Men's Cross Country Opens 2021 Season at Mark Covert Classic Saturday
CLAREMONT, Calif. - The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men's cross country team begins a promising 2021 season when it travels to compete in the Mark Covert Classic, hosted by Cal State Fullerton, on Saturday morning.
The Stags were last in action in 2019 when they finished sixth at the NCAA Division III Championships, which marked the second-highest finish in program history. CMS headed into that offseason optimistic that they had the potential for another strong finish in 2020, potentially even higher, but the season was wiped out due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A couple of the key top-seven runners that competed at nationals in 2019 as junior deferred their graduations in order to get their last season of competition, including senior Stevie Steinberg and senior Will Kimball, which makes the 2021 squad deeper and more talented than it otherwise would have been. The Stags did graduate Thomas D'Anieri after the 2019 season, when he won the SCIAC individual championship and finished third at nationals, but the rest of the core group was excited to step up and fill that void, looking at the 2020 campaign as a chance to challenge for the national title.
Seniors Kyril Van Schendel and Miles Christensen are also back from the top seven, along with juniors Henry Pick and Daniel Krasemann. Van Schendel and Christensen have been in the top four runners for the Stags since they arrived as first-years in 2018, while Pick had a key role in helping the Stags to the SCIAC team title in 2019 in his first year, finishing tenth to earn first-team all-league honors and give CMS the final point it needed to win the tiebreaker with Pomona-Pitzer. He even earned National USTFCCCA Runner of the Week honors for his efforts.
The Stags have a deep roster, though, with lots of talented new faces, which means that positions in the top seven aren't guaranteed for anyone heading into the new campaign. In fact, the team is deep enough that Evan Hassman, an All-American in track and field in the steeplechase as a sophomore, was outside the top seven in cross country that year. The team hopes that the stiff competition will push everyone to a higher level and get the program back to elite status again in 2021, after it left off that way in 2019.
Steinberg also feels that the success of 2019 squad still resonates with the program, despite the long layoff.
"I think it's definitely carried over a lot," he said. "We've kept a lot of our top returners, so we've got a lot of the same people who remember what exactly that race was like and exactly how close we were to a top-two finish. We realize we're competitve and strong, and we're hoping to make some noise at nationals again this year."
After competing in the Mark Covert Classic, the Stags will run in the UC Riverside Invitational on Sept. 18 and the CSU San Marcos Cougar Challenge on Sept. 25, before its biggest event of the regular season, the NCAA Pre-Nationals on Oct. 2, where they will compete on the same Louisville, Kentucky course at Sawyer State Park where the NCAA Championships will be held in November.