Wingate Wins Men's Cross Country Regionals; Anderson and One Individual Advance to Nationals
SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- The Wingate Men's Cross Country Team won the NCAA Division II Southeast Regional Championship on Saturday morning.
Wingate had a perfect score of 15 on the way to its fourth straight regional title. The Bulldogs had the top six finishers, led by senior individual champion Ricardo Barbosa.
A 2024 NCAA Division II All-American, Barbosa posted a personal-best 10K time of 29:16.0. Less than 0.2 seconds separated Wingate's top five runners. South Atlantic Conference individual champion Will Aitken finished second with his silver-medal time of 29:16.1. Luca Poppe, Antonin Saint Peyre and Scott Nutter completed Wingate's top five with identical times of 29:16.2.
Anderson's men's cross country team clinched a spot to the NCAA National Championships in dramatic style, winning the tiebreaker against Flagler to secure the lone third-place finish at the NCAA Southeast Regional Championships to punch their ticket to Nationals in two weeks.
The top three finishing teams at each NCAA Regional Championships qualifies for the NCAA National Championships. Anderson finished the race with a team score of 102, deadlocked with Flagler, as the sum of each team's five scoring runners amounted to 102. The Trojans finished on the scoreboard with 7th, 12th, 16th, 33rd and 34th place counting towards the team score, while the Saints rounded out the race claiming the 15th, 17th, 21st, 24th, and 25th positions.
To determine which team would earn the sole third-place finish, thus clinching a spot to the Nationals, it came down to comparing the place of each of Anderson's scoring members versus their respective competitors from Flagler. Anderson won the tiebreak, winning three of the five comparisons.
Individually, Lenoir-Rhyne's Jacob Parkinson finished 11th overall to qualify for nationals as an individual.