Donald Speas
Dec 5, 202310 min
Answers by Donny Speas, questions, edits & additional commentary via Garrett Zatlin
The 2023 NXN Championships have concluded and my goodness were they exciting! In order to properly discuss and analyze all of the action, we asked our high school and NCAA recruiting correspondent, Donny Speas, a few questions about the meet.
Let's dive right in...
I am shocked that Danny Simmons fell so far at this meet.
I knew he wasn’t invincible, so I’d say that on a 1 to 10 scale, I'd give my surprise factor an 8. However, I’m 10 out of 10, 100% completely in shock, that Simmons fell out of the top-10, altogether. If you had a time machine and had told me that a week ago, then I don’t think there’s a universe in which I would have believed you.
As for Jojo Jourdon winning the title, I’d say I’m also about an 8 out of 10 level of surprise.
In my meet preview article, I mentioned that only two athletes had finished within 10 seconds of Danny Simmons this season. What I didn’t mention is that one of those athletes was Jourdon. The Utah native started his season off slowly, but by the time he toed the line for the NXR Southwest meet, he had already picked up wins at the Bob Firman Invitational and at the UHSAA 5A XC State Championship.
In retrospect, I definitely undervalued how strong of an athlete Jourdon was heading into this meet. Plus, I’m sure that the Wake Forest coaching staff over is enjoying being able to tell everyone in the country, “I told you so."
If you told me that the Herriman Mustangs wouldn’t have had the closest spread of anyone in the meet, I would have been shocked (that honor goes to the Great Oak Wolfpack). Despite having a larger spread than normal, the Mustangs still got it done. They were simply the most consistent team all season and that’s what ultimately paid off.
The biggest standout performer for the Mustangs was senior Jack Beckstorm who was 27th place overall and the seventh team-scoring athlete of the entire meet. More importantly, Beckstrom was one of the team’s few returners from Herriman’s 2022 squad where he placed 67th overall. In terms of Herriman performed, he felt like the major point where the points began to swing in their favor.
But truthfully, the point differential between American Fork and Herriman came down to American Fork as a whole having a slight "off" day, although it wasn't at all catastrophic.
Yes, Danny Simmons still scored one point, but outside of Simmon’s performance, it seemed that the Caveman ran almost the exact same as last year despite a much stronger regular season. In 2023, felt like this team as a whole had taken a significant step forward and that wasn't so much the case this past Saturday.
In our meet preview, we said that the biggest factor would be: “Can all of the Cavemen run well on the same day?" and ultimately, they couldn’t, or at least not as well as we thought they could have. Herriman simply proved to be the more consistent and prepared team.
Niwot definitely had the best day of any team’s on the guy’s side.
It’s not every day you see a team come in and finish in the top-five of the national meet after only finishing 4th at their regional meet. Shoutout to freshman Quinn Sullivan and sophomore Rocco Culpepper for preforming extremely well under the sport’s brightest lights, both finishing just inside the top-40.
To have an underdog team be led by two underclassmen who offered compact lead scoring is super impressive. But maybe more impressive is the fact that this team has two OTHER sophomores in their top-five. Gabe Marshall (83rd) and Hunter Robbie (106th) offered respectable scoring stability and junior Keegan Geldean (122nd) wasn't far behind.
So to summarize, the reason why Niwot's performance was so impressive isn't necessarily because they beat expectations, but more so because they did that with a VERY young and inexperienced group of scorers.
One other team that you could argue over performed their TSR ranking was Southlake Carroll.
I owe the Dragons an apology. I saw the ugly national meet performances of years past and combined with the incredibly muddy weather, I figured it wasn’t going to be a podium day for Southlake Carroll.
And, well, I got proven wrong.
Caden Leonard (21st) and Jude Alverez (48th) both ran phenomenally, but I was the most pleasantly surprised by junior Griffin Cords 69th place. I feel like he was the biggest factor in Southlake Carroll finishing on the podium, especially Zach Troutman and Blake Bullard finishing in the top-100 to significantly raise the floor of this program.
There’s one really obvious answer here. It has to be 4th place finisher: Austin Westfall (UT).
I’ve seen Westfall race a few times now. I thought he would be an All-American, but admittedly, I didn’t see him finishing inside the top-five. I’m very interested to see where Westfall commits to -- I’m sure BYU is in the conversation -- although I wouldn’t be shocked if he follows his former teammate, Tayson Echohawk, to Oregon.
I also know that Westfall has taken a visit to the University of Arizona. And after this weekend’s performance, I’m sure nearly every school in the country would love to have him, although the demand for his talents (as well as his opportunities to earn significant scholarship money) has seemingly just skyrocketed.
The second-best unsigned senior was Porter Middaugh (CO) who finished in 6th place, although truthfully, I don’t know how much performance that improved his stock. I feel like we all knew that he was legit after running a 14:38 (5k) at 4600 feet back in October.
Of course, finishing nine spots higher than where I thought he would be validates Middaugh's overall talent. It's one thing to run fast once, but to show up on a championship stage and validate your fitness with a star-caliber effort should only help his recruiting value.
One athlete who I feel has flown under the radar is senior James Partlow (MD). By finishing in 16th place on Saturday, Partlow was the third unsigned senior across the line. And truthfully, I’m surprised that Partlow hasn’t already (knowingly) been signed, especially considering that he ran a 14:47 (5k) PR in order to qualify for NXN.
My first takeaway is that the Southwest region is insanely loaded. But I’m going to go into a lot more depth on that in the girl's analysis
My second takeaway, and this may be a super hot take, is that it may be time to start rethinking if New York deserves its own region. It’s not a good look when the two strongest boys teams from the region both finish 20th and 22nd in a 22-team field.
New York also had the last place team during the 2022 NXN Championships as well as the 19th place team in 2019 (the meet didn't happen in 2020 or 2021).
Perhaps I am discounting the long history of strong teams from the Empire State. After all, certain programs like Manlius, Liverpool and Corning have often fared well at NXN, at least during the 2010s. Plus, there are probably other years you could point to where certain regions have struggled.
Even so, when it comes strictly to a competitive perspective, I'm not sure I can find the same justifications for New York to get its own region like I can for California.
Going into this past weekend, I thought the girl's individual national title battle was going to be a two-horse race. And truthfully, I severely underestimated what Ritzenhein was capable of.
Upon reflection, I don’t think I would’ve given her more than a 5% chance of winning and a lot of that could be attributed more to her youth and inexperience rather than anything talent related. However after Elizabeth Leachman started to fade, I wasn’t too surprised that Ritzenhein was able to pull away for the victory.
Ritzenhein has shown in the past the ability to really step on the gas and win by huge margins. Just look at this year's Desert Twilight XC Festival where she won by 47 seconds! Or the Colorado 4A XC State Championships where she won by 30 seconds! If you give her a gap, she'll take full advantage of it, and that's largely what happened on Saturday with 1k to go.
In other words, I’m definitely more surprised that Ritzenhein won the race rather than by how much she won by. Given her track record, she has shown that once she takes the lead, there’s no turning back.
For this conversation, I’m going to largely ignore the top runners, individual national champion Addison Ritzenhein (Niwot) and runner-up finisher Bethany Michalak (Air Academy), from each team. Those two women did everything that could have been asked of them and were by far the two best scoring athletes in the field.
In our preview, I noted that the performance of Air Academy junior Tessa Walter would be the biggest factor in how the team title race shook out. Well, sure enough, that was the case. Walter finished fourth scoring runner overall in Saturday’s race, taking 29th place.
Having a high-end low-stick scorer certainly gave the Kadets a significant chance to contend for gold and maybe even have a little wiggle room in their rest of their scoring pack.
But in the grand scheme of things, it was Air Academy freshman Mariah Hook who sealed the deal for the Kadets. After not scoring for Air Academy at the NXR Southwest meet, Hook had the race of her life to finish as ninth scoring runner, taking 36th place overall.
The breakout ultimately rookie gave Air Academy a lethal top trio and that was enough top-end scoring to separate Air Force from a Niwot squad that had a better backend, but not nearly by enough to secure gold.
Oh, for sure, it’s definitely fair to say that the North Allegheny girls (listed as Wexford) had the best race relative to expectations coming into this race.
Frankly, I don’t know where this amazing performance came from. North Allegheny had been good all season long, but they didn't produce anything which suggested that they could be a top-five team at the national meet. Big props to the twin sisters of Wren and Robin Kucler who both finished inside the top-30 scoring positions (and top-60 overall), giving the Tigers the score edge that they needed to truly stand out.
However, you could argue that the team's third and fourth scorers, Eva Kynaston and Erin McGoey, were just as impactful keeping top-four gaps very minimal. And despite a drop-off to the latter-half of this varsity group, it feels like those two support scorers allowed the low-stick scoring of the Kucler sisters to carry this team into the top-five.
One other team that had a great race was Assumption (KY) who finished in 7th place. I knew that University of Florida commit, Reagan Gilmore (30th overall), was the real deal, but it was the supporting cast that gave the Rockets the edge that they needed to outmatch opponents who weren't nearly as structurally sound.
Senior Julia Schmitt was phenomenal in 43rd place overall and junior Leah Penick was one of the best third scorers in the entire field, placing 70th overall! Congratulations to these ladies from Louisville.
I'm not sure that there are a ton of strong answers to this question. This was much less apparent in the girl's race than it was in the boy's race.
To be honest, I’m not shocked with any of the athletes who finished in the top-10. That being said, in future years, everyone should pay attention to Gianna Rahmer, the 8th grader from New Mexico. She finished an outstanding 6th place this past Saturday and will surely be a name to watch for years down the line. Of course, when you look at her unbeaten streaking coming into this past weekend, that's not exactly jaw-dropping or other-worldly shocking.
One runner whose been having a very nice progression in her high school career is senior Logan Hofstee (WA). Last year, she finished in 38th place at NXN, but improved to a 9th place finish this year!
Hofstee will be staying the Spokane Valley for college, competing for Gonzaga where she will be a great addition to a program that has seen respectable cross country success with certain individuals, specifically 2023 breakout star, Rosina Machu. And given a few of the other promising recruits that the Bulldogs have landed in recent years, it's hard to not be optimistic about the future of that program.
The Southwest region is so loaded it’s not even funny. And yes, as I mentioned above, I'm also going to bring the boy's teams into this conversation, as well as some results from the RunningLane XC National Championships.
We’ve seen two teams from the same region finish 1st and 2nd at the NXN Championships before (think the peak of the New York girl's domination). However, after some light browsing, I can't remember seeing a region be as dominant as the Southwest was this past Saturday.
The Southwest region had four teams advance to the national meet (the maximum amount of teams that a region is allowed to advance to NXN) and they proceeded to sweep the top-spots in the race! Not only that, but five of the top-10 individuals in the field all hail from the Southwest region.
And now allow me to channel my inner-Billy Mays: But wait, there's more!
Look at a squad like Fossil Ridge (CO). They just won the RunningLane XC National Championships, but were only able to manage 7th at the NXR Southwest meet. And when you are armed with that fact, it becomes painfully clear how much better the Southwest region is compared to the rest of the country.
If you pop over to the guys results, you'll see that the Southwest schools swept the top-two spots and put all four teams inside of the top-nine. Just absurd stuff.
So yeah, I’m willing to argue that this year’s Southwest region has been the strongest region in the history of NXN/NTN and it seems unlikely that we'll see a region have a better year of racing for quite some time.