William Battle III
Staff Writer
On Nov. 23, the NCAA Divison II National Cross Country Championships took place in Sacramento, California at the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex. SSC men’s runner of the year, Christian Giller, represented Florida Southern as an individual qualifier and finished in 41st place, one place shy of All-American recognition. Despite this, Giller finished with an impressive time of 30:31.3, just five-tenths of a second off of All-American time.
Giller credits much of his collegiate success to Matt Levassiur, the head coach of the Men’s Track and Cross Country team.
“Coach Matt is the reason I am as good as I am today,” Giller said. “I think if you told me in high school that I’d be running the times I am right now, I think I would’ve just laughed. He’s a solid coach, he’s definitely a hard coach who will challenge you and work you very hard and I think that’s the reason we’ve been so successful is because of him.”
However, despite the success FSC and Coach Matt Levassiur have enjoyed recently winning their second straight conference championship, he did not begin his sports career wanting to be a track coach or star. The first sport to catch his eye was America’s pastime, baseball.
“I grew up playing baseball … my dad coached me,” Levassiur said. “Looking back upon it … it’s probably the first place that I really felt a sense of community. When I got to high school, I thought I’d be able to walk on and work my way on the team … but I got cut from baseball. The sport that wouldn’t cut me was running and that’s kind of how I walked into that.”
While running may not have been his first choice, he quickly found a passion for it in high school. Levassiur was not the “top man” but he improved consistently on a linear scale going from a quite modest 23-minute 5K to around a 15:50 5K. From there, he set his sights on collegiate running but despite showing improvement, he did not receive much interest from colleges.
“I walked on to Adam State and… when I went to Adam State, I went from, …a 15:50 guy to a 15:00 guy and didn’t quite make the team,” Levassiur recounted. “The next year I went, I dropped down to 14:30 for the 5K and the year after that I ran 14:15 and the year after that I ran 14:07 and the year after that I ran 13:50.
After walking on to Adam State, Levassiur progressively lowered his 5k time from 15:50 to 13:50. “By the time I finished there, I was an 11th-time All-American at the [NCAA] Division Two level.”
Levassiur made history as a part of a team at Adams State University with the 3rd-best result in school history. Post-graduation, Levassiur moved on to running the roads.“I made the world mountain racing team in Italy and represented the US there. I ran in two Olympic trials in 2008 and 2012.
Obviously, this experience has boded well for Levassiur as that experience has certainly followed him to his tenure at Florida Southern. Quality role models and coaches were hugely impactful in bringing him here and influencing his philosophies which are more team-centric rather than individually based.
As a coach at FSC, Levassiur believes in team growth over everything.
“I just really believe in giving people opportunities … we design workouts that help the group progress more than just the individual progress,” Levassiur stressed. “In my philosophy, the number one guy can help the number five guy move along and a lot of times in moving that along, it keeps the number one guy from overtraining.”
When it comes to athletes, Coach Levassiur had a simple message.
“Go where somebody’s gonna give you the opportunity to feel a sense of purpose in what you’re doing,” said Levassiur.
