On Oct. 31, cross country will head down to Van Courtlandt Park in New York City for the the Ivy League Heptagonal Championship, a race in which both the men and the women’s teams have a winning history.
The men have won the title nine times, including a share of the first ever Ivy League Cross Country Championship in 1939. Their tally is the third-best in the Ivy League, only behind Princeton University’s 25 and Dartmouth College’s 15.
The women have also seen success in the Championship. Having won six titles in total, they won three consecutively from 1991-1993 and back-to-back titles in 2011 and 2012.
In 1992 and 1993, both the men’s and the women’s teams won the Ivy League Championship, two of only eight times this feat has been accomplished.
Despite its fantastic history, recent years have been more difficult for the Red.
The men haven’t triumphed in this race since 1993. Since then, they’ve finished second in 2007 and 2014, but were distantly away from the title with gaps of 29 and 34 points, respectively. The Red came agonizingly close to the title in 2015, only missing by 10 points while finishing fourth.
The men have also finished last twice, in 2003 and 2018.
The late 2010s and early 2020s were a particularly bleak time for the men, as they only earned one top-half finish from 2016-2021.
Since 2022, the men’s fortunes have improved: three consecutive third place finishes have catapulted the Red back into contention. Yet, they remain unable to break through the foreboding fortresses of Princeton and Harvard. Princeton has averaged 43 points over those three years and Harvard averaged 49.
Compared to the Red’s average of 81 points across the same time frame, its odds of winning the title in 2025 seem thin.
Despite having won the title in 2012 with a dominating 63 point gap and achieving a second place finish in 2013, the women have been fraught with woes in recent years. Since 2013, they have finished no higher than fourth and no higher than sixth after 2018.
Rather than battling against Harvard and Columbia for the title, the women have been sparring with Brown and the University of Pennsylvania to avoid finishing last. The women have kept themselves off the foot of the standings, to their credit.
As for the current men’s and women’s teams, they are counting on their best runners to do the heavy lifting. Senior Tyler Canaday, junior Aryan Abbaraju and freshman Griffin Mandirola will be the standard-bearers for the men. On the women’s side, senior Mairead Clas, junior Maisie McManus and freshman Evelyn Prodoehl look to be the top scorers.
It is likely that the men will emerge either in third or fourth place after the dust settles. They have failed to be competitive with Harvard and Princeton this season; Yale University looks to be a tough team as well. The other teams don’t pose a threat to the Red.
The women hope to finally break out of their rot. While they too have failed to compete with Harvard and Princeton, alongside the fact that they’re of similar strength to Yale, they dispatched Dartmouth and Brown easily earlier this year. Also the women recently defeated Columbia at the Princeton Fall Classic. Should they beat those three teams, they will finish fifth, which would be their highest finish since 2017; should they beat Yale, they will finish fourth — their highest finish since 2014.
This is the last race the Red will run before the NCAA Northeast Regional Championship in Hopkinton, NH, on Nov. 14. The start time is 11 a.m. in New York City.
Eric Joy is a Sun Contributor and can be reached at ewj36@cornell.edu.
