Titans To Make 24th NCAA Championship Appearance
Attention-grabbing results throughout the 2021 season earned UW-Oshkosh one of 22 at-large selections into the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III Men's Cross Country Championship that will be held Saturday (Nov. 20) in Louisville, Ky.
A total of 32 seven-person teams, along with 70 additional individual qualifiers, will compete in an 8,000-meter race that starts at 11 a.m. (EST) from E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park.
Joining UW-Oshkosh as an at-large qualifier for the Division III Championship are Amherst College (Mass.), Bates College (Maine), Calvin University (Mich.), Case Western Reserve University (Ohio), Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges (Calif.), Colby College (Maine), Johns Hopkins University (Md.), Loras College (Iowa), Middlebury College (Vt.), North Central College (Ill.), Otterbein University (Ohio), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (N.Y.), St. Olaf College (Minn.), Tufts University (Mass.), University of Chicago (Ill.), University of Lynchburg College (Va.), UW-Eau Claire, UW-La Crosse, Washington University in St. Louis (Mo.), Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Mass.), and Vassar College (N.Y.).
Programs receiving an automatic berth into the Division III Championship after winning one of the 10 regionals held last Saturday (Nov. 13) were Carnegie Mellon University (Pa.) from the Mid-Atlantic, Emory University (Ga.) from the South, State University of New York at Geneseo from the Niagara, Haverford College (Pa.) from the Metro, John Carroll University (Ohio) from the Great Lakes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the East, Pomona-Pitzer Colleges (Calif.) from the West, Wartburg College (Iowa) from the Midwest, Williams College (Mass.) from the Mideast, and UW-Whitewater from the North.
UW-Oshkosh enters Saturday's meet ranked 19th nationally by the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association. The top-ranked team in team in the country is Wartburg College.
UW-Oshkosh will be appearing at the Division III Championship for the 24th time and first since 2015 when it placed 13th. The Titans have 15 top-10 finishes on their resume, including first-place listings in 1988, 1989, 1990 and 2002. UW-Oshkosh finished third at the national meet in 1987, 1991 and 2000; fourth in 1996; and fifth in 2011.
The Titans sealed their at-large invitation to the Division III Championship with a third-place performance at last Saturday's North Regional held at the Whitetail Golf Course in Colfax.
UW-Whitewater edged 2021 Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference champion UW-La Crosse by one point, 58-59, for the regional title while UW-Oshkosh placed third with 124 points, UW-Eau Claire fourth with 139 and St. Olaf College fifth with 167.
Earlier in the season UW-Oshkosh won the six-team Concordia University Wisconsin Ken Weidt Classic and eight-team Lawrence University Gene Davis Invitational. The Titans also finished third at both the eight-team WIAC Championship and 27-team UW-Eau Claire Blugold Invitational while placing fourth at the 35-team Oberlin College (Ohio) Inter-Regional.
UW-Oshkosh's line-up for Saturday's Division III Championship consists of seniors Cody Chadwick, Andrew George and Andrew Rathkamp; junior Steven Potter; and sophomores Mitchell Bradford, Jason Ford and Joe Kehoe. The only Titan with Division III Championship experience is Chadwick, who finished 21st in 2019 to earn All-America honors and 67th in 2018.
Last Saturday at the North Regional, Bradford finished 17th among the meet's 222 runners while Chadwick placed 20th, Potter 22nd, George 23rd, Kehoe 42nd, Ford 59th and Rathkamp 77th. Chadwick previously finished 10th and Potter 11th at the 2021 WIAC Championship.
In addition to the St. Olaf College, UW-Eau Claire, UW-La Crosse, UW-Oshkosh and UW-Whitewater programs, the North Region will also be represented at the Division III Championship by individual qualifiers Calvin Boone from The College of St. Scholastica (Minn.), Henry Bowman and Ben Santos from Carleton College (Minn.), Munir Isahak from Concordia College (Minn.), Spencer Schultz from UW-Stout, Andrew Stumbo from Gustavus Adolphus College (Minn.) and Lloyd Young from Saint John's University (Minn.). The top seven individual finishers from each region who are not a part of a qualifying team were also selected to participate in the Division III Championship.
The 2020 Division III Championship, scheduled for Terre Haute, Ind., was canceled due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, so 2019 champion Pomona-Pitzer Colleges will look to defend its team title on Saturday.
The top 40 individual finishers at Saturday's Division III Championship will receive All-America accolades, an award achieved by the UW-Oshkosh men's cross country program 43 times.