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Harvard’s men’s cross country team and the captain of the women’s team, Molly Malague, will advance to the NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships next weekend, following their qualifying performances on Friday at the Northeast Regional Championships.

The men secured an at-large bid to the national event after finishing in third place at the New Hampshire meet, just behind automatic qualifiers and top-two finishers Iona University and Syracuse University.

Malague, one of four individual regional qualifiers to the national race, finished in third. The women’s team finished seventh overall.

Men’s Cross Country

The Crimson was the only team to have two top-five finishers in Friday’s race, with junior captain Sam Burgess (29:18.6) and freshman Tam Gavenas (29.21.2) placing third and fifth, respectively. Junior Charlie Ortmans finished in 15th place (29:41.4).

Burgess, who was the only one on Friday’s lineup with experience at both regionals and nationals, has two NCAA Cross Country Championships appearances. The men typically run 8k races throughout the season, but the final two NCAA-level competitions are a 10k race format.

“We only have one person who had run the regionals prior to this week and ran a cross country 10k prior to this weekend,” Burgess said. “That considered, we wound up running alright, as a good first look at a cross country 10k for a lot of the guys, and then we’ll hopefully touch some things up next weekend and run pretty well.”

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Men’s cross country has qualified for the NCAA Cross Country Championships for six consecutive seasons, including two previous second-place finishes at the regional level.

Graham Blanks, a two-time NCAA Cross Country Champion and Team USA Olympian, graduated last year and is now a professional runner for New Balance. In Blanks’ absence, Harvard’s young team is adjusting to the rigor of competing on the NCAA stage. Out of seven runners on Friday, four were freshmen and six were without 10k experience.

In addition to missing Blanks, the team raced without three of its runners with 10k experience, as they were sidelined with injuries. Harvard was still able to notch a third-place finish, even without former top-10 regional placer and top-60 national finisher senior Shane Brosnan and junior Ferenc Kovacs, who finished third in the 1,500 meters at last year’s nationals for track and field.

“Third place in the region is not too bad, and it definitely sets up the confidence looking towards nationals next week,” Burgess explained. “We have four freshmen on our regionals and nationals group.”

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Gavenas, the 2024 Foot Lock Cross Country Champion, had already secured second-place at the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country Championships and All-Ivy First Team honors, positioning himself for a bright future in collegiate running.

“The freshmen run very mature for how young they really are compared to some of the guys that we run against,” Burgess said. “I don’t think the [experience] really affects our approach to nationals in any way, though. I think it’s just trying to be as confident as we are. We've done the training, we've run well, and it's putting it all out there on Saturday.”

Heading into the upcoming nationals race, the team’s goals include a top-20 placement and beating its Ivy League rival Princeton, which secured a first-place finish at the Ivy League conference meet. Several Harvard runners will also vie for a top-40 individual finish and All-American honors.

Harvard will strive to continue its history of success in the NCAA Cross Country Championship, after Blanks has won the last two individual titles and the team has recorded three top-20 finishes in the past four years.

Women’s Cross Country

Malague, a three-year veteran of the NCAA Cross Country Championships and Two-time All-Ivy First Team honoree, will be the only runner representing Harvard’s women’s cross country team in Columbia, Mo., next week.

The senior led the team in regionals with a time of 19:54.6, followed by freshman Dylan McElhinney’s 15th-place finish (20:23.5). Senior Penelope Salmon, a 2024 All-Ivy First Team selectee and sixth-place conference finisher, was out due to injury.

“I thought it went pretty well on the whole. We were missing one of our top teammates. She’s been banging up and out with injuries, so I think we knew that we would have to have a perfect day to get a team qualification for the NCAA [Cross Country] Championship,” Malague said.

“With that in mind, we just went out and tried to get the most out of ourselves individually, knowing that the bulk of the work was done in the months previous in training,” the Metuchen, N.J. native added. “We had to go out and see what we were capable of.”

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Malague sees this season as a representation of a “growing team,” following two consecutive appearances and top-30 finishes for the women at the NCAA Cross Country Championship. Similar to the men’s team, only some of the runners had previous regional and national experience.

“The bulk of our team graduated. So this year we've definitely been finding ourselves again, trying to find a new team identity, as our coach says,” Malague said. “ I think that this year wasn’t our best performance, because we’ve had a good string of getting to NCAA championships as a team recently. I'm sure in the coming years they’ll build back to that.”

Although the course will be unfamiliar at next week’s national race, Malague looks forward to her last race and seeing how she fairs against the best racers in the country.

“There’s a lot of potential, a lot of room to grow, and I think the team is going to do that growing,” Malague said. “Just watch out for the Crimson this year in the track seasons. I think the men will do really well next weekend. I’m just grateful to have been a part of the program.”

The NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships will take place next Saturday.