Spots in the 2024 NCAA National Championships were on the line when Texas men’s cross country traveled to College Station last Friday for the NCAA South Central Regionals. Amongst a field of 32 teams, the Longhorns placed third, finishing behind Arkansas and Tulane, respectively, who gained automatic qualification to the championships. While their third-place finish put them in the running for an at-large bid to the Nov. 23 race in Madison, Wisconsin, the Longhorns were not one of the final 13 teams chosen. 

“You need to gain at-large qualifying points, so I knew, our guys knew, that if we didn’t finish second we weren’t going to go (to the NCAA Championships),” Texas men’s assistant cross country coach Greg Metcalf said. “We rallied and ran great at the SEC meet and ran I think a little better at the regional meet, but we came up a little short.” 

In Friday’s race, the Longhorns’ top five runners earned a combined 84 points, only eight behind Tulane’s total of 76. The eight-point difference was season changing for both schools. It is the first time that the Texas men’s team hasn’t qualified for nationals since 2020, while Tulane punched its ticket to the championships for the first time since 1998.

Senior Isaac Alonzo, junior Nathanael Berhane, senior Logan Patete, junior Hudson Heikkinen and sophomore Jack Boyd were the top five finishers for Texas. Alonzo qualified individually for nationals with a fourth-overall finish in College Station and will be the lone representative of Texas men’s cross country this Saturday. Berhane, Patete and Heikkinen earned All-South Central Honors as top-25 finishers. All five ran collegiate personal-best times in the 10k. 

Junior Emmanuel Sgouros, who also ran a personal record at the distance, and graduate student Rodger Rivera were the final two runners for the Longhorns. 

Texas was ranked No. 3 in the region by the USTFCCCA heading into the competition and the top five ended the day in their respective USTFCCCA rankings: Arkansas, Tulane, Texas, Texas A&M and Incarnate Word. 

The South Central Regionals were the Texas men’s fifth race of the season. The team began its season on Aug. 30 with a sweep of the Stormy Seas Opener and competed next just under a month later in Stillwater, Oklahoma, at the Cowboy Jamboree. Ranked No. 24 at the time, the Longhorns finished fourth in the Sept. 28 race, with No. 1 Oklahoma State, No. 8 New Mexico and No. 22 Oregon coming in the top three positions. 

The final regular season race for Texas was the Wisconsin Pre-Nationals, in which the Longhorns came in 27th out of 32 competing schools in the top men’s division. Texas, listed as No. 29 during the Pre-Nationals, dropped out of the USTFCCCA rankings following the Madison race. On Nov. 1, the Longhorns debuted at the SEC Cross Country Championships in College Station, finishing in fourth place and helping earn the Cotton Holdings Lone Star Showdown trophy in enemy territory. 

Reflecting on the season, Metcalf is proud of the way his team controlled what it could. 

“The young men we put on the starting line, they ran great,” Metcalf said. “There are things beyond our control that changed our roster as the season progressed. … Our goal as a program, as a coach and as athletes is to control what we can control and walk away from every competition with the ability to learn, adapt, adjust and grow from every experience whether it is good or bad.”