Nathanial McReynolds knows more about Northwestern State cross country despite being one of the youngest NCAA Division I head coaches in any sport.
McReynolds, 26, is in his second cross country season as a head coach after running at NSU for five years and being a graduate assistant for another year-and-a-half.
The coach, who thought his future would be as a professional trumpet player after he obtained a bachelor’s and master’s in music education, accepted the head coaching position in January of 2015 after serving as an interim coach the previous fall. He also serves as the distance coach for the track and field program under head coach Mike Heimerman.
McReynolds is attempting to build depth on his men’s squad behind sophomore Joshua Wilkins, the Demons top runner in 2015. “Coach Nat” nearly doubled the men’s roster to 15 runners (from eight in 2014) as he is building other top runners to join Wilkins and create “the minute gap” between NSU’s scoring runners.
On the women’s side, NSU welcomes back five second-year runners who cut their teeth under McReynolds as freshmen. Erin Wrozek and Jacqueline Rushford are battling for the top spot there.
As a runner, McReynolds broke NSU’s program record in the indoor 3K, only to have Wilkins snatch it away in the spring of 2015.
McReynolds’ event specialty was the steeplechase, an event littered with obstacles and water pits. He left NSU as a top-three performer in the event in program history.
Though he might face similar obstacles in trying to rebuild NSU’s cross country/distance program, he’s focusing on steady improvement along with adding more runners to the men’s and women’s teams.
In his first season, cross country runners improved their times 1-4 minutes while distance runners have bettered their marks by at least 20 seconds in their respective events.
“It’s a four-year program for distance, and you want to let your runners improve structurally and emotionally before they’re relied upon to compete at the top level,” McReynolds said. “Back in the (1970s), we had amazing runners like Frank Trammel that came here to run.
“One of our main priorities is to develop the want to come here for distance and establish regional dominance. All but one of our six freshmen are from Louisiana, and we want to keep our homegrown guys here. We have an open-door policy for distance running in that if you want to run, you can come and run, but you have to work when you get here.”
