USTFCCCA News & Notes
NCAA DII XC RECAP: Adams State Men, GVSU Women Win Team Titles
SAINT LEO, FLORIDA – The weekend’s first national cross country champions were crowned at the NCAA DII Championships hosted by Saint Leo.
Find the full recaps of both races below.
WOMEN’S RECAP
Grand Valley State’s women’s cross country team is partying like it’s 2014.
Just like two years ago, the top-ranked Lakers claimed the NCAA Division II Women’s Cross Country national team title as Kendra Foley led the way with an individual national title of her own.
GVSU made its move to the top of the team standings by the halfway point of the six-kilometer race and never relented en route to its fifth national crown in the past seven years, topping defending champion No. 2 Adams State, 116-139.
No. 4 Western State was third with 168 points, No. 6 Chico State was fourth with 189 points and No. 8 Southern Indiana scored 209 points to outperform its rank in fifth.
The Lakers edged ahead of the Grizzlies at the 3K mark, 104-105, and never looked back. GVSU’s move to the top of the leaderboard almost directly correlated with Foley’s move to the front of the individual race.
After Southern Indiana’s Jessica Reeves set the early pace and established some early separation, Foley – who now has two national titles and a national runner-up finish to her credit on the fall circuit – reeled her in and passed her just past the race’s halfway point.
From there, Foley’s lead would extend to 12 seconds over the next 1200 meters, to 19 seconds by the 5K mark, and 25 seconds by race’s end. She became the first woman in NCAA DII history to win national individual titles in non-consecutive years.
She covered the course in 20:01.8 ahead of runner-up and 2015 national champ Alexis Zeis of U-Mary. Foley’s and Zeis’ order was flipped from a year ago, but the margin was much, much wider; Zeis outleaned Foley at the line by a third-of-a-second a year ago in Joplin, Missouri.
Meanwhile, Foley’s Laker teammates did their part for the remainder of the race, extending their lead to 30 points over the Grizzlies at 5K and holding on for a 23-point winning margin.
Three more Lakers earned All-America honors, most notably frosh Stacey Metzger in 15th place.
Adams State had the depth to contend with five runners in the top-50, but not the top-end power with only 20th-place Aden Alemu finishing top-20.
MEN’S RECAP
For nearly nine kilometers, the NCAA Division II Men’s Cross Country Championships belonged to the No. 3 Grand Valley State men.
The final kilometer – and ultimately the national team title – was all No. 2 Adams State’s.
After coming through the 8.8-kilometer split trailing GVSU, 49-61, the Grizzlies powered through the final kilometer to overtake the Lakers – who struggled down the homestretch – for their seventh national title in the past nine seasons, 54-79.
Defending national champion No. 1 Colorado Mines was a distant third with 153 points, while No. 4 Chico State finished fourth with 166 and No. 5 Alaska Anchorage rounded out the top five with 222 points.
The individual title went to Vincent Kiprop of Missouri Southern, who pulled away from 2015 national champion Alfred Chelanga of Shorter on a hill just before the 8K split. The sophomore won by nearly 30 seconds on the 10K course in 29:07.4.
Adams State was led by fourth-place individual finisher Sydney Gidabuday, who held off a late charge from the Lakers’ Zach Panning in fifth.
While Panning made up a more-than-20-second gap on Gidabuday in the second half of the race, it was the Grizzlies who did most of the surging in the final kilometer.
Trailing by 12 points with a kilometer to go, Kyle Masterson moved up four spots for the Grizzlies into eighth place while Chandler Reid also moved up four spots to finish 29th as ASU’s fifth runner.
Meanwhile, the Lakers were taking on water in the race’s late stages. Senior Bryce Bradley, a former All-American running as GVSU’s fifth runner at 8.8K, lost 61 spots in the final kilometer, going from 19th to 80th in the span of five minutes.
Chris May in 10th, Nate Orndorf in 12th and 18th-place Trevor Sharnas held relatively steady, losing one, two, and two spots each, but Bradley’s descent left 48th-place Wuoi Mach as the Lakers’ fifth.
The race between the two teams had been close since the two teams assumed the lead in the team standings before the halfway point, never separated by more than 12 points and tied at 51 points each at 6.7K.
Kiprop claimed the individual title in a race that went out quick from the gun. A group of five – Kiprop, Chelanga, Gidabuday, James Ngandu of Tiffin and Leakey Kipkosgei of American International – separated themselves by the conclusion of the first mile.
Before the next mile passed, that group was down to Kiprop, Ngandu, Chelanga and Gidabuday. The Grizzly would fall off the pace the 4.2K and it was just Kiprop and Chelanga remaining by around six kilometers.
A hill before the 8K mark proved to be the difference between Kiprop and Chelanga, as the Missouri Southern sophomore powered up the incline while Chelanga labored up.