By David Melly
November 26, 2025
With Thanksgiving around the corner, it’s time to take a second and reflect on what you’re grateful for. Here at the Lap Count, we’re thankful that another NCAA cross country season wrapped up with a fantastic day of racing in Columbia, Missouri.
The outcomes in both the men’s and women’s races weren’t exactly unpredictable, but that’s largely because the runners and teams with a lot of pre-race hype simply delivered on expectations. The top-ranked teams heading into the weekend both won titles fairly decisively, with the NC State Wolfpack racking up 114 points in the women’s race and the OK State Cowboys riding a 57-point performance to victory. And both squads bounced back to the top step of the podium in parallel fashion: they both won titles in 2023, and amazingly, both finished eighth in 2024. What are the odds?!
Across the top of the results, the theme of great teams turning in great performances continued. In both competitions, the top four ranked teams finished in the top five spots; the biggest podium outlier was the sixth-ranked Oregon Ducks taking third in the women’s race. Individually, the top returners from last year took the win: Doris Lemngole defended her title on the women’s side, and Habtom Samuel ascended a step after finishing twice the last two years. So why are we counting our blessings and cheering for a race that, generally speaking, looked in practice exactly how it was forecasted on paper?
Because the race itself played out in thrilling fashion from start to finish. If you missed the broadcast or didn’t want to shell out for ESPNU, the full race replay is available on YouTube and it’s worth a watch (or at least a skim).
In the women’s race, the clash of heavy-hitters delivered, with Lemngole taking on BYU freshman phenom Jane Hedegren head-to-head for the first time this season. As hoped for, both women ran away from the pack and into the Gans Creek record books. The duo looked ready and willing to lead, dropping the pack around the halfway mark then opening up a huge gap on the field. With a kilometer to go, 0.6 seconds separated the two, but coming over the last “hill” in the relatively flat course, Lemngole let her experience do the talking, making a perfectly-timed final push that generated immediate separation. For the first time all season, Hedengren looked mortal; her 3:14 final kilometer was the slowest of anyone in the top 15. Lemngole, meanwhile, cruised to a 18:25.4 course and meet record—a reminder that she’s not just the best distance runner in the NCAA; she’s among the best in the world.
Hedengren deserves her flowers nevertheless. Sure, times don’t matter in cross country, but it’s worth noting that across four races this season, her slowest 6km was 19:06.6 and her 18:38.9 from this weekend put her under her own “old” Gans Creek course record. The 19-year-old had to contend with sky-high expectations coming into college as a six-time high school record holder joining the defending national champs at BYU, and she didn’t let the bright lights dazzle her. Lemngole, who—let’s not forget—finished fifth at Worlds in the steeplechase a few months ago, is simply a legend-in-the-making, with four NCAA titles, a NCAA record, and a Diamond League win all on her resume at 23 years old.
The men’s race was no two-runner affair, at least not for 5/6ths of the race. For the first 20 or so minutes, the national cross country championship looked like a tactical 1500m heat, with dozens of guys jockeying for position in between hay bales. With exactly one mile to go, Samuel, the 2024 NCAA 10,000m champ, made a HARD move and opened up a 30-meter gap in a matter of seconds… but was it too hard? The guy with the best response was Southeast Regional champ Rocky Hansen of Wake Forest, who kept Samuel within his sights for the rest of the race but couldn’t quite close the gap. After two runner-up finishes in XC (plus three more on the track), Samuel finally picked up his second individual title thanks to a 2:44 final K en route to a 28:33.9 run.
Hansen, to his credit, solidified his “most improved” status after an already strong season. Last year, the North Carolina-born Deac finished 100th; the year before he missed the XC postseason entirely. This time around, he finished second as a 21-year-old junior, a stratospheric jump that every mud-covered sixth man in Missouri went to bed Saturday dreaming of for next year. Hansen first rose to prominence in 2023 as a sub-four miler in high school, but it’s becoming clearer that he’s a pure distance guy through and through. When you look at the recent trajectories of Graham Blanks and Conner Mantz, cross country strength is a pretty darn good predictor of future success on any surface.
Behind the leaders, the team battles were being fought very clearly throughout the top ten. OSU’s paltry 57 points came on the backs of an impressive 4-5-6 finish from Brian Musau, Fouad Messaoudi, and Denis Kipgnetich, whereas Samuel’s New Mexico teammate Collins Kiprotich finished eighth to keep the Lobos close behind in second. On the women’s side, Diljeet Taylor’s BYU Cougars did their level best to defend the crown thanks to a huge fourth-place run by Riley Chamberlain, who despite being known more as a miler moved up seven spots in the final 2km. But that wasn’t the most impressive team scorer of the day: no, that honor belongs to Hannah Gapes of NC State, who moved up from 26th at 1km to finish fifth as the Pack’s top scorer, one spot ahead of teammate Grace Hartman. When your team has a World Championship qualifier as your fourth runner in the form of Angelina Napoleon, you know you’ve got it pretty good.
Gapes was NC State’s top scorer at Regionals, but she was only their third runner at ACCs and her career-best finish at NCAAs on the track is only 10th. But she’s now finished top-ten in the last two NCAA XC championships, and her consistency was invaluable to the team’s title chances as Napoleon, the ACC individual champ, faded badly at the end of the race, dropping 21 spots in the final kilometer. NC State has now won four of the last five national titles as a team, and the dynasty may very well continue: all five of their scorers and six of their seven runners are able to return next year.
Oklahoma State’s Coach Dave Smith
Despite all the action on the grass, the moments that got the most lips a-flapping and comments a-typing this weekend came in the form of newspaper interviews and press conference clips. First, BYU men’s coach Ed Eyestone caused a stir by referring to recruiting foreign-born athletes as a “shortcut” he’d be “embarrassed” to employ. Then, when OSU coach Dave Smith, whose roster features a number of international stars, was asked about the remarks, he implored his fellow coach to change the rulebook or, if not, “shut up and coach.”
Smith ultimately got the last laugh as he returned to Stillwater hoisting the trophy, but the conversation their comments sparked rages on. A notable element of all this hoopla is the increasing impact of professional recruiting organizations on the sport, with a reported 97 Kenyan athletes on the starting line coming to their universities via Scholarbook and Townhall, two such agencies. Solomon Kipchoge, who finished third in the race for Washington State, has attracted a disproportionate share of criticism because of one big discrepancy: eligibility-wise, he’s a sophomore, but the WSU Cougar turns 30 in May.
Like every virtually rule in the NCAA books, the restrictions or lack thereof on competition age, NIL money, and international runners are a fast-moving target. The goal is to balance multiple, sometimes antithetical, considerations in the name of fairness, and people have strong opinions over whether the system is succeeding. It’s easy to look at the men’s team results—with the multinational squads of Oklahoma State, New Mexico, and Iowa State producing enough low sticks to claim the top three spots—and assume the system is unfairly tilted toward a certain kind of winning team. But look one spot behind them at the Orangemen of Syracuse: they claimed the final podium spot with a very different kind of strategy, landing five scorers between 31st and 73rd place and still ending up fourth overall. Their leading scorer, Sam Lawler, is from the cross country mecca of Pittsford, New York (just kidding, it’s a random suburb of Rochester with 30,000 residents).
Over on the women’s side, the top two teams of NC State and BYU featured exactly zero Kenyans on their scoring squads. If anything, the immediate presence of freshmen like Hedengren for the Cougars and Sadie Engelhardt for the Wolfpack show that the U.S. high school nationals are just as fruitful a farm system as the pipeline from Iten. In the men’s race, its impact may take a few more years, but Hansen and UVA’s Gary Martin still landed in the top ten overall.
Few, if any, winning NCAA teams are all one thing. OSU’s fifth man Ryan Schoppe hails from the faraway land of La Porte, Texas, and he helped his team take home the win with a 34th-place finish to secure his first career XC All-American honors in five attempts (thanks to the pandemic). His first two previous finishes were 230th and 225th, so it’s hard to argue that recruiting studs and developing talent are mutually exclusive coaching skills.
That’s what makes cross country, especially on the NCAA level, so fun. Because each of the 32 teams is assembling a seven-piece puzzle, there are near-infinite ways to build a roster. Some rely on squeezing a few extra miles out of speedy middle-distance runners; others are full of 10k specialists who get toasted every time they set foot on a track. Some guys are returning from missions, riding out the last gasp of COVID eligibility, or yes—coming into the NCAA system already in their mid-20s, but others were racing high school dual meets a handful of months ago.
Part of the reason professional cross country lacks the excitement and aura of the NCAA is that there isn’t the same variety of styles and integration of different kinds of athletes. No collegiate sport is a perfect product that should never change or evolve. If anything, we’re in the exact opposite moment, where court settlements and new regulations are continually upending the established norm and changing the rulebook. It would be nice if there was a little more stability and a little less mind-bending overcorrection, but it’s certainly not a static, stale time to follow along.
If there’s one thing we hate, it’s when running is boring. So this year, when it comes to NCAA XC, we’re feeling quite thankful.
David Melly
David began contributing to CITIUS in 2018, and quickly cemented himself as an integral part of the team thanks to his quick wit, hot takes, undying love for the sport and willingness to get yelled at online.
