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TSR's 2024 Preseason D3 XC Top 10 Team Rankings (Women): #4 SUNY Geneseo Knights
- Gavin Struve
- Sep 10, 2024
- 6 min read
NOTE: Earlier this summer, The Stride Report reached out to nearly every team that was considered for a possible ranking this summer. While we did receive numerous responses and great clarity, we did not get a 100% response rate. On certain occasions, we are referencing TFFRS in order to talk about returners and athletes who are out of eligibility.
SUNY Geneseo has finished crushingly close to the podium each of the past two seasons, placing 5th in both 2022 and 2023 (you don't have to feel too bad, they finished 3rd at the 2021 NCAA XC Championships). They actually exceeded our expectations last season, but won't need to do so to reach elite status in 2024.
That's because with five of their top-six runners from 2023 back, including our TSR #1 runner in our preseason individual rankings, we expect the Knights to be a top-five team for the fourth season in a row.
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The SUNY Geneseo women opened their 2023 cross country campaign at an in-state meet without too many teams at their level, finishing runner-up behind only Division One Cornell as Rachel Hirschkind, Penelope Greene and Lilly Fowler-Conner all finished in the top-eight.
Those women also comprised the Knights' top-three in the Paul Short "Gold" race, where they topped fellow Division Three programs like Johns Hopkins and UW-La Crosse.
Next came their home meet: the SUNY Geneseo Mike Woods Invitational, which was probably their biggest test of the regular season because of the stout D3 opposition they would face.
Greene won the meet ahead of superstar adversary Sara Stephenson, and Hirschkind was close behind in 3rd place. Six other Knights packed the top-30, including Fowler-Conner and Kaitlyn Grossman in the top-20. Those women offered solid scoring support, but there was too big of a gap between them and this team's top-two to claim the team title.
Instead, SUNY Geneseo finished as runner-up on their home course behind eventual national champion Carleton, but they still comfortably beat strong teams like Lynchburg and Johns Hopkins.
The Knights predictably dominated the SUNYAC XC Championships, sweeping the top-nine (!) spots in an effort led by Greene. It was a similar story at the Niagara Regional XC Championships, where Greene, Hirschkind, Fowler-Conner and Grossman took the top-four spots in that order.
On the national stage, Greene more than lived up to the outsized expectations she had set for herself by thriving all season. She earned individual bronze, giving her Knights a better lead scorer than any of the top-three teams could boast, and Hirschkind (24th) was stellar as well.
The women of Geneseo, New York were tied for 3rd place through two scorers. While their lineup didn't fall apart from there, the same gap that we saw at their home meet showed up again. Fowler-Conner was a perfectly respectable third scorer, delivering one of the better races of her career to finish 56th.
Grossman was close behind in 69th place, although with Sierra Doody back in 120th as the fifth scorer, the Knights had neither enough firepower nor a compact enough scoring structure to get back onto the podium.
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Aside from the fact that they didn't nab a top-four team finish in the end, the 2023 cross country season was still a success for this squad. With virtually unrivaled levels of retention, SUNY Geneseo is perhaps the best-positioned team to move onto the podium in 2024 among those who didn't reach it last fall.
The only departure from their scoring contingent is a sizable one: Rachel Hirschkind. After finally finding her groove on the grass last fall, the three-time steeplechase All-American has transferred west to Buffalo.
That's a hard loss to stomach, sure, but it's made far more palatable by the fact that her former team returns its focal star and another All-American candidate or two beyond her.
SUNY Geneseo's sun rises and sets with Penelope Greene. She was a four-time top-eight national meet finisher last academic year alone after entering 2023-24 without any All-American accolades.
Now, she's a slight favorite to win the individual national title in two and a half months. Greene won all three meets that she contested against only D3 competition leading up to the national meet last fall, and we expect her to continue that trend this season.
Lilly Fowler-Conner could be primed to fill Hirschkind's shoes as the Knights' second star. She was already on the verge of low-stick status in 2023 when she was consistently their third runner. Fowler-Conner didn't quite reach any national meets on the track, but she ran competitive and encouraging PRs of 17:20 (5k) and 35:41 (10k).
After improving from the top-100 at the 2022 NCAA XC Championships to nearly the top-50 last year, we think that Fowler-Conner could be on the verge of the top-30 this fall.
Kaitlyn Grossman may not be far behind. She emerged as a key fourth scorer in 2023 and should naturally step up into a connective middle-lineup role in her senior season.
Then there's Sierra Doody, who was better in the fall of 2022 than she was last year. She was still a solid fifth scorer at the end of last year, but matching or building upon her 2022 form (when she placed 93rd at the national meet) would fortify the Knights' middle-lineup scoring enough to make them podium favorites. Instead, they settled for 5th place.
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We should note that SUNY Geneseo has one other varsity departure beyond Hirschkind: Katherine Vogel, who was their seventh runner and the 170th-place finisher at the national meet last fall.
In theory, Vogel wouldn't have factored in as a scorer this season since five of the returnees were solidly ahead of her. With a few more solid options in reserve, the Knights should still be relatively deep even with two lineup losses.
The fifth and final returner from the Knights' 2023 NCAA XC Championships group is Ann Brennan, who placed a respectable 138th on the national stage. She fared pretty well in her second collegiate cross country season (and first as a member of her team's top-seven).
If Brennan can build upon her 2023 finish in what will be her second national meet appearance and close out the scoring lineup slightly quicker than Doody did last year, then this team may not have any imperfections in its top-five.
Of course, there's always the possibility that a team's lineup doesn't shake out exactly how we expect it to. The Knights appear to have a relatively defined top-five among their returners, but injuries, illnesses and "off" days (while we wish they didn't exist) are part and parcel of the cross country season.
Fortunately, we think SUNY Geneseo's reserves are up to snuff.
Jillian O'Rourke placed 9th at the SUNYAC XC Championships as a freshman last year (making her the Knights' sixth returner from that meet) to finish just seconds ahead of a top-50 national meet finisher in Oneonta's Megan Francoeur. She then went on to win conference bronze in the 3000-meter steeplechase ahead of Grossman in the spring.
We expect O'Rourke to fill one of the two open varsity positions. Gabby McCarthy could figure into SUNY Geneseo's top-seven as well. Her PRs -- 10:09 (3k) and 17:27 (5k) -- are very competitive. The catch, however, is that she ran them in 2023 and wasn't particularly close to matching them this past academic year after not being much of a factor last fall.
If nothing else, we know that the talent is there for McCarthy as a rising senior.
A younger option is Ari Reback, a freshman who comes to SUNY Geneseo with personal bests of 4:46 (1500) and 10:13 (3k), which should make her immediately competitive on the track as a collegian. And what about on the cross country course? Well, an 18:44 (5k XC) personal best suggests that this in-state signee will be competitive early on, perhaps in a similar vein to O'Rourke.
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For as good as Hirschkind was last fall, SUNY Geneseo enters the 2024 cross country season with more certainty in the front-half of its lineup. Consider that neither Hirschkind nor Greene had been cross country All-Americans before 2023.
Beyond Greene, it feels far more likely than not that one of Fowler-Conner or Grossman will finish as a top-40 runner this season, while Doody and Brennan represent better backend scorers than most teams can boast.
Between their breadth of firepower, middle-lineup scoring, backend support, lineup cohesiveness and overall depth, this squad feels very good, but not necessarily great, in every area. After all, they return five women who finished in the top-140 at the 2023 cross country meet but just one of whom was an All-American.
Minor improvements from each member of the scoring contingent should be enough to bump the Knights one spot up the team standings at the 2024 NCAA XC Championships.
Coach Dan Moore's squad has far more answers than questions, and while a run at a national title feels like a bit of a stretch, we think that the Knights appear primed to get back to the podium in 2024 after back-to-back seasons in that dreaded, but still elite, status of "first team out."
