By Rachel DaDamio
June 3, 2025
This weekend, athletes from around the country raced in regionals to punch their tickets to the 2025 NCAA Championships in Eugene, Oregon. Each year, two regional meets—East and West—host the top 48 qualifiers per event, with the top 12 finishers advancing to nationals. Though regionals is not a team-scored competition, I created a Distance Report Card to rank teams across four metrics related to performance at the regional meet. The Regionals Distance Report Card focuses on the three distance events: the 3k Steeplechase, the 5k, and the 10k. To make all values fall between 0 and 1, I applied min-max scaling to the number of entries criterion. For more information on min-max scaling, see this documentation from scikit-learn.
Ranking Criteria
To create an overall program score, I computed an average across the four aforementioned criteria. The maximum possible overall score is 1.
Top 5 Programs
Combined men’s and women’s programs:
Northern Arizona comes out on top when looking at combined men’s and women’s regional meet performance in the distance events. This result isn’t surprising given that the Lumberjacks men and women finished 5th and 4th in the 2024 NCAA cross country national meet, respectively. Notably, most NAU athletes (65%) outperformed their expected place, speaking to the ability of director Mike Smith to get athletes ready for late season, championship racing. New Mexico also had an impressive regional performance having the most distance entries in the meet (22). Though it was not a factor in the rankings, New Mexico was the only program to qualify at least one athlete to the national meet in all six distance events, so the Lobos will be a program to look out for in Eugene.
Women’s programs:
On the women’s side, Northern Arizona scores first again with impressive results across all metrics. Washington and Texas A&M score second and third, respectively, with all of their female distance athletes outperforming their expected places. Washington 5k runners Amina Maatoug and Julia David-Smith had particularly strong showings, outperforming their expected places and qualifying for nationals. Maatoug was ranked 14th and finished 2nd, and David-Smith was ranked 20th and finished 8th.
Men’s programs:
The New Mexico men had the best regional meet based on the four performance metrics. Wyoming cracked the top 5 with all of their athletes outperforming expected places, and they earned the honor of having the biggest upset of the weekend. In the West 5k, Wyoming’s Jacob White came into the race ranked 46th and finished 4th to punch his ticket to the national meet. Wake Forest also had a strong showing at the regional meet with another huge performance in the men’s 5k. JoJo Jourdon was ranked 39th in the field and finished 4th in the East Regional.
While I only highlighted the top 5 programs in this article, the full list of rankings can be found here.
Regionals is not a team race. There are no team standings or team champions crowned. However, how a team performs at regionals speaks to the strength of their program and how well the athletes are able to race late into the season. Teams that rose to the top of the Regionals Report Card– like NAU, New Mexico, and Washington– will be ones to watch at the NCAA Championships, as many of their athletes will be podium contenders in Eugene.
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Rachel DaDamio
Rachel DaDamio ran at the University of Notre Dame and moved to Chicago after graduating to work as a data scientist, where she’s also training for a fall marathon.
