HAMMOND, La. – The Southeastern Louisiana cross country teams will be on familiar ground when they travel to Baton Rouge Saturday morning for the LSU Cross Country Invitational at Highland Road Park.

    "It's usually a very good meet for us," Southeastern head coach Sean Brady said. "It's important to our group for a lot of reasons. This is a course they are very familiar with. They train on it during the summer and we have several of our athletes who are from the Baton Rouge area and they all ran on that course during their high school career. We'll see a lot of the state schools and they will get to see a lot of their friends and people they competed with in high school."

    Among the teams scheduled to compete along with Southeastern are LSU, New Orleans, Nicholls, Southern, Southern-New Orleans, Tulane, Louisiana-Lafayette, Xavier-New Orleans, Southern Mississippi, Millsaps and Alcorn State. The Louisiana Distance Project, which consists of either former runners or unattached runners from around southeast Louisiana, will also compete.

    "It will give us an idea (of where we stand)," Brady said. "We like to compete against LSU. Our kids always get up when they go compete against the purple and gold. Louisiana-Lafayette and Tulane have very good teams so it will be good competition for us at this time. It's one we get excited about simply because it's close and we'll have a lot of spectators there."

    The women's 5K is scheduled to start at 7:30 a.m., followed by the men's 5K at 8:10 a.m. Live stats, provided by LSU, will be available on the Southeastern cross country schedule page at www.lionsports.net.  

    Both the Lions and Lady Lions finished third at the LSU Invitational in 2015. Then-junior Stephen Cassingham took 15^th and then-freshman Salvatore Grizzaffi 19^th. Then-sophomore Clarissa Smith came in 14^th for the Lady Lions.

    The Southeastern men are coming off a fourth-place finish at the Azalea City Classic in Mobile, Alabama. Freshman Ben Vasterling led the Lions' squad with an 18^th-place finish in 27:23.62 for the 8K. Sophomore Brett Olivier was 22^nd in 27:54.78 with Grizzaffi finishing 23^rd in 27:58.37. Sophomore Trevor Johnson was 29^th (28:23.22), freshman Bryant White 37^th (30:09.72), sophomore Tahj Lewis 39^th (30:30.87) and freshman Matthew VanAmburg 40^th (30:45.29).

    Smith paced the Lady Lions, finishing eighth in the 6K in 23:11.