TSR Collaboration
Nov 26, 202211 min
Written by Kevin Fischer, Hannah Thorn & Brett Haffner
Additional edits and commentary by John Cusick and Garrett Zatlin
NOTE: These rankings are based on how an individual fared throughout the entirety of a season, not just how they ran at the NCAA XC Championships or at a singular meet. You will notice that these rankings may mirror the national meet results, but not precisely. That is intentional. These rankings are intended to be an aggregate, not a recency list.
Was not ranked in our last update.
First number indicates how much the team has moved in the rankings.
The second number indicates where the team was ranked in our last update.
In what was only Connecticut College's second-ever team appearance at the NCAA XC Championships, Matt Carter led the Camels with a very solid 19th place finish last weekend.
Despite having raced at multiple national meets in both cross country and track, this was Carter's first time achieving All-American honors -- and deservedly so. Carter had been quietly stacking excellent result after excellent this fall, ultimately delivering a top finish to validate a season where it feels like he truly reached a new level.
He does drop a few spots backwards in our rankings due to some guys beating him who were originally listed behind him, but Saturday's effort wasn't a bad performance by any means and his season as a whole was one to be proud of.
Matthew Kearney closed out a very consistent fall campaign with a huge 14th place finish at the national meet which contributed to MIT lifting the team trophy.
The Rhodes Scholar has progressed on his national meet performances on the grass throughout his career. He's gone from placing 83rd in 2019, to 28th in 2021, to now 14th in 2022. He is clearly making significant strides which each passing year which makes him worthy of being in our top-20 to finish the season.
His career on the oval has been a little up and down, but Kearney appears to have found true consistency this cross country season. As a result, he should have a lot of confidence going into the winter months as he is clearly getting better with age.
Will Kelly is someone who has looked pretty darn good all year long, but he never quite had enough on his resume to truly be ranked as one of the best of the best.
His biggest test of the regular season came at the Connecticut College Invite where he finished 11th. From there, he placed 6th in a solid field at the North Regional XC Championships.
However, Kelly's 13th place finish at the NCAA XC Championships last Saturday was just on a different level than anything that he's done before, so it came as a bit of a pleasant surprise.
It's safe to say that Kelly used the tough, wintery conditions to his advantage and showed up when it mattered the most. Either he has a true clutch gene, he peaked in time for the postseason or both.
Isaac Wegner moved in and out of our top-20 individual rankings multiple times this season and we recognized him as an elite second scorer behind Ethan Gregg.
At the national meet, we expected a huge jump from Wegner after he placed 67th at the 2021 NCAA XC Championships. And sure enough, he more than delivered on those expectations, finishing a highly impressive 12th overall.
Wegner has made the necessary strides to improve within Division Three this fall and that was showcased at the national meet. While there are some athletes who are better than him right now, he's on the right track to change that narrative heading into the winter track season.
There were a lot of surprising results last weekend, but seeing Haverford star Ryan Kredell finishing 17th on Saturday was not one of them.
Kredell finished 9th at the Connecticut College Invite in a very strong field. He then parlayed that result into two wins at the Centennial Conference XC Championships and the Metro Regional XC Championships, two admittedly lay up races for someone of his caliber.
At the NCAA XC Championships, we saw Kredell back up his strong racing from earlier this season, although he clearly delivered his best performance of the season on the nation's biggest stage. He proved that he can perform in high-pressure situations and has become one of the most consistent runners in the country.
On a day where Pomona-Pitzer struggled mightily as a whole, Lucas Florsheim held on at least well enough to finish 16th overall.
Even so, after his performances at the Augustana Interregional Invitational, the SCIAC XC Championships and the West Regional XC Championships, there was an indication that he could reasonably be expected to finish in the top-10.
Based on those expectations coming into last weekend, a 16th place finish is a little underwhelming, but what he accomplished throughout the season should still be recognized in our final rankings.
Simon Heys stays put in our final rankings after finishing 15th at the national meet. The Wilmington veteran placed 5th overall at the national meet last year, so on the surface, it may seem a bit disappointing that he dropped 10 spots in this year's edition of the race.
But when you consider how many people fell victim to the conditions, avoiding catastrophe and almost matching his ranking should be considered a success in our book.
Heys' consistency throughout the season was some of the best that we saw from the top athletes in Division Three. Before the NCAA XC Championships, we never saw Heys finish worse than 5th place in any race he toed the line at -- and he did not have an easy schedule!
Despite the 15th place national meet finish this year, we can leave this season feeling confident that Heys is one of the more reliable upper-echelon distance talents in the country who can produce top results regardless of the setting that he's in.
As a solid culmination of his breakout season, Cory Kennedy earned his first All-American honors by taking 20th place at the national meet this past weekend.
Even though he has been ranked higher throughout the season, we would call this result a solid performance from Kennedy who’s been “on” and “off” between races this year. And on Saturday, Kennedy only finished 11 seconds behind teammate Matthew Lecky, filling his role as RPI’s secondary low-stick.
This was a massive improvement from his placement at last year’s national meet, where he took a whopping 214th place overall -- not a bad jump in a year’s span!
Of course, the greater development was seeing how Kennedy has evolved over the entirety of this fall. He caught fire midway through the season and was able to ride that momentum through the end of the season.
We’ll be honest, we didn't see this coming at all.
Fellow D3 contributor Kevin Fischer was the only one on our TSR staff to predict that Logan Bocovich would even to earn All-American honors (he predicted him to place 35th overall, to be precise). But then the Saint Olaf ace goes out to the national meet, mixes it up with the main pack and gets 8th place overall.
8th place!
Where did that come from???
After placing 8th at the Connecticut College Invite, 3rd at the MIAC XC Championships and 5th at the North Regional XC Championships, Bocovich's resume, in retrospect, did seem to be an All-American-caliber collection of results. However, that was certainly not the kind of resume that we expected to see from a top-10 finisher at the national meet.
When you consider that Bocovich has been racing for St. Olaf, maybe the brutal midwest conditions truly played out to his advantage. The Minnesota environment that he trains in certainly set him up well for snow and cold like the field that we saw at the national meet.
Ultimately, Bocovich earned this ranking fair and square with an outstanding and heroic performance for the Oles.
After some inconsistency shown in his conference meet blow up, Spencer Moon revalidated his distance running prowess with a very respectable 10th place finish at the national meet.
Moon is one of the few guys on this list who mixed it up with the best names of Division Three in the first-half of the national meet last Saturday and then paid the price for it, albeit only by a small margin, as he still hung on for 10th.
Regardless, last weekend's performance was still miles better than his 118th place finish at the 2021 national meet and it's a good indicator that he’s still a top talent, even with some slight inconsistency this fall.
Boasting one of the biggest over performances of the meet, Ryan Wilson completely annihilated expectations to finish 5th overall, helping lead MIT to their national team title.
His regular season performances and general postseason “clutch” value might have pointed towards a higher-end All-American finish, but we could not have predicted this performance from Wilson in the slightest.
We can no longer call him just an 800 meter specialist anymore. Wilson is truly a guy who can thrive on the national level regardless of the setting and regardless of the season.
If anything, this should serve as a huge confidence boost before we see some excellent exploits from Wilson in the middle distance events on the track.
Sliding Tyler Morris down four spots might seem like a bit much, but a combination of his lukewarm national meet performance and some other guys moving up puts him at TSR #9, a ranking that matches his national meet finish.
For someone who we expected to mix it up with the leaders, Morris was ultimately outside the top-10 for nearly the whole race, but a strong last kilometer moved him up from 13th place at 7k to 9th place at the finish line.
We wouldn’t call this a bad performance from the Colby star, but his 5th place performance at the 2021 national meet forces us to classify his 2022 result as “lukewarm”.
It’s a little hard to dislike Matthew Lecky’s 11th place performance at the national meet. While it’s likely that he could have finished slightly higher up last Saturday, would his absolute best possible result been that much higher? No, probably not.
Last weekend was a really nice improvement from Lecky's 38th place finish at the 2021 NCAA XC Championships and a clear extension of his breakout season on the track from earlier in this calendar year.
It would have been nice to see RPI finish a little higher as a team, but Lecky did exactly what he needed to do -- be a reputable low-stick to help his team. And for the most part, we saw that from him throughout this entire season.
In fact, his win at Rowan, 61st place finish in the "Gold" race at Paul Short and runner-up result at the Siena Invitational are all reasons why Lecky outranks his national meet finish.
Given the opportunity to race a deeper field of competition, we saw Nick Andrews deliver in a huge way, finishing 6th place overall last Saturday, a huge improvement over his 39th place All-American finish in 2021.
To make matters even better, Andrews served as a top-notch low-stick for the Knights, a team that came away with an unreal 3rd place team finish after not even being ranked inside our top-10 before the national meet.
Andrews’ performance was a clear indicator of where he stands among the D3 ranks and putting him at TSR #7 feels just right to match his level of performance. His overall seasonal resume, in retrospect, was also really undervalued given his runner-up finish at Rowan and the Mike Woods Invite as well as his 17th place finish at the MSU Spartan Invitational.
MIT didn’t necessarily need to have a true low-stick to bring home a national team title as their pack-running tactics in previous races proved to be quite effective and plenty successful.
However, MIT got an unbelievable low-stick result in Sam Acquaviva (as well as a second low-stick in Ryan Wilson) as he finished an incredible 3rd place overall, giving the Engineers a brilliant first scorer to lead their team to NCAA gold.
Again, very similar to Wilson, there wasn’t a lot that we had seen from Acquaviva, on paper, that would have pointed to him exceeding expectations by this magnitude. And yet, the Engineer star simply went out and executed at the highest level, far beyond what we thought his ceiling was.
With all of this success on the grass between this fall and 2021, where will Acquaviva excel on the track? That’s a question that we’re very curious to find out the answer to.
Behind Alex Phillip, it’s been pretty evident throughout this season that Elias Lindgren is one of the best names in Division Three and arguably the second-best overall. However, that said, his national meet performance left a lot to be desired, as a grueling 3:54 final kilometer left him fading to 21st place after a late-race surge to the lead.
However, Lindgren displayed the confidence and guts to try and break the field open and give himself a shot to win the national meet. He ran very true to how we know him to be: gutsy as ever.
And for that reason, we opted to keep the Williams star inside our top-five.
On a day where everything clicks, we might have seen one of Lindgren’s bold and gutsy moves pay off in a national meet setting.
While finishing 7th at the national meet isn’t a bad performance, we expected Chris Collet to compete a little closer to the front in this race.
His highest placement at any split point was 7th, maintaining the same position pretty much from start to finish throughout the race, but not challenging the top group which is unlike what we’ve seen from him before.
However, the key point to highlight here is that this was Collet’s first All-American honor in cross country, having placed 130th in 2019 and 80th in 2021. With that in mind, we wouldn’t call this performance a bad one by any means.
We just thought his dominance throughout this season would lead to a top-five result, especially given that he won the Augustana Interregional Invitational earlier this year.
Running from the front like the true grinder that he is, Ethan Gregg finishing 4th at the national meet feels just about right considering that he was ranked at TSR #4 going into last weekend.
While the speed of Phillip and Patzka may have been too much for Gregg to handle over the final kilometer, the UW-La Crosse star was still able to hang on to a finish that was better than his 11th place result at last year’s national meet.
It’s clear that Gregg has inserted himself into the top tier of Division Three runners in the 2022 season and this breakout year bodes well for his future seasons in the NCAA. He was a different (and better) runner from day one of this season and leaned heavily on his raw fitness throughout the entirety of this year.
We had a feeling that if the individual national title came down to a kick, that Christian Patzka could potentially outperform his previous TSR #7 ranking.
An when the race was all said and done, Patzka gave Phillip a legitimate run for his money, finishing three seconds behind him while emerging as the national meet runner-up. For only being a sophomore, Patzka has some seriously savvy racing tactics on national stages, finishing runner-up in both the steeplechase and now cross country.
With guys like Phillip and Lindgren finishing up their time in Division Three after this academic year, the pathway for Patzka to become Division Three’s next big star is wide open.
The future is looking very bright for the UW-Whitewater ace.
Another season, another national title for Alex Phillip.
Phillip is probably the most dominant men's long distance figure in the NCAA right now, regardless of division, when it comes to winning national titles.
When you include his national meet results from last year and this year for cross country and track, Phillip has won FIVE national championship races in six attempts. His only loss came from the outdoor national meet in the 5000 meters in which he took 8th.
His 2022 campaign was no short of impressive, but ultimately not surprising, from the John Carroll star who has established his reign as “King Phillip” of Division Three distance running.
Not losing to any Division Three opponents, pulling away from the field last Saturday and continuing to win at a high level keeps Phillip at the top of our TSR rankings for the second year in a row.
Ryan Wilson (MIT)
Logan Bocovich (St. Olaf)
Will Kelly (St. Olaf)
Matthew Kearney (MIT)
Braden Nicholson (North Central)
Grahm Tuohy-Gaydos (Williams)
Connor Riss (North Central)
Gunner Schlender (UW-Whitewater)
Braden Nicholson (North Central)
Grahm Tuohy-Gaydos (Williams)
Connor Riss (North Central)
Gunner Schlender (UW-Whitewater)
Scott Sikorski (Rochester)
Derek Fearon (Pomona-Pitzer)
Gavin McElhennon (Johns Hopkins)
Colin Kirkpatrick (Pomona-Pitzer)
Jacob Green (Wartburg)
John Lucey (Williams)
Joe Backus (John Carroll)
Ezra Ruggles (SUNY Geneseo)
Andrew Mah (MIT)
Spencer Schultz (UW-Stout)