Men’s cross country has strong early season showing at Nuttycombe Invitational

The No. 18 men’s cross country team took to Madison, Wis. this past Friday to race in the Nuttycombe Invitational, one of the premier meets on the team’s calendar. The Tigers battled hot and sunny early season weather to come home with a solid ninth place finish out of 24 teams in a preliminary viewing of this November’s NCAA Championship venue. The Tigers’ ninth-place finish follows their first-place finish at the New Jersey Jam, though the Nuttycombe meet presented a far more challenging set of opponents for the Tigers, with 17 of the top 30 teams in attendance.

Despite being ninth overall, the Tigers were first among Mid-Atlantic teams, a promising sign as the top two teams from the region will return later this year.

It was a historically fast day on the grass as No. 6 UNC’s Parker Wolfe captured the individual title in a course record 23:04.0 performance over the eight-kilometer distance. The No. 2 BYU Cougars won the team contest in commanding fashion, notching 44 points, the third lowest total in meet history, with four of the first nine runners across the finish line representing the Navy and White.

The Tigers entered the meet favored eighth among the teams in the field and finished in ninth with 275 points, just one point back of No. 21 Colorado. While three other teams ranked behind Princeton placed higher than the Tigers, the team overcame Virginia, Portland, and Villanova — the three programs rated directly ahead of them in this week’s USTFCCCA coaches poll.

“The team is feeling really positive about the result,” junior Jackson Shorten wrote to The Daily Princetonian. “Our training has been relatively conservative up until this point in the season, so we weren't expecting to blow it out of the water. It was more about gaining experience and feeling what it feels like to run amongst the best teams in the country.”

Princeton was led by junior Myles Hogan who finished 26th out of 186 total racers in a time of 23:58.6. Three Tigers then crossed the line in quick succession, with Shorten clocking 24:09.4 for 43rd place, sophomore Weston Brown running 24:12.7 for 50th place in his 8k debut, and senior Daniel O’Brien finishing in 24:13.8 for 53rd. Senior Nicholas Bendtsen rounded out the Tigers’ scoring five in 103rd place with a time of 24:43.5.

Prior to the race, the Tigers were instructed by head coach Jason Vigilante to stay conservative early on and move up through the pack as the race progressed, a style of racing employed frequently in their successful 2023 campaign. Shorten noted to the ‘Prince’ that the team “seemed to execute this plan perfectly.”

A quarter of the way into the race, at the 2,000 meter split, the Tigers found themselves firmly in the back of the field, sitting in 22nd place as a team. At every subsequent 2,000 meter split, each of the team’s top four eventual finishers improved their position, with Hogan passing 92 runners in the final 6,000 meters, Brown overtaking 72, and O’Brien blowing by 68.

Shorten, who passed an astounding 96 competitors in this interval, relayed that this strategy personally “allowed [him] to feel in control the entire way” and gave him “targets to catch.” By the three-quarter mark of the race, Princeton had moved up 13 places as a team to ninth overall, and they held this position to the finish line. Shorten added that one success of this strategy is that his teammates were all executing the same race plan and could work together: “when we work together, we achieve great things.”

Princeton finished first on the day among teams from the Mid-Atlantic region, where they are currently ranked first, with Villanova and Georgetown, the two teams behind them, present. The two highest placing squads at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Championships late in the season will be back on the Thomas Zimmer Championship Course on Nov. 23, 2024, running for all of the glory at the NCAA Championships.

Should the Tigers take one of these spots or secure one of the thirteen at-large bids by committee decision, they will return to Madison with valuable experience gained from this meet. Shorten emphasized the importance of running the course now, which allowed the team to gain knowledge of how to run the tangents, take on the hills, and visualize where moves need to be made on the big stage.

“[Nationals] is where we want to be at our best, so any little thing we can do to ensure our success, we want to do.”