Being the unanimous last place finisher in the Big Sky preseason coaches poll doesn’t exactly help a team ooze confidence.

For Sacramento State, having runners to finish a race may be good enough.

“Before I knew who was showing up, I was really nervous,” returning sophomore Dominic Vogl said. “I was like are we even going to have a team? But seeing faces out here makes me feel better.”

Of the team’s 12 runners, Vogl is joined by fellow sophomore Vincent D’Onofrio and senior Steven Schenck as the only returnees.

They will have to rely heavily on freshmen to have any success this year.

Freshman will also be a key feature to the women’s team.

“On the women’s side, the freshmen are going to make an immediate impact,” director of cross country Kathleen Raske said. “We also have some sophomores like Sara Baxter and Gabrielle Hernandez that will contribute along with our seniors, Virginia Grillo and Michele Garcia. We’re getting better.”

And no poll position will change that perspective.

Raske said the potential and the challenge of building the program attracted her to Sac State from Central Michigan almost two years ago.

“All of my California colleagues who are familiar with Sacramento State all told me it’s a sleeping giant, a diamond in the rough,” Raske said.

The cross country teams have both dealt with some tough seasons recently, finishing at the bottom of the Big Sky Conference last year with Northern Arizona winning both team championships.

Raske said when she inherited the team she could barely put together five guys to make a men’s cross country team and believes the team has come a long way from that but continues to have a larger vision.

“We’re hoping to just start by taking seventh place, then the next year climbing to sixth and then the next year climbing to fifth, whatever the case may be we are looking for improvement in our Big Sky finishes,” Raske said.

Raske knows very well what it takes to succeed at a high level, having helped coach the United States at the 2005 Junior Pan American Games in Windsor, Ontario, this summer.

The team won 57 medals, second best in U.S. history behind their 1999 finish of 61 medals, a team Raske also coached.

A summer training program lined out for them by Raske and her assistants, Juan Vasquez and Chyllis Scott, may help the Hornets take that first step to seventh.

” I ran 85 miles a week in the summer,” fifth-year senior Schenck said of the new program.The first test of the season will come on Sept. 3 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with the University of San Francisco Invite.

Matthew Vevoda can be reached at [email protected]