Buckle up, as the cross-country roller coaster has already left the gate. When you’re a distance runner in the NCAA, there’s no true off-season once the academic year starts. Summer is the primary opportunity for shakeups, and now we’re starting to find out which favorites are picking up where they left off, which transfers are adjusting best to their new home, and who’s ready to level-up thanks to some quality summer training.

What it also means is that some athletes are still building from a post-track break, others are quietly recovering from late-spring injuries, and some teams – blessed with enough firepower – are saving their star players for the postseason. After our first real look at the NCAA landscape, it’s too early to call the shots just yet, but that’s what’s so fun about collegiate XC’s opening weekend. It’s irresponsible to count anybody out, but you can start adding contenders to your increasingly long “short list.”

Racing a partial roster can mean many things.

We’re still 52 days away from The Big Dance, so it’s unsurprising that we didn’t see the full championship lineup of every team on our radar. That means that if your favorite team underperforms without a full lineup, you can write off the result entirely. But if your favorite team overperforms with some legs still in reserve… get everyone else on board the hype train.

A ninth-place finish for the Oregon women at the Nuttycombe Invitational may seem like a discouraging result for the Ducks at first glance (it dropped their ranking eight spots to No. 12), but we aren’t concerned. They were missing the upperclassmen trio of Silan Ayyildiz, Maddy Elmore and Klaudia Kazimierska. Meanwhile, Mia Barnett had a solid showing as their highest finisher in 18th place. 

At the same time, their B1G counterparts out of Seattle validated their jump to the Duck’s old No. 4 ranking. Even with Amina Maatoug’s uncharacteristic showing in 27th place, the Washington Huskies flexed their depth with all scorers in the top 34 and a mere 29.3-second gap separating their first and fifth. The team was led by a promising eighth place outing from Maeve Stiles, a transfer from Penn whose only result at NCAAs so far is a 60th-place XC finish in 2022.

A little bit further south at Missouri’s Gans Creek Classic, the Midwest was anything but “mid” (hold your boos). The Florida women slotted four in the top 13 without individual title contender Hilda Olemomoi or super-senior Allison Wilson. The British duo of Beth Morley (sixth) and Tia Wilson (11th) impressed in their NCAA debuts, and Reagan Gilmore finished 13th in her hard launch at the collegiate level. The Gators made a statement despite falling four spots to No. 11 ranking. 

The stage gets set for another huge team clash.

The OSU men backed up their No. 1 ranking with a 1-3-4-5-6 finish at the Cowboy Jamboree, and it’s safe to say the Cowboys didn’t win solely on the strength of their home field advantage. Brian Musau crushed the 8K course record in 22:55.6, besting the 2023 NCAA cross country runner-up and reigning outdoor 10,000m champion Habtom Samuel by eight seconds. If OSU’s 19-point team score wasn’t impressive enough, keep in mind that Adisu Guadia finished 10th while competing unattached, and Fouad Messaoudi, their third scorer and 10th-place finisher at last year’s championships, didn’t even spike up.

While it might be tempting to go ahead and start engraving “Oklahoma State University” into the trophy now, there’s still some intrigue in the fact that OSU has yet to face off against the team with the best shot to swipe their next title: BYU. The Cougars had a near-mirror image showing at Nuttycombe with four runners in the top 10 (and six runners inside the top 21, for that matter) at a higher-caliber meet, at least depth-wise. BYU’s 44 points marked the third-lowest men’s team score in the history of the invitational.

For now, we’ll have to wait for the OSU-BYU premiere at the Big 12 Cross Country Championships on November 1… with the sequel to follow three weeks later at NCAAs.

The stars of tomorrow have arrived… today.

Villanova’s Sadie Sigfstead winning Nuttycombe wasn’t completely out of left field. Sigfstead is returning Mid-Atlantic regional champion, but she’s flown a bit under the radar given that her highest finish at an XC national meet is 71st at last year’s championships, and she only finished 12th in the 10,000m outdoors. The Wildcats haven’t brought an individual crown home since Sheila Reid went back-to-back in 2010 and 2011, but after her run Friday, Sigfstead is clearly a threat to end that drought. 

Another attention-grabbing performance came from runner-up Florence Caron of Penn State, who made a huge jump from 133rd at Nuttycombe last year (and 182nd at NCAAs). Perhaps it’s the proximity of Wisconsin to the northern border, but these Canadian juniors going 1-2 at Nuttycombe is something to keep in mind ahead of their likely return to the same stage in late November. Seeing as three of the last four NCAA cross champions (Parker Valby and Graham Blanks in 2023 and Katelyn Tuohy in 2022) also won the Nuttycombe Invitational, winning on the Zimmer Championship Course might be good early-season luck, eh?

A pair of names that sound more familiar if you have a YouTube account are Leo and Lex Young, who took second and fifth over at the Gans Creek Classic. The Youngs’ new 8k PBs led the Stanford men to a dominant 31-point win, which boosted their team ranking from No. 10 to No. 6. The Stanford women didn’t do too shabby either, also placing four inside the top 10 for a Cardinal sweep in Missouri.