Yelm High School junior Kailey Slevin represented Yelm well as the lone Tornado to compete in the 4A girls state cross country meet at Sun Willows Golf Course in Pasco, placing 109th with her second-best time of the season.
In her third state meet in as many years, Slevin finished in 20 minutes, 18 seconds, just two ticks off from her time in Pasco last year.
Slevin acknowledged that she has high expectations for herself going into every race, but she tempered those goals in Pasco since she recently overcame an illness.
“I just wanted to get out there and race and see what could happen. I didn’t really have a lot that I was expecting for myself,” she said. “I just wanted to get out there and see how many girls I could pass. I ended up passing 16 girls. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.”
Slevin said it was a “special experience” to be the only Tornado to qualify for state three years in a row. She credited her coaches JoLynne Hopkins and Alex McIntire for her continued growth and success in cross country.
“I put in so much work. I run every morning and I train all year. It’s really rewarding to know that all my work is able to pay off each time that I can run,” Slevin said.
Although she was once again the only Tornado female runner to compete in Pasco, Slevin said she saw a big leap in the team’s camaraderie and culture over the course of her junior season.
“I look back on how much of a team we really became. The girls team started off kind of mediocre. We didn’t really have much. We weren’t really connected,” she said. “But we’ve really built a culture and we’ve built a family. That’s what really helped me to get here, other than my coaches and my discipline, is knowing that I have a team that I can rely on.”
Hopkins praised Slevin for her leadership and influencing the rest of the team with her work ethic.
“Kailey is a hard worker. This is well-deserved because she just puts in the hours and has the mental state it takes to get to a meet at this level,” she said. “She is an inspiration and a leader on our team. The other girls really look up to her, and she brings them along with her, too.”
The biggest adjustment Slevin made from her sophomore to her junior year was accepting the highs and lows throughout a season and understanding that she won’t set a personal record every race.
“Last year and her freshman year, she had these goals, and if she didn’t perform as well as she expected herself to, it really upset her. She was having a hard time getting over it,” Hopkins said. “This year, she’s given herself more grace and she’s still surpassing anything we could have hoped for her. This time, when she didn’t quite run the race that she wanted or she was having an off day, she would bounce back better from it. I think that’s part of growing up and understanding that the lows aren’t bad things.”
Hopkins saw an improvement from the whole team over the season as well and hopes to build off of that with more fun activities for team bonding in the offseason.
“We had a lot of girls who made great strides this year. I was going back and looking at times from the first race to the last race, and all of them had two-, three-minute improvements over the season,” she said. “A couple of them had five-minute improvements over the season. That’s pretty impressive. We had a lot of brand new runners, so it takes time to figure it out, but they came in and did the work.”
Slevin wants to continue to shift her mindset as she prepares for her senior season. She set a lofty goal not just for herself but for her team as a whole.
“I’m hoping to get a little more team activities and get some more girls out for morning runs so we can make it to state as a team. That’s our main goal,” she said. “I honestly just want to get after it. I don’t want to put any expectations on myself. I don’t want to have any pressure on myself. To improve and maybe get top 20 [at state], it’s going to take a lot of belief. I put a lot of pressure on myself usually, so it’s going to take letting expectations go a little bit.”
