Fields set for NXN Nationals and solidifying for Foot Locker Nationals; Grevious dominates NXN Northeast, while Colorado's Meineke qualifies for both finals
The U.S. prep cross-country season has grown exceptionally long and branching for exceptional runners
The Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) series for American high-school cross-country runners, which emphasizes team competition, was instated in 2004 and includes nine regional championships for boys and girls and one national championship held one to three weeks later, with the interval between races depending on a runner’s home base. Three of the 2023 NXN regional meets (Northwest, Heartland, and Midwest) were held two weekends ago, three (Southwest, South, and Southeast) were held last weekend, and three (Northeast, New York, and California*) were held this past weekend. NXN Nationals are scheduled for next Saturday (December 2) in Portland, Oregon.
The Foot Locker Cross Country series for the same demographic, which began in 1979 under the banner of Kinney Shoes, is for individuals only and includes four regional championships and a national championship staged either one or two weeks later, again depending on where a given runner lives. The Foot Locker Northeast, Midwest, and South regional races were held this weekend, while the West regional championships are next Saturday and Foot Locker Nationals set for December 9 in Balboa Park in San Diego.
Two teams and five individuals not on qualifying teams automatically qualify for NXN Nationals from each of the nine regions, with four at-large teams and five at-large individuals added to the mix at the discretion of a panel of carefully chosen and frequently drug-tested judges. This means, in theory, annual NXN Nationals fields of 22 teams and 50 individuals for boys and girls. Those fields are now set.
The top ten individuals from each of the four Foot Locker regional races qualify for Nationals. Therefore, three-fourths of the boys’ and girls’ San Diego-bound fields have been filled. (The average gap between the winner and the 10th-place runner in the three completed girls’ Foot Locker regional races was 48 seconds, while the corresponding average for the three boys’ races was 23 seconds. It’s typically far lonelier at the top for elite female runners than it is for elite males no matter the level of competition, be it high-school, collegiate, or professional.)
California, being a bloated mess in every respect, didn’t even have its state championship races until Saturday. This is the reason for the asterisk in the opening paragraph: The CIF State XC Championships function as an NXN regional meet, with the two fastest boys’ and girls’ teams and five fastest individuals from the state’s five divisional championships automatically ladvancing to Portland.
Meanwhile, New York and Massachusetts wait almost as long as California to hold their state championship meets, opting for what appears to be the third Saturday every November. That was last weekend, pushing the NXN meets for kids in the New York and Northeast regions forward to this past weekend, thereby making these races coincide with the Foot Locker Northeast Championships.
The upshot of these scheduling vagaries is that kids who live in Foot Locker West states, New York, or any of the states in NXN Northeast territory don’t have the have the opportunity to advance to both NXN Nationals and Foot Locker Nationals in the same season. Kids elsewhere have a path through both series that allows them to compete in that order in both national high-school cross-country finals on the first two Saturdays in December.
Apart from these restrictions, not many kids have the talent to qualify for either NXN Nationals or Foot Locker Nationals, so by definition the pool of kids with a shot at reaching both is even smaller. And within this minuscule pool, few runners are inspired, or advised, to even try. But Payton Mieneke of Thornton, Colorado has qualified for both races this fall, though she had to run the second of her regional qualifying races before learning the first one had already extended her season into next month.
Adding together “NXN California” and the states in the NXN Northwest and Southwest regions results in the states in Foot Locker West region, with one exception: Colorado, which is curiously included in the Foot Locker Midwest region. This means that kids who live in Grand Junction, Colorado, which is practically in Utah, are in the same Foot Locker region as kids who live 1,630 miles away in Ashtabula, Ohio, a city close to the Pennsylvania border.
Meineke, a sophomore who attends Riverdale Ridge High School, raced in the NXN Southwest Championships last weekend in Mesa, Arizona. She placed eighth, with two of the runners ahead of her on teams that gained automatic berths to Portland. That means she was sixth among individuals, missing an automatic qualifying spot for NXN Nationals by one place (and 2.57 seconds).
NXN Southwest is an exceptionally strong region, and there was a good chance Meineke would be selected for an at-large Nationals spot. But this wouldn’t be known until after Saturday’s NXN-like races in California and NXN New York and NXN Northeast races, both held in Wappingers Falls, New York. I have no idea if this fed her motivation to enter the Foot Locker Midwest Regional Championships on Saturday, but thanks to Colorado being a part of that affair, she could, and she did. She wound up placing sixth at the FL Midwest race in Kenosha, Wisconsin, earning her a trip to San Diego along with fellow Coloradan and seventh-placer Emily Cohen of Cherry Creek High School, who had been 17th at NXN Southwest a week earlier.
That evening, whoever maintains the NXN site uploaded the list of at-large qualifiers, Meineke was among the five girls who had been chosen for an individual spot in Portland.
Also on the Front Range front, Benjamin Anderson of Mountain Vista High School, who had been 41st at NXN Southwest, and Matthew Edwards of The Classical Academy, who’d finished 30th in Mesa, also earned trips to San Diego in Wisconsin on Saturday by placing seventh and tenth respectively.
These were great rebound efforts by Cohen, Anderson, and Edwards, but their placings also suggest that the Foot Locker series is no longer the default national-championship cross-country path even for individuals on non-elite teams.
A similar situation emerged on the East Coast, because summing together the states in the NXN New York and Northeast regions almost, but not quite, results in the same list of states included in the Foot Locker Northeast region. The difference is that Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia are Foot Locker Northeast zones, but kids there compete in the NXN Southeast region. This means that kids from these places, unlike those from New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England, have the chance to reach both national-level championships.
At least one girl tried. At the NXN Southeast Regional Championships last weekend in Cary, North Carolina, Brynn Crandell, a senior at Indian River High School in Dagsboro, Delaware, placed ninth overall, with only one girl ahead of her on a team that qualified for NXN Nationals. On Saturday, she headed to Franklin Park in Boston for the Foot Locker Northeast Region Championships and secured eighth place, punching her ticket to Balboa Park in two weeks.
I’m interested to see how Byron Grevious, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, fares against more highly rated public-school competition in Portland. He won the NXN Northeast race with startling ease, winding up 21 seconds in front of New England Championships winner and third-place finisher Steven Hergenrother of Ridgefield, Connecticut. Ridgefield wound up third, one spot away from qualifying for NXN Nationals. But as I expected, at least on Saturday, they proved to be a better team than Brookline, Massachusetts, which went in ranked slightly ahead of Ridgefield per Dyestat’s national rankings but wound up 44 points behind the Tigers in fourth in Wappingers Falls. Meanwhile, the boys of Niwot High School of Colorado, ranked just behind both of these teams, were granted one of the four at-large team berths in Portland after placing fourth at the NXN Southwest meet last weekend.
This means that Colorado will have three of the 22 girls’ teams on the line next Saturday in Oregon, while the advancement of the Niwot boys means that both the boys’ and girls’ Cougar teams will be on the line in Portland.
New Hampshire’s Haley Kavanagh, a junior at Oyster River High School, will be the Granite State’s only set of legs in either Portland or San Diego this fall. This is typical, as New Hampshire has only 1.4 million people and most of them would rather shoot at moose and go bass-fishing and snowmobiling—even in the summer—than run, except for when Fish and Game officials are patrolling the area.
But almost twenty-nine years ago, a very strange thing happened at the Foot Locker National Championships. Two runners and friends from neighboring towns in New Hampshire who had noisily escalated their already superheated in-state rivalry beyond New Hampshire’s borders at the New Englands and Foot Locker Northeast meets—Matt Downin of Pinkerton Academy and John Mortimer of Londonderry High School—placed first and second in San Diego.
