NEW HAVEN – The Yale women's cross country team heads to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, N.Y., for the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country Championships. The Bulldogs will face their seven Ivy rivals in a 6K race starting at 11:00 a.m.
Yale returns a pair of All-Ivy League runners from last year's edition of Heps, in which the Bulldogs finished third. Princeton is the defending champion.
USTFCCCA Regional Rankings
The Bulldogs enter the race ranked fifth in the Northeast Region in the USTFCCCA poll. Ivy League teams in the regional rankings include:
Northeast
- No. 3 Harvard
- No. 5 Yale
- No. 9 Cornell
- No. 10 Columbia
- No. 11 Brown
- No. 14 Dartmouth
Mid-Atlantic
- No. 5 Princeton
- No. 6 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 (21 nationally), Penn (48 nationally), Yale (69 nationally) and Harvard (76 nationally).
Top Finishers So Far This Year
- Senior Claire Archer has been the team's top finisher in seven straight races dating back to the start of last season. Last year at Heps she earned first team All-Ivy League honors for her fourth-place finish. Of the three runners who finished ahead of her at last year's race, only Princeton's Anna McNatt returns.
- Senior Charlotte Whitehurst has been Yale's No. 2 finisher in two races and No. 1 in one race. She was Yale's fourth finisher at Heps last year, finishing 30th overall.
- Junior Hebe Chadwick has been Yale's No. 3 finisher in two races and No. 2 in one race. She was ninth on the team and 60th overall last year at Heps.
- Senior Linde Fonville has been Yale's No. 4 finisher in two races and No. 6 in one race. She earned second team All-Ivy League recognition last year at Heps, placing second on the team and 10th overall.
- First-year Phoebe Benun has been Yale's No. 5 finisher in two races and No. 4 in one race.
- Junior Daniella Henderson has been Yale's No. 6 finisher in two races and No. 3 in one race. Last year at Heps she was No. 7 on the team and No. 50 overall.
- Sophomore Zoe Martonfi has been Yale's No. 7 finisher in two races and No. 5 in one race. She was Yale's 10th finisher at Heps last year.
- In Yale's three most recent races sophomore Sylvie Sanok Dufallo is the only other Bulldog to have cracked the team's top seven, doing so at the Paul Short Run.
Heps History
Yale's third-place finish at Heps last year tied for the Bulldogs' best finish since 2016 (when they finished second). The Bulldogs also finished third in 2017 and 2021.
As a team Yale has won six Heps Championships (1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 2000, 2001).
Yale's individual Heps Champions include:
- 1986 Kelly Groteke '87
- 1988 Sarah P. Smith '89
- 1998 Ariana Kelly '99
- 2001 Kate O'Neill '03
- 2002 Kate O'Neill '03
- 2006 Lindsay Donaldson '08
- 2018 Andrea Masterson '19
- 2019 Kayley DeLay '21
- 2021 Kayley DeLay '21
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.
