Building Momentum: Concordia University Thunder Set Sights on Top Finishes

Based in Edmonton, Canada, Concordia University is a small but strong cross country program. With fall cross country races about a month away, Head Coach Matt Norminton and the team are focused on full preparation for the upcoming season.

“With the men’s team, we’re looking to improve upon last year. We finished fifth at the ACAC championships so it'd be great to see us kind of get back up into the top three” said Coach Norminton. “We’ve got some good rookies coming, so it should be a competitive team again. I don’t think we’ll necessarily be vying for a championship, but it’d be great to see us take that next step up. The women seem to be in a bit of a rebuild phase. We got a couple good rookies coming into the program.”

With experience as an athlete from high school all the way to the professional level, Coach Norminton is filled with the know-how to train collegiate athletes. Not only does he have years of experience, but has run every event from the 800 all the way up to the marathon competitively, highlighted by a second place finish at the Canadian marathon national championships.

“I have had some great coaches along the way to help guide me and shape my own coaching philosophy. So that has been a big help of course” said Coach Norminton. “Over the years, I still jump into a lot of workouts myself and run with the guys, not so much the last year or two, but when I was a little bit younger I’d run to get a feel for the workout.”

With many of the team having had seasons that ran deep into the summer, Coach Norminton is resting some of his athletes before beginning a short run of summer training.

“So we’re on a bit of a transition right now. We did relays, a couple of guys did some outdoor track meets. The Alberta Provincial championships recently happened. Nationals are over with. So for a lot of the team I’ve encouraged them to take a week or two, or just get in some easy volume before we start to do some workouts again for cross country,” said Coach Norminton. “After a week or two of volume and some base work, we’ll start to move into some tempo workouts first…It could be anything like three times 10 minutes or two by 15 minutes, usually in that 30 to 40 minutes sort of volume. Then once we kind of get a couple of those under our belts, we’ll throw in some hill workouts. So nothing crazy, certainly nothing revolutionary. But like I said, we won't be banging out any hard kilometer repeats or mile repeats at this point in time, you know, or come mid to late September.”

With a small team on both the men's and women's side, the team is a tightly knit, cohesive unit that works closely with Coach Norminton. In most seasons, the entire team will travel together to meets, everyone knows everyone well, and the squad is supportive of one another.

“Usually [the team] is not much bigger than 15 to 20 athletes, so it’s a pretty small team…We always travel to our races on our own. Even if it’s going up to Grand Prairie or going out of Calgary, we don’t tend to share buses with other teams” said Coach Norminton. “I like that we’re all in the band together, sharing some jokes and stories…Probably my favorite part about the culture and the team that we’ve developed is that we still have a lot of our alumni come out and run in our club.” The Thunder will make their fall season debut at home on September 7th. They’ll be looking to lead out strong with the ACAC championships just six weeks after their home opener.

Follow along with their upcoming performances here.