NEW YORK – The Yale men's cross country team heads to Van Cortlandt Park for the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country Championships on Friday. The Bulldogs will face their seven Ivy foes in an 8K race starting at 12:00 p.m.
Yale returns three of its top four finishers from last year's edition of Heps, in which the Bulldogs finished fifth. Princeton is the defending champion.
USTFCCCA Regional Rankings
The Bulldogs enter the race ranked fourth in the Northeast Region in the USTFCCCA poll. Ivy League teams in the regional rankings include:
Northeast
- No. 2 Harvard (No. 21 nationally)
- No. 4 Yale
- No. 9 Cornell
- No. 12 Columbia
- No. 13 Dartmouth
- NR Brown
Mid-Atlantic
- No. 1 Princeton (No. 19 nationally)
- No. 9 Penn
USTFCCCA XCRI
New for 2025, the USTFCCCA has developed the
Cross Country Ratings Index (XCRI) – a comprehensive ranking system that evaluates athletes based on head-to-head race results and strength of schedule. Rankings are based solely on current season performances and are objective and deterministic (no simulations used). In those rankings, the top Ivy teams are Princeton (13 nationally), Harvard (40 nationally), Yale (74 nationally) and Cornell (77 nationally).
Top Finishers So Far This Year
- Senior Owen Karas has been Yale's top finisher in both races he has run this year. He was Yale's No. 2 finisher at Heps last year, placing 18th overall.
- Senior Kenan Pala has finished among the Bulldogs' top three six times in the last seven races dating back to last year, and has been Yale's No. 2 finisher in all three races this fall. He was the Bulldogs' third finisher at Heps last year, 20th overall.
- Junior Daegan Cutter has finished as Yale's No. 3 runner twice and No. 1 once this fall. Last year at Heps he was the Bulldogs' fourth finisher, 30th overall.
- Senior Braden King, Yale's captain, has been the team's No. 4 finisher in both races he has run this year. Last year at Heps he was the Bulldogs' seventh finisher, 39th overall.
- Junior Guy Stevens has been Yale's No. 3 finisher once, Yale's No. 5 finisher once and Yale's No. 6 finisher once. Those were the first three cross country races of his Yale career.
- Sophomore Lucas Cohen has been Yale's No. 5 finisher twice and No. 6 once. Last year at Heps he placed 10th on the team and 52nd overall.
- Five other Bulldogs have cracked the team's top seven at various points this year: senior Alex Mader (No. 4 at the Iona Meet of Champions), junior Brian Gamble (No. 7 at the Iona Meet of Champions), sophomores Matthew Schutzbank (No. 7 at the Paul Short Run) and Seb Sutch (No. 6 at the Iona Meet of Champions) and first-year Magnus Manley (No. 7 at the Princeton Fall Classic). Schutzbank was the team's 11th finisher at Heps last year.
History
Yale's best finishes in the last 10 editions of Heps were third place in 2015 and fourth place in 2023.
As a team Yale has won one Heps Championship (1942) and three Ivy League Championships (1958, 1959, 1960).
Yale's individual Heps Champions include:
- 1942 LeRoy Schwarzkopf '44
- 1989 Jim Gibson '90
- 2016 James Randon '17
NCAA Regionals and NCAA Championships
- Yale will compete at the NCAA Northeast Regionals on Friday, Nov. 14 at Hopkinton State Fairgrounds in Contoocook, N.H. The Bulldogs placed 11th at Regionals last year.
- NCAA Championships selections will be announced by 5:00 p.m. ET Saturday, Nov. 15 on ncaa.com.
- The NCAA Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships provide for a maximum of 32 (five-to-seven-person) teams and 38 individuals per gender.
- Eighteen teams automatically qualify for the championships races by finishing as one of the top two teams at any of the nine regional races.
- The remaining 14 at-large teams are selected by the NCAA Division I Cross Country Subcommittee.
- Thirty-six individuals automatically qualify for the championships races by being one of the top four regional finishers not on an advancing team.
- Two additional individuals are selected at-large by the committee.
