Cory Leslie: "The Harsh Reality Is You Probably Can't Do It in the SEC"

He built a world-class pro group in Baltimore. Then he left it for a college roster of 30.

Five years after his first appearance on the show, Cory Leslie returns as Ole Miss's new associate head cross country and assistant track & field coach, fresh off nearly five years building Under Armour's Mission Run Baltimore into a group that produced Olympians and World XC medalists from a city nobody expected it from.

He walks Dominic through how fast it all happened: a casual conversation with Connie Price-Smith at USATFs in New York, a formal interview an hour before his Uber to the airport for the Commonwealth Games, and an offer thirty minutes later. Then a scramble to Oxford weeks before the season opener.

The conversation gets into why he's moving toward college athletics while other coaches are heading for the exit—the impact he thinks he can have on thirty athletes instead of a handful, and his conviction that plenty of American talent will fall through the cracks under roster limits. He's blunt about what that means in recruiting: if you don't have Olympic dreams, the SEC probably isn't for you.

Also covered: what he's telling a team that's had three coaches in one summer; why he's sending them to Memphis on tired legs; the SEC as the best non-Diamond-League track in America; soft-surface trails a half mile from the locker room; what he's leaving behind in Baltimore; and—because it's late August—Ohio State loyalties, Julian Sayin's Heisman case, and a Buckeyes-Rebels title game prediction.

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