Recap: 2025 NCAA DIII Cross Country Regional Championships

Welcome to Regional Championships Saturday!

We’re about to find out which teams earn automatic bids – and those who must rely on at-large berths – to the upcoming 2025 NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships on Saturday, November 22, at the Roger Millikin Cross Country Course in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

From The USTFCCCA InfoZone: Meets & Results | USTFCCCA Scoreboard

We’ll keep track of which teams earned automatic bids to the Palmetto State.

NCAA DIII Cross Country Automatic Team Qualifiers
Region	Men’s AQs	Women’s AQs
East	No. 11 MIT	No. 17 Tufts
Great Lakes	No. 16 Hope	No. 8 Trine
Metro	No. 30 TCNJ	Swarthmore
Mid-Atlantic	No. 3 Johns Hopkins	No. 4 Johns Hopkins
Mideast	No. 8 RPI	No. 1 Williams
Midwest	No. 2 Wartburg	No. 13 Washington (Mo.)
Niagara	No. 5 SUNY Geneseo	No. 2 NYU
North	No. 1 UW-La Crosse	No. 6 UW-La Crosse
South	No. 19 Washington and Lee	No. 16 Emory
West	No. 14 Pomona-Pitzer	No. 5 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps

Mideast Region Championships

CLICK HERE FOR RESULTS FROM THE MEET

Men’s Recap

RPI got out fast – really fast – holding a perfect score through the 2-mile split.

The eighth-ranked Engineers never looked back, cruising to the team title at the Mideast Region Championships with 44 points, 51 fewer than the next-closest team. That win secured RPI the lone automatic qualifier out of the region, leaving No. 8 Williams (second, 95 points), No. 24 Middlebury (third, 104 points), No. 21 Wesleyan (Conn.) (fourth, 109 points), and No. 15 Amherst (fifth, 111 points) to wait for at-large selections.

Evan Lacey led six Engineers in the top 15 with his third-place, trailing only individual champion Nathan Tassey of Roger Williams and runner-up Nicholas Lyndaker of St. Lawrence. Colin Goldschmidt and Tobin Durham also joined Lacey in the top ten, placing sixth and tenth, respectively. Justin Cascio (11^th) and Thomas Manson (14^th) rounded out RPI’s scoring lineup, which posted an impressive spread of just 16.3 seconds.

Women’s Recap

Williams is the No. 1 team in the nation for a reason.

The top-ranked Ephs ran roughshod over the field on Saturday, defeating No. 9 Middlebury by 57 points, 39-96. Williams placed all seven runners in the top 15, led by Kate Tuttle in third, trailing only individual champion Audrey MacLean of Middlebury and Jules Bleskoski of RPI – both considered favorites for the NCAA title.

At no point after the 1k split did the Ephs exceed 40 team points. They posted 37 at the mile, 38 at the 2-mile, 35 at 3.93k, and then 39 at the finish.

No. 12 Connecticut College was third with 101 points, followed by No. 22 Amherst (129) and No. 18 Vassar (139) in fourth and fifth place, respectively.

Midwest Region Championships

CLICK HERE FOR RESULTS FROM THE MEET

Men’s Recap

No. 2 Wartburg was simply too much to handle on its home course, packing all five scorers in the top nine to defend its regional title with 30 points, winning by 57 points over No. 9 UChicago.

All five of the Knights’ scoring quintet finished before any other team’s No. 2 runner. They were led by defending individual champ Isaiah Hammerand, who was runner-up today, with Lance Sobaski (fifth), Jack Kinzer (sixth), Eli Larson (eighth) and Tyler Schermerhorn (ninth) completing their scoring with a 1-5 gap of 28.0 seconds.

A much closer team battle came for the runner-up position, with the Maroons edging No. 10 North Central (Ill.), 87-93. No. 29 Loras (128) and No. 18 Washington (Mo.) (134) completed the top five teams.

The individual race was close through the 7.3k split, with Isaac vanWestrienen of Cornell College, Hammerand and Loras’ Isaac Bourne separated by 2.0 seconds. The final 700 meters provided clear separation as VanWestrienen bolted away for a commanding 7.5-second winning margin over Hammerand in 24:00.9. Bourne was another 6.6 seconds back in third.

Women’s Recap

The top two teams dominated the individual leader board as No. 13 Washington (Mo.) topped No. 10 UChicago by just six points, 42-48, reversing the order of last year’s finish. This was the Bears’ first regional title since the 2021 re-alignment of NCAA DIII regions.

This contest was tight from at least the midway point, where the Bears led by four points, 45-49, before increasing the margin to 10 at 5k (42-52).

At the finish the two UAA rivals closed the difference to the final six points and combined for 10 of the top-17 individuals. WashU went 1-2 with Lucinda Laughlin leading Jillian Heth by 1.1 seconds in 21:29.7 for the individual title and followed by Katie Rector, Lauren Raley and Riley Clark in 8-15-16.

The Maroons’ top duo went 3-5 – Katja Dunayevich ahead of Estelle Snider – with Margaret Horn, Nora Holmes and Eva Devlin following in 11-12-17.

It was the first time this year that WashU beat UChicago, which finished higher at the UAA Championships and Augustana Interregional Invitational, both times occupying the third and fourth team places.

No. 21 Wartburg was third with 91 points as No. 24 Central (Iowa) and Grinnell rounded out the top five teams with 136 and 148 points, respectively.

Other Meet(s) of Note

The Upset of the Day came in the East Region, where No. 17 Tufts took down defending national champion No. 3 MIT for the women’s title, 51-61. Pack running propelled the Jumbos, as they went 4-10-11-12-14, compared to a 1-2-15-17-26 finish by the Engineers. MIT saw Kate Sanderson capture the individual title in 21:20.1 with teammate Rujuta Sane close behind in 21:26.4.