Kathleen Raske arrived at Sacramento State on Sept. 15, two weeks after school began and a month after she was hired as the director of track and field and cross country.

She was hired in August after being selected from a pool of over 100 candidates and will earn $75,000 this year, according to Athletic Director Terry Wanless.She will not be paid for the two weeks that she was not on campus.

Wanless said he was comfortable hiring Raske even though she would not be on campus until two weeks before the team’s first meet on Saturday at the Stanford Cross Country Invitational.

Raske held a team meeting the day she arrived and immediately began holding daily practices.

“I’m just getting to know the team,” Raske said. “Everybody has been very welcoming and friendly. Not only our athletes and staff, but our administrators and the rest of the athletic department.”

Raske said she found a lot of similarities between Sac State and CMU when she was considering the job.

“When I took over the program at Central, we were pretty much last in the conference,” Raske said, who coached her teams to two championships. “There wasn’t much of a team concept or a Division I mentality.”

The Hornets enter Saturday’s debut with both the men’s and women’s teams ranked last in the Big Sky preseason cross country coaches poll.Even with the low ranking, Raske said she believes Sac State has the potential to become a top program.

“I think this place is a gold mine,” she said. “California is the forefront of track and field. We have no weather barriers, we have one of the best talent pools in the entire United States and we have great depth and great talent.”