USTFCCCA News & Notes
Weekend Recap: NCAA DIII Cross Country Conference Championships
Welcome to Conference Championships Weekend.
We hope you enjoy your stay.
From The USTFCCCA InfoZone: Meets & Results
Ranked teams are vying for conference glory across the nation.
Let’s see which meets stood out the most on Saturday.
NESCAC Championships
Men’s 8k
No. 7 Williams with the individual title? Check.
No. 4 Tufts with the team title? Checkmate.
Eli Welch of Williams captured individual top honors on Saturday, clocking 24:20.2 to finish 2.4 seconds ahead of Jonah Reisner of Tufts. Welch and Reisner were part of a four-man pack that broke away between 4.8k and 5.7k, but Welch proved strongest down the stretch to secure the victoty.
The Jumbos had the last laugh, though, claiming the team title by 27 points over the Ephs, 30-57. Tufts placed four runners among the top seven – led by Reisner’s runner-up finish – and saw its fifth scorer cross the finish line in 11th to seal the win.
Williams took second behind Tufts, the only other program with three or more athletes in the top ten. No. 15 Amherst (80), No. 20 Wesleyan (Conn.) (107) and No. 22 Middlebury (129) rounded out the top five in third, fourth, and fifth, respectively.
Women’s 6k
Dominance.
Individual and team.
Audrey MacLean of Middlebury ran away with the individual title, covering the 6k course in 20:47.8 – nearly 18 seconds clear over Grace McDonough of Connecticut College. MacLean stayed with the pack through 1.65k, then surged ahead by three seconds at 2.6k and never looked back.
No. 1 Williams steamrolled the team competition, placing all five scorers in the top ten with just 4.3 seconds between them. The Ephs went 4-5-6-7-10 for 32 points, earning a 37-point win over No. 7 Middlebury.
Rank order held from there: No. 13 Connecticut College (81), No. 17 Tufts (108), and No. 18 Amherst (139) rounded out the top five.
UAA Championships
Men’s 8k
NYU swept the individual and team titles – the first by a men’s program since 2018, when Washington (Mo.) did so.
The Violets’ Theo Udelson-Nee edged Ryan Podnar of Carnegie Mellon by 0.3 seconds in 24:49.6 to win the individual title. Two more Violets – Liam Hagerty and Andy Taylor – followed to give NYU three of the top-4 finishers, and Chicago’s Sanju Patel completed the individual top-5.
Hagerty and Patel were the highest returners from last year, having finished sixth and seventh, respectively, while Podnar had his third-straight top-10 showing (10th last year, fifth in ’23).
NYU – ranked No. 6 in the latest NCAA Division III national coaches poll – continued its domination to repeat as team champions with 27 points as eighth-place Huck Oakes and 11th-place Alex Hrycyszyn completed the scoring; NYU’s 1-5 spread was 20.9 seconds. Team order went to form in the next three positions – No. 9 Chicago (50), No. 16 Carnegie Mellon (88) and No. 19 Washington (Mo.) (92) – with unranked Emory (138) rounding out the top-5 teams.
Women’s 6k
NYU swept the individual and team titles here also with the Violets matching their feat from 2023.
Ashlyn Pallota’s time of 21:00.8 gave her a 7.0-second winning margin over Chloe Bonson of Carnegie Mellon while Josephine Dziedzic and Grace Rowley continued the NYU dominance in third and fourth. Lucinda Laughlin of WashU rounded out the top -5. Pallota was 44th in last year’s race as a freshman.
Six ranked teams included three among the top-10 – the most of any conference in the nation. NYU, the highest-ranked team at No. 5, returned to the top spot after a runner-up finish last year, totaling 25 points with Stella Kuttner and Lucy Gott eighth and ninth, respectively, to complete their scoring. No. 7 Carnegie Mellon was runner-up with 54 points and was the only other team with more than one runner in the top-10 (five different squads had at least one).
Third place went to defending champion No. 10 UChicago (80), which was followed by No. 12 WashU (91), No. 16 Emory (122) and No. 26 Brandeis (180).