NC State women’s cross country claims eighth at NCAA Championships, snaps bid for fourth straight title
After claiming three straight NCAA national championships, NC State women’s cross country’s reign atop the running world came to an end during Saturday’s 2024 edition of the event.
The Wolfpack, which was seeded 13th entering the meet, placed eighth with a team score of 251 in the women’s 6k national championship, hosted by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisc. BYU won with a score of 147, while West Virginia was second in 164 and Providence placed third with a score of 183.
Junior Grace Hartman placed fifth in 19:39 to lead the Pack’s runners, while junior Hannah Gapes was right behind her in eighth with a 19:42 finish. Senior Brooke Rauber finished 50th (20:12), sophomore Angelina Napoleon came in 97th (20:31) and freshman Bethany Michalak rounded out NC State’s score in 160th (20:52).
Sophomore Kate Putman came in 203rd (21:12), while freshman Ellie Shea rounded out the Wolfpack’s runners with a 247th-place finish (22:02).
NC State was the gold standard in the sport over the past three seasons as it became the first ACC program to win three straight national championships before this year’s results. The Pack was just the first team to accomplish that feat since Stanford’s women did it from 2005-2007.
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While the Pack entered the weekend as the three-time defending champion, NC State was not expected to contend for the fourth consecutive crown.
NC State won the NCAA Southeast Regional in Rock Hill, S.C., last weekend to clinch its ticket to the national championship. That followed the Pack’s fifth-place ACC Championship finish at WakeMed Soccer Park on Nov. 1, which snapped the program’s eight straight seasons with the conference title.
Hartman claimed the individual ACC title, the sixth consecutive season that a Wolfpack woman won the meet, while she then won the NCAA Southeast Regional. Gapes, meanwhile, placed third in both the ACC championship and at the regional championship to help lead the Pack’s top-five runners in the postseason.
The ACC had seven other women’s teams in the field along with NC State. Stanford finished sixth as a team (213), while North Carolina was 11th (310), Virginia placed 14th (388), ACC Champion Notre Dame finished 16th (427), Syracuse placed 20th (512), Florida State came in 24th (572) and Boston College rounded out the conference’s squads in 29th (717).
