VILLANOVA, Pa.—The first full team meet of the season comes up this week for the Villanova men's cross country team as it competes in the Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational on Friday afternoon. The men's championship race gets underway at 2 p.m. Eastern time (1 p.m. Central) and can be seen live on Runner Space+ PLUS (subscription required). Friday's full schedule includes women's and men's 'B' races in the morning followed by the championship races (women at 12:20 p.m. Central time).
This year's Nuttycombe meet is a chance for teams get familiar with the site for this year's NCAA Championships on the Thomas Zimmer Championship Cross Country Course. More than half of the team's in the most recent USTFCCCA National Coaches' Poll – 18 in all – are scheduled to race at Nuttycombe. The list includes the host Badgers along with the Wildcats, who currently check in at No. 17 nationally and are No. 2 in the most recent Mid-Atlantic Region poll.
A small contingent of Villanova runners competed at Temple in the official season opener on August 30, but for the majority of the Wildcats roster this week will be the first chance to get a competition under their belt for the 2024 season. In addition to this week's race, Villanova will compete at the Princeton Fall Classic in October before turning their full attention to the postseason calendar which includes the BIG EAST Championships, NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional and NCAA Championships in a span of four weeks in November.
The redshirt freshman duo of
CJ Sullivan (Milton, Mass.) and
Nick Sullivan (Middletown, N.J.) led the Wildcats with second and third place individual finishes at Temple last month. They were separated by just a second at the finish line, with CJ covering the 6,000 meter course in 19:25.2 and Nick following him in 19:26.2. The rest of the Villanova scorers in the race were redshirt freshmen
Brian Theobald (Wall, N.J.) and
Kai Mitchell-Reiss (Portland, Ore.) along with fifth year collegian and graduate transfer
Bennett Booth-Genthe (Pottstown, Pa.) in his Wildcats debut.
Villanova tallied its second straight top-20 finish and third in the past four seasons at the NCAA Championships a year ago. Along the way the team tallied second place finishes at both the BIG EAST Championships and the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional, the latter of which secured an automatic berth for the Wildcats to the NCAA Championships.
Two of the top five runners in last year's Villanova lineup are back this year. Fifth year runner
Liam Murphy (Millstone, N.J.) and junior
Marco Langon (Raritan, N.J.) lead the team along with senior veterans
Sean Donoghue (Dublin, Ireland) and
Devon Comber (Ambler, Pa.) who have gained significant experience during their careers.
This is the third straight year that the Wildcats will compete in the Nuttycombe Invitational. Villanova came in ninth out of 33 teams in the men's championship race in 2022 and moved up a spot to finish eighth in a field of 36 schools last year. Murphy and Langon have each been in the Wildcats lineup at Nuttycombe the past two years and they both improved their finishing spots from 2022 to 2023. Murphy in particular showed his progress a year ago when he came in 21
st out of 280 runners, 30 spots higher than he had finished the year before.
Friday's field of teams includes the top three teams in the Mid-Atlantic Region – the Wildcats along with top-ranked Princeton and No. 3 Georgetown. These squads will all see each other again at the Princeton Fall Classic next month.
