2021 D3 XC Nationals Preview
Every so often, an event occurs in your lifetime that is so full of emotion that you can picture everything about that moment in crystal clarity: where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, how you felt when the news of the event broke. Sometimes these moments are happy, and other times they are devastating.
One such moment in the D3 college runner’s lifetime was the day they learned their 2020 cross country season would be stripped away from them amidst the raging coronavirus pandemic. This news sent ripples across the country, sparking many different reactions. For some, this was an abrupt and devastating end of the road; it meant staying on track for graduation in the Spring and foregoing their last ever season of cross country. For others, it was a fresh opportunity for a fifth year or a chance to recover from injury. For others still, it was a time of great uncertainty and confusion trying to factor a year off into their college plans. And for middies everywhere, it was quite possibly a cause for celebration (or maybe that’s just college me). Jokes aside, the news of the season cancellation hit everyone pretty hard.
However, this Saturday, the NCAA D3 Cross Country Championship meet will return for the first time since 2019, serving as the culmination of, not just the 2021 cross country season, but two years of hard and dedicated training. This year is sure to impress, giving an inside window into how individuals and teams responded to the truncation of seasons and the extra year to train.
If you’ve been following along, you know all of the names to expect to show up. On the men’s side: Wartburg, Williams, MIT, Pomona-Pitzer, Alex Phillip, Aidan Ryan, Tyler Morris. On the women’s side: Johns Hopkins, CMS, Wartburg, WashU, Kassie (Rosenbum) Parker, Ari Marks, Fiona Smith. But there are some names, too, with quiet seasons and nothing to lose, that might just surprise you come race day.
Men’s Championship
In the men’s race, the battle for first place will take place between Williams, Wartburg, MIT, and Pomona-Pitzer, all teams with strong seasons, most recently highlighted by victories over their respective regional assignments last weekend.
Of these four teams, the men’s team from MIT had the most impressive regional performance, placing six athletes in the top ten (all seven were in the top 17, well within the boundaries of All-Region honors), with only four seconds elapsing from their first to their fifth scorer. Their pack has been their strength all year, as they split 20 seconds at the pre-national meet, winning by almost 100 points over second place team CMS, 19 seconds at Connecticut College, narrowly missing the victory over Williams by five points, and 21 seconds at their conference meet, where 15 of the top 20 finishers were all donning a red and black MIT jersey.
Perhaps the next most impressive regional performance of the weekend occurred out west, where Pomona-Pitzer went 4-6-7-8-10 in six seconds, to outscore #7 CMS by 35 points. Similarly to MIT, Pomona-Pitzer relies heavily on a tight pack, with depth that placed their seventh runner no worse than 19th at the regional meet to earn All-Region. In fact, these teams are two of nine teams in the country who placed all seven of their competing athletes in the top 35 of their respective region last weekend. This phenomenon is either a product of a weak region or just an indication of how dominant these teams truly are. Regardless, all nine teams will be represented at the national meet this weekend for a chance to put their depth to the test on a national stage.
The team last weekend with the fastest performance was that of Wartburg, who raced the course at Augustana, where they bested Pomona-Pitzer as well as a handful of other top ten teams earlier in the year. They were led by Joe Freiburger, who covered the 8k course in 24 minutes and 19 seconds, and is someone who will certainly be gunning for top five this weekend. Wartburg has a strong second runner in Christopher Collett, whose name appears, sure as death and taxes, right next to Freiburger’s in every results page this season. With a little bit of shuffling between this team’s third, fourth, and fifth runners this year, it will be crucial for these athletes to show consistency and a tight pack if they want to bring home a trophy.
#2 Williams had perhaps the most disappointing weekend (as disappointing as a regional team victory and a 1-2-3 individual sweep can be) based solely on the positioning of their fourth and fifth scorers. After third place finisher Grahm Tuohy-Gaydos crossed the line, a huge gap of over 40 seconds existed before the next finisher, and then another 26-second gap occurred between scorers four and five. At a meet like the NCAA's, where teams have the capability of putting four seconds between their first and last scorers, earning a national title leaves little room for errors of this size. Williams clearly has the capability to be a top team, if not the top team, in the nation, as proven by their undefeated record as a varsity squad this year, but every team member will need to show up and have their best day in order to make this dream a reality.
While the aforementioned four teams are most favored for the top four this year regardless of order, there are a few emerging teams who may look to shake things up. Most notably, the men from SUNY Geneseo have been building momentum all season and enter this weekend with an undefeated record against D3 teams. At regionals, they put all seven runners in the top 12, proving they have more than enough depth to be a threat.
A dark horse pick is the OAC team John Carroll, who also has run undefeated this year and trail-blazed their way through the postseason, winning the men’s OAC and Great Lakes Regional Championships for the first time in their program’s history. Regardless of whether or not the Blue Streaks can place within the top three they have the unique opportunity to post the highest XC national meet finish in school history.
Perhaps another page in the JCU history books should be reserved for Phillip, who became JCU’s first male XC conference champion and has strong potential to also become the program’s first ever cross country national champion. Phillip enters this weekend with the fastest time of the season, having posted a blazing 23:39 at Lehigh Paul Short, good for sixth place overall amidst a field largely composed of D1 talent. Sixth was his deepest finish of the year, having gone otherwise undefeated against DIII runners.
In fact, Phillip has done more than just beat DIII runners this year: he’s smashed them, and then gone on to add D1 and D2 athletes to the list. He opened his season with a win at the All-Ohio multi-divisional championship, becoming the fourth D3 athlete in history to win the overall meet. Later in the season, at Oberlin, he tempoed the first 5k with his teammates, dropping the hammer and asserting his fitness with just 3k to go. At OAC, he took control early and didn’t look back, taking a smooth win over the field, and at the Great Lakes Regional meet, he ran a cool and collected race in which he waited patiently in the pack before making his move after 5k. Wilmington’s Simon Heys tried to go with him, but Phillip threw in another surge and by 7k, had clearly separated from the rest of the field.
This weekend will be Phillip’s first look at any semblance of stiff competition in D3, and it will be interesting to see which race strategy he chooses to employ, whether it be staying under control early and moving hard at 5k as at Oberlin or Regionals, or gunning straight for the front and putting as much space on the field as possible, Ian-LaMere-I-have-my-own-lead-gator style. Given that he clearly didn’t empty the tank last weekend at Regionals, he could be saving up to put on a big show this weekend.
Phillip’s greatest challengers will be Colby’s Tyler Morris, Wartburg’s Freiburger, and Williams’s Aidan Ryan. In the 2019 championships, Phillip was 15th and Morris 36th, but Morris has had a much more dominant 2021 season than two years ago and also enters this weekend undefeated. He comes off of a controlled regional victory where he beat the field by 37 seconds as well as a NESCAC victory by over 30 seconds, a race in which he technically beat Ryan, who ended up with a DNF next to his name. Nobody has been within 30 seconds of Morris all year, so if he can respond well to some help up front this weekend, he’s sure to bring on a battle.
Wartburg’s Freiburger has the weight of a team title on his shoulders, but is also no stranger to the limelight at the national meet, having finished 22nd in 2019 and fourth and fifth, respectively, in the 10k/5k double at the national meet outdoors. In fact, he finished one place ahead of Phillip in the 10k and is the only returning athlete this season to have beaten Phillip head-to-head in an on-event last spring (the only other being Matthew Wilkinson, who won the 5k and just qualified to DI nationals as Minnesota’s #2-man last weekend). The buck will stop here for two of the trio of Phillip, Freiburger, and Morris, as only one may continue their undefeated season streak.
An athlete with a few losses on his season record but perhaps the most experience out of the whole field is Williams’s Ryan. A fifth year, Ryan took a gap year in 2020, when COVID eliminated any opportunity he had to compete, to train with some teammates in Boulder, Colorado. Even prior to this hiatus, Ryan had created quite the resume for himself, having qualified for the NCAA XC Championship every year since he was a freshman, each time progressing closer to the top. In 2017, he was 91st, in 2018, 42nd, and in 2019, he was 10th, perfectly on track for something big in his final year. No stranger to the big leagues, he has raced pros such as Paul Chelimo and Brian Barraza, as well as two-time DII record-holder Christian Noble, making him more than equipped to face the DIII field this weekend.
Finishing ahead of Ryan in the 2019 championships were UW-Whitewater’s David Fassbender and Pomona-Pitzer’s Ethan Widlansky, who will also be expected to repeat top ten finishes this year. Watch out, as well, for Ryan’s teammate Elias Lindgren, who has two victories over Ryan this season and finished runner-up to him at the Mideast Regional meet last weekend.
Women’s Championship
In the women’s competition, expect a flurry of blue, yellow, gray, and orange up front, as the teams from Johns Hopkins, CMS, WashU, and Wartburg will take part in the battle for a team title.
Johns Hopkins has not budged from their #1 D3GD ranking all year, and it’s no wonder why, as their fifth scorer has placed no worse than tenth among D3 competition all year. TENTH. As #5. At the Mid-Atlantic Regional meet this past weekend, they swept second through sixth, losing only to Dickinson’s Isabel Cardi. Regardless of how deep the region is, that sort of dominance at a regional level has to fare well for this squad headed into nationals.
While Hopkins has not faced off head-to-head with the #2-ranked CMS women yet this season, they seemed to have had a much more impressive showing at pre-nats earlier this year despite opting to compete in the 5k Gold Race rather than the pre-nationals race. Since then, they have managed to maintain a tight pack time of 40 seconds or under in every race, a crucial element to success heading into this weekend. All this has been completed, too, without two time national runner-up Ella Baran, who hasn’t toed the line since September, and may be out of the championship race this weekend.
CMS has strung together a strong season as well, coming off a victory out of the West region, where they went 2-3-4-6-12 in a low team total of 27 points. They also won the pre-national meet this year, which should give them plenty of confidence when it comes to course familiarity and national competition. The biggest challenge for CMS this weekend will be their pack time and ability to keep runners four and five close enough to take down Hopkins. While frontrunners Meredith Bloss, Riley Harmon, and Natalie Bitetti have remained pretty consistent all year, this team has suffered some variability on the end of their pack that they will need to polish up come Saturday. That, or hope Hopkins has a bad day, a shortcoming this team has yet to display.
Currently sitting at third is the team from Wartburg, who could have the opportunity to make this weekend meaningful beyond just a team title. If both Wartburg’s men and women can seal the team victory in their respective races, it will be the first time since 1996 that a team has won both team titles at the national meet, the last team to do so being UW-Oshkosh. As the men will kick off the weekend, seeing them win could give the Wartburg women the extra push to truly maximize this whole squad’s trip down from Iowa.
Wartburg enters the weekend with three total victories over #4 WashU this season and just a single loss from Augustana against #9 Pomona Pitzer. Frontrunner Aubrie Fisher, who has finished in the top two of races all year, finished 22nd that day, likely explaining the anomaly on Wartburg’s record. Assuming Fisher is back up front (which is highly probable as evidenced by her runner-up finish to Loras’s Parker at the regional meet last weekend), this team is almost guaranteed to bring home a trophy, if not the trophy of the meet: the team title.
A final noteworthy contender for a first place finish is the team from WashU. As winners of the highly competitive UAA meet and narrow runners up at the Midwest Regional to Wartburg, who they lost on a tie-breaker to at the Dan Huston Invitational earlier this year, this team has all the talent in their squad of Emily Konkus, Lindsay Ott, Kiera Olson, Emma Walter, and Sophie Young to bring home a trophy. They were national runners up in 2019, a memory Young, who finished as that team’s fifth, will likely have in the back of her mind as she takes to the starting line.
Other teams on the rise and hungry to perform are the teams from #5 Williams and #6 Tufts, who has heated up at the right time having just won the East Region and missing the NESCAC crown by 13 points behind Williams. Both teams are akin to some stiff competition out of the East coast and come into this weekend thoroughly prepared to face the rest of the nation.
The athlete to watch in this race is Loras’s Parker, who hasn’t run a shade over 21 minutes all season. At the Lewis and Clark Invite during mid-October, she dropped a 20:10 for 6k to beat a field of multi-divisional and unattached athletes. No one has even come close to Parker all season, putting her in great favor for an easy victory. Almost identically to Phillip, Parker’s record of first places this season is tainted only by a sixth place finish at Notre Dame, where she finished behind a slew of Notre Dame runners. If a handful of firsts and one sixth is the recipe to create a national champion, then both Phillip and Parker will walk off the course with gold this weekend.
While beating Parker will be a challenge, don’t count out Wellesley’s Ari Marks, who just showed it’s possible to take down big names. Marks posted a huge victory over Tufts’s Danielle Page this past weekend to continue an undefeated season heading into the national championship. A newbie to the national stage, a little naivety could bode well for Marks, who need only focus on being a competitor. Expect Page, however, to try to bounce back and secure her spot ahead of Marks and within the top 5 this weekend.
Another name to watch out for is St. Benedict’s Fiona Smith, who is undefeated except to Parker, who has beaten her twice this season so far. Smith comes off a dominating regional performance, where she dipped under 21 minutes to win by 27 seconds over the rest of the field. Smith, while not as experienced in her first year of cross country, completed a star-studded track season last year when she placed fifth in the NCAA 5k as a freshman. One of the athletes she beat in this race was in fact Parker (Rosenbum), who finished seventh off of a 10k/5k double.
Other All-Americans from this race expected to repeat their top-8 success on the cross country course are Dickinson’s Cardi and Hope’s Ana Tucker. Cardi was third at the 2019 championships, the highest finish of any returner to the 2021 championships, and back stronger than before with a perfect record of first places. Tucker started this season strong with a series of top finishes in multi-division races and a win at Augustana, but has lately found tough competition in Trine’s Evie Bultemeyer, who has overtaken Tucker two weekends in a row now leading into NCAAs. Bultemeyer finished 8th in 2019 and is certainly in a great position to gain a few positions closer to the front given her undefeated season this year. Rounding out the front pack are the Mideast athletes Genna Girard of Williams and Cassie Kearney of Middlebury, two All-Americans who went 1-2 last weekend.
While not everyone will leave the national meet an All-American or a team trophy winner, there’s something to be said of qualifying for D3’s premiere cross country event. The beauty of this sport is in the fact that everyone comes together under the same pretenses to fulfill entirely different goals. While teams like Johns Hopkins have a chance to bring home their seventh women’s team trophy in the past ten years, the men’s teams from WPI and Vassar are celebrating their first team qualification to the NCAA meet in program history. Smith College celebrates their first qualification in 30 years. Lynchburg women return after a dry spell that dates back to 1996. History can still be written in the simple act of showing up.
Every so often, an event occurs in your lifetime that is so full of emotion that you can picture everything about that moment in crystal clarity: the Kentucky bluegrass rustling in the breeze, the nervous anticipation of your coaches and teammates, the feeling of pride over all you have accomplished to get to this moment.
One such moment in the D3 college runner’s lifetime is the day they line up at the NCAA championship meet. Do all you can to preserve this very moment.