2025 D3 XC Nationals Preview
2025 NCAA D3 National Championships
Spartanburg, SC / Milliken Research Park
Men’s Race: 10am ET
Women’s Race: 11am ET
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64 teams and 140 individuals will all converge in Spartanburg, South Carolina this weekend for the coveted annual NCAA D3 XC National Championships. Eight of these teams and 80 individuals will return home with hardware, but the fight for a trophy will not be easy. D3 Glory Days will be announcing off-site in the booth, but we will also have boots on the ground with our core team of photographers and videographers, ready to capture all the top moments of the weekend. If someone hands you a tiny mic, lean into your moment of fame, as we will also be conducting on-site interviews Friday and Saturday.
Of course, no matter where you find yourselves on Saturday, at home on the couch watching the live broadcast on NCAA.com or swimming through the sea of spectators live on the course, make sure to follow D3 Glory Days for all your up-to-date nationals coverage.
Here’s to the glory days, which may just be days ahead of us.
Men’s Race
Can anyone catch the UW-La Crosse Eagles? Last year, they turned lemons into lemonade when they upgraded their narrow one-point runner-up finish to Pomona-Pitzer in 2023 to a sweeping national victory in which they beat runners-up Wartburg by nearly 100 points. Can they show similar dominance this year? Perhaps, considering they return everyone but their seventh to this year’s roster. However, Wartburg is also looking particularly strong in 2025.
UWL’s loaded team of returning All-Americans features Grant and Aidan Matthai, Joey Sullivan, and Jayden Zywicki–all of whom landed in the top 20 last year–as well as Adam Loenser, who was 53rd, and Chuck Vater, who was 69th and is having a great sophomore year as a steady scorer for the Eagles. Loenser appears to be having some hiccups in his season so far, not having raced since interregional weekend, but this is a team with a deep roster of athletes like Nico Castellanos, Owen Clark, Mason Brown, and Aidan Manning, all of whom have been in the team’s top 7 at some point throughout the year. Coach Stanley has his work cut out for him choosing this year’s racing roster, but there doesn’t appear to be an option for the “wrong decision” with so much talent on this team in 2025. They’ve already proved at Augustana that they have what it takes to beat Wartburg, but it wasn’t an overwhelming victory–only 12 points. Will a more crowded field at nationals break up their pack enough to keep it close? Can another team like Johns Hopkins, Tufts, MIT, NYU, or SUNY G come in and steal the throne? Anything is possible.
Wartburg also comes in boasting an impressive list of returners from last year’s runner-up team and appears to be much closer to the heels of UWL than the Eagles would like. Their steady leader, Isaiah Hammerand, has only lost to four D3 competitors all year (excluding an early season apparent tempo effort alongside teammates at Redbird), and one of these competitors, Isaac vanWestrienen the Midwest regional champ, fell to Hammerand at Dan Huston in early October. Hammerand will have his eyes on the individual title, knowing that the closer he is, the more points he can knock off for his team.
The real determining factor, of course, will be what happens behind him. At ARCs, Wartburg posted a perfect score with Hammerand, Lance Sobaski, Eli Larson, Tyler Schermerhorn, and Jack Kinzer. Their split was a mere 20 seconds. At regionals, it was 28 seconds. Augustana, where they lost to UWL, was their widest split at 31 seconds, but they have shown all year that they can keep this time tight, something they will surely be trying to do at nationals. Knowing UWL is capable of similar pack running, the race for the title is sure to be a battle of the packs, and it’s going to be close, much closer than last year. They will need all five to be firing as they do not enjoy the luxury that La Crosse has of having someone slot in if needed. With ~28 seconds separating their five from six at regionals, there’s no room for error with this team.
Pomona-Pitzer and UW-Whitewater rounded out the podium last year, but both teams enter rebuilding years this year after losing several heavy hitters up front, meaning the spotlight is ready to shine on someone else.
Could it be reserved for rising force Johns Hopkins, who has never made a nationals podium before? Like Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, Johns Hopkins is a cross country power couple between their two programs in Baltimore, but until this year, the women have mostly held the spotlight with their incredible eight national titles and ten podium finishes. Now, Johns Hopkins men are ready for their Super Bowl rings, and by that, we mean, nationals trophy.
The Blue Jays have major starpower in Emmanuel Leblond, who has posted two consecutive regular seasons in which he was completely undefeated against D3 competition. He was sixth at nationals last year, but appears to be running on a different level this year, evidenced in part by his sixth place finish at Paul Short (22 places and 41 seconds faster than last year), meaning he could finish the whole season undefeated with a win on Saturday. Regardless of his place, he is almost guaranteed to land in the top 40 barring something catastrophic, which will make him the only athlete in the men’s field and the 18th in D3 history to earn four consecutive All-American honors.
Leblond rested at regionals alongside teammates Anthony Clark and Olaf Dietz, which indicates to us that Coach Bobby Van Allen is cooking up something delicious for Leblond and the Blue Jays at nationals, and a tight 2-5 pack and an almost guaranteed low stick is perhaps the perfect recipe. In the absence of Leblond, Clark, and Dietz at regionals, teammates Kenny Wanless–the Mid-Atlantic regional champ–Brady Ott, Cedar Nichols-Barnhart, Connor Oiler, Rowan Cassidy, Nash Minor, and Caleb Tenney cleaned house with a point total of 23, a full 41 points ahead of ranked Carnegie Mellon. Similarly to other teams coming into nationals with deep squads and podium dreams, Coach BVA has a tough job picking this team’s lineup.
Other teams with eyes on the prize come into the weekend after two intense regional matchups: Niagara region’s SUNY Geneseo versus NYU, and the East region’s MIT versus Tufts. MIT has to be feeling good riding some momentum with their 7-point East region victory over Tufts. This comes after Tufts beat them handily at Conn, though the Engineers were without rookie Sam Hansen, who seems to be clicking at the right time following his fourth place regional finish this past weekend. Assuming MIT is firing from all cylinders this weekend, they just might ride their regional victory momentum all the way to the podium.
Tufts, on the other hand, will have something to take back from MIT following regionals. They were missing Cullen McCaleb and Harris Gulbransen from their squad last weekend, which left them a bit vulnerable, but the depth of their pack led by runner-up Amokrane Aouchiche stepped up and landed just seven points behind MIT. Arguably their best performance of the year came from Conn College where they were second, 15 points back from Johns Hopkins and seven points ahead of SUNY G. Their fifth in this race was 19 seconds back from their fourth, which isn’t a terrible margin, but in a massive race like nationals, even the smallest of gaps can be detrimental, especially if it exists closer to the bellcurve of the race than the front. Keeping each other in sight and out of the masses will be key for the Jumbos.
We’ve apparently made it our mission to expose SUNY Geneseo at every turn this year, but it’s only because this team is really good and we haven’t really gotten to see it every race. Some weekends they sat out key scorers, and at Paul Short, they were in the gold race, making it hard to compare them to other D3 teams. Like a good dessert, however, we are saving the best for last, as the Knights of Batavia are sure to be running on full steam against all of D3 this coming weekend. After sitting most of their varsity on conference weekend, they went 1-3 at regionals with their trio of Ryan Hagan, Emerson Comer, and Pierce Young. Collin Brown and Connor Hitt rounded out their scoring pack with Thomas Blake not far behind. This was the same crew at Conn who placed third behind Hopkins and Tufts. Though Geneseo has yet to beat Hopkins head-to-head, don’t be surprised to see jumbled results from the regular season, as teams have been within points of one another all year.
NYU is another team coming in with a lot to prove. They missed the podium by a single point last year and will be determined not to return to Manhattan under the same circumstances this year. They have star power between national returners Jeffrey Chen and Liam Hagerty, who were just outside of All-American contention last year, and add to the lineup freshman standout Theo Udelson-Nee, who won UAAs; Andy Taylor, who has been a pretty consistent third, and duo Huck Oakes and Alex Hrycyszyn, who came in together practically holding hands at Paul Short, where NYU posted a convincing win against Amherst in the white race. They fell to SUNY G by 18 points at regionals, so will need to keep them in sight on Saturday to have a chance of finishing ahead of them this time around.
Another squad heating up at the right time is that of RPI, who are fresh off of a 50-point Mideast victory over Williams. Their 1-5 split was just 16 seconds, and their 1-7 split 25 seconds, meaning this is a team that can rival the depth of pretty much any other podium contender. Led by junior Evan Lacey, this team finished behind Wartburg at Augustana and has only gotten more threatening since.
Other programs on the rise to follow this weekend include Hope, who captured their first regional win since 1980 following a historic MIAA win that snapped a 37-year-long Calvin winning streak. At Great Lakes regionals, they pulled Rose-Hulman along with them to nationals following their standout performance and 1-2 punch from Sam Rinker and Joshua Pohle. Rose returns to the national stage for the third time in program history and first in 11 years. Lebanon Valley heads to the national stage for the first time in program history, and looks poised to make some noise in the top 25.
Individuals
While Emmanuel Leblond has been getting a giant spotlight for leading the rise of Johns Hopkins, there’s another quiet force traveling to Spartanburg as an individual, ready to claim what was almost his last year. Augsburg’s Mo Bati has been training all year for this moment. His Strava, comically gaining attention last year for his astonishingly slow paces in perspective to his race pace, has done a complete 180-degree turn. Now, the king in the north is logging well over 100 miles per week at blistering speeds. Though there are certainly an abundance of different ways to train for an 8k, it’s hard to think anyone could beat the aerobic monster Bati, who ran a casual 63:52 half marathon over the summer. Known for making hard moves near the end of the race rather than going right from the gun, a strategy that a seasoned Patzka executed just a little bit better last year to take the win in the final straightaway, fans are left guessing what Bati will do this year.
Boasting sub-8 3k speed, Leblond has both the wheels and stamina to close, so will Bati leave him in it long enough to be dangerous, or will he trust a big base and try to gap him earlier than expected? Leblond is certainly not the only lethal threat, either. Including Bati and Leblond, 60% of last year’s national top 10 returns in peak form this year, and 100% of these returners are sure to have eyes on an individual national title.
Wartburg’s Isaiah Hammerand was ninth and looking to capture a low stick for his team with national title dreams. Roger Williams’s Nathan Tassey was fourth and this year is fueled by his robbed 10k title in the spring. La Crosse’s Grant and Aidan Matthai were third and fifth, respectively, last year, and bring with them Jayden Zywicki this year, who has finished within striking distance of the twins practically all year. Grant is in top shape, his only notable losses this year to Bati and Cornell College’s Isaac vanWestrienen, which brings us to yet another twist in the plot.
vanWestrienen is ready to step into the spotlight now, too. His only loss this season is from Dan Huston to Wartburg’s Hammerand, who he then beat weeks later on interregional weekend in addition to both Matthai twins. Last winter, he PRed in three events, most notably running a 14:00 5k, propelling him to a fifth place All-American finish in this event at indoor nationals. He’s never been an All-American in cross country, and, in fact, is a top candidate for most improved after his 272nd place finish last year. Watch for him to jump as many as 271 places this year.
2025 has been the year of another name: Colorado College’s Will Shuflit. The junior was 30th last year and started this cross country season undefeated against D3 competition for three consecutive meets, including his breakout win at Paul Short against Tassey. His first D3 loss came at Augie, where he lost to vanWestrienen and Grant Matthai, pretty good company in which to find oneself.
A dark horse to keep an eye on is SUNY Geneseo’s Ryan Hagan. The bronze medalist in last year’s 1500, Hagan has shown that he has a knack for the grass, too. His sole loss to D3 competition this year has been to one Emmanuel Leblond. He was the second D3 athlete in the Paul Short gold race, finishing 22nd amongst D1 talent, and second at Conn College. He’s slowly chipping away at the gap between himself and Leblond; could Saturday be his time to draw his sword to make a charge for glory?
The front of the national meet will likely look much like Paul Short or Augie, with all the heavy hitters, Hammerand, Grant and Aidan Matthai, Tassey, vanWestrienen, Hagan, Shuflit, and more meeting up with Leblond and Bati for a brisk Saturday workout. Whoever can hang on the longest will cross the finish line as a national champion.
Women’s Race
The power teams of the northeast will head south like snow birders, except, instead of poolside happy hours, they hope to be enjoying national trophies. The year started favoring returning champions MIT, but teams like Williams, NYU, and Johns Hopkins have caught fire throughout the season, showing they could have what it takes to overthrow the Engineers.
Last year, MIT pulled ahead of UChicago for the win with a final score of 128-138. They return all from last year’s squad except graduating senior Cristina Crow, who finished as a 35th-place All-American, MIT’s third and final All-American of the day behind frontrunners Kate Sanderson (16th) and Rujuta Sane (19th). Sanderson and Sane will return to the front of this year’s race in hopes of bettering their finishes from last year. Both come off of impressive 2025 seasons, in which Sanderson was the D3 leader in the Paul Short gold race and the East regional champion, and Sane ran a 41-second course PR at Conn and was the regional runner-up. Look for these two to work together up front alongside returning trio Gillian Roeder, Lexi Fernandez, and Liv Girand, all of whom rested regionals weekend in preparation for a big national meet. Though this squad has suffered some bumps in the road this season, which forced them to run at partial strength more meets than not, do not underestimate a team that knows how to win a national title. They fell to No. 1 Williams at Conn College without Fernandez, but still managed to beat No. 4 Johns Hopkins, who appeared to have their full squad.
The team from Williams comes into this meet as the favorites. They are completely undefeated this year and will want to keep it that way with their squad of Kate Tuttle, Morgan Eigel, Tamar Byl-Brann, Kate Swann, and Charlene Peng. Swann, Byl-Brann, and Tuttle are the returning All-Americans on this squad led by Tuttle’s incredible D3 freshman lead at eighth overall last year. Another year stronger and wiser and with a rock-solid team around her, Tuttle is sure to be locked in. In their only head-to-head battle with MIT this year, the Ephs edged out the Engineers at Conn College and did so without Tuttle, meaning there was more to give. They won the Mideast region handily with a 20-second 1-5 split in which they seemed to pair up well behind Tuttle. This will be key this weekend, as will keeping their pairs tight. The battle with MIT will be a close one, and the winner will not only be the best of Massachusetts, but perhaps the best in the nation.
That is, unless NYU has something to say about it. The Violets come into this meet hungry for the top of the podium. In 2024, they were fourth, and in 2023, they landed in second by a mere three points in a race that they knew they should have won. They have been knocking at the door of a national title for three years now, and they head into this weekend hoping 2025 is finally their year. Also a team that has navigated some bumps this year with a partial squad, they seem to be bringing all the right pieces together at the right time.
Last weekend, we saw the return of Janie Cooper, the 2024 14th place All-American who didn’t race all season until regionals, where she finished an impressive second overall. At UAAs several weekends ago, we saw the return of both 1500m national qualifier Stella Kuttner and 10k national qualifier Grace Rowley, both of whom finished comfortably in the Violets’ scoring roster. With a nice addition this year in Ashlyn Pallota, an Emory transfer who was UAA champion and 4th place at Paul Short, and a great season from Josephine Dziedzic, who has been a steady No. 2, this team is absolutely loaded. We haven’t even mentioned Lucy Gott yet, the 39th place All-American from 2024. The Violets have something to prove this weekend and have all the right parts to make it happen. Do not be surprised if the purple you see on top of the podium this weekend is not, in fact, purple, but violet.
Rounding out the top-four ranked teams headed into the weekend is none other than the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays, eight-time program national champions and no strangers to the big stage. Led by standout Carter Brotherton, who was 25th last year, the Blue Jays have to be feeling jazzed about the rise of freshman Mia Kotler, who was well on her way to beating Brotherton at Centennial Championships before she was misdirected by a course marshall. Both Kotler and Brotherton, along with Eleni Alvarez, sat out at regionals to rest up for the big day, indicating they are eying one big prize. Their partial squad still beat Carnegie Mellon comfortably, 42-64. With fresh legs and a legacy of greatness on her side, there’s no telling how high this team can go.
With much of the attention focused on teams from the east coast, the west coast may be overlooked a bit. Do so at your own risk. CMS heads to the national meet with plenty of firepower and nationals experience. This squad features three women from the 2023 4th place finishing team. The Athenas are led by two All-Americans in Riley Capuano and Elle Marsyla. Capuano has two top 20 finishes (11th in 2023, 18th in 2024) and Marsyla finished 27th in 2023. The duo has traded off some top finisher honors with Marsyla taking the SCIAC title and Capuano taking runner up to Colorado College’s Alison Mueller-Hickler at regionals. Where the Athenas are dangerous is with their pack. At Pre-Nationals they finished with a 25 second 1-5 split. At conference? 20 seconds. Look out for Hope Dragseth, Sara Wexler, and Sadie Drucker to come in real close. The trio has been fairly interchangeable throughout the season; you can count on them to step up to the challenge. With just 10 seconds separating this trio at Pre-Nats and conference, watch for them to work together to navigate through the field. With two low sticks and a formidable pack, the Athenas will have podium aspirations this weekend.
Another team with an impressive season that will surely have their eyes on the podium is the UW-La Crosse Eagles. They first turned heads at Joe Piane, where they beat D1 St. Thomas and 2024 D3 runners-up UChicago in an impressive runner-up finish. They carried this momentum with them to Augustana, where they won by 20 points over rising Great Lakes force No. 7 Trine. With an impressive 18-second split at WIACs and an easy North region victory over Carleton, the Eagles are primed and ready to do something special. Coach Stanley is sure to be sprouting gray hairs between picking the men’s and women’s rosters for the weekend, especially after freshman Milana Pisto’s impressive seventh place finish at WIACs.
Some other teams to watch this weekend include Tufts, who just beat a partial-squad MIT at regionals, Carnegie Mellon, who just had six All-Region finishers and have been having a consistently strong season, and Trine, who is coming off of their first regional victory in program history. Keep an eye, too, on programs Swarthmore and Suffolk, who bring their full teams to the national meet for the first time in history.
Individuals
Perhaps the most anticipated battle of the weekend is Middlebury’s Audrey MacLean versus RPI’s Jules Bleskoski. The pair from the Mideast have been swapping victories all year, and this weekend is finally the battle that crowns fastest in the nation. MacLean heads into the weekend with the most momentum following her Mideast victory last weekend, in which she outran Bleskoski for the win by a commanding seven seconds. The Middlebury standout has been undefeated all season, save for an early-season team tempo run and a single blemish from Paul Short where she lost to…you guessed it…Jules Bleskoski. The difference? Also seven seconds. The pair were both in the top ten last year, with Bleskoski finishing in fourth, one second ahead of MacLean, who was sixth. This year, both athletes are running light years ahead of their competitors and have shown that their only true rivals are, well, each other. At Conn, MacLean won by 23 seconds. At NESCAC, 18 seconds.
Bleskoski’s season record looks incredibly similar. After an early season 5k, she is undefeated save for her regional loss to MacLean. Her margins of victory have been nothing short of incredible. At Purple Valley, she was at least a minute and 21 seconds ahead of No. 1 Williams’s entire roster. At Augustana, she beat Trine’s Sidney Swick by 55 seconds. These efforts indicate that Bleskoski is more than comfortable running alone, leading us to believe this is a strategy she could use on Saturday, gapping the field early similarly to how Faith Duncan did to win her 2024 national title. MacLean, on the other hand, has shown that she can hang on, so this could turn into a mono vs. mono race very quickly. Will MacLean try to beat Bleskoski in her own game or play a patient game in which she trusts her kick? Many scenarios are possible. Regardless, this is a battle for gold you won’t want to miss.
In the chase pack, look for several top 10 returners to establish early leads on the allegedly narrow course. Carleton’s Hannah Preisser, Williams’s Kate Tuttle, and Washington and Lee’s Olivia Warr will all have something to prove following their seventh through ninth place finishes, respectively, in 2024. Preisser is the only athlete in the women’s field with the opportunity to become a four-time consecutive All-American, an honor only 15 other athletes in D3 history have accomplished in the women’s race. Preisser has improved her finish every year from 15th to 14th to 7th and will look to keep this progression alive with a top 5 finish. She may just bring along with her freshman standout Claire Vukovics, who has been running stride-for-stride with Preisser much of the season.
Other big names to watch for are those looking to land a low-stick for their podium-hopeful teams: Ashlyn Pallota and Josephine Dziedzic of NYU, Kate Sanderson and Rujuta Sane of MIT, Carter Brotherton and Mia Kotler of Johns Hopkins. If the course is as narrow as fabled, strategies will become interesting for low sticks in the team battle. Do runners try to move hard toward the end when others fade or establish early positioning to avoid getting stuck in the masses? With most of these athletes having teammates who can hang with them up front, look for lots of good ole’ fashioned teamwork at play.
Several more athletes will have their eyes on the top 5, including Colorado College’s Alison Mueller-Hickler, who was 60th last year, but this year has finished no worse than third aside from a 12th place finish at Paul Short. Mueller-Hickler was the SCAC champion, West region champion, and third at Augie, so she knows how to race up front in competitive meets. Trine’s Sidney Swick is another to watch after she passed on a regional title to rest the Great Lakes regional meet. Swick was 70th last year, but after a fourth place finish amidst D1 talent at Louisville and a runner-up finish at Augie just ahead of Mueller-Hickler, look for Swick to land comfortably in All-American contention, and likely to her hopes, within the top ten. Vassar’s Haley Schoenegge has had a quiet season compared to last year. The 3x 1500/Mile champion and last year’s XC runner-up, just finished fifth in the Mideast Regional meet. Each meet she appears to be returning to form and could be hitting her stride at the time. With her championship prowess, don’t count out Haley Schoenegge!
The women’s race is full of depth this year, fueled by several teams battling to make the podium, so don’t be surprised to see many from the same school walking up to the stage to receive their trophies.
