GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.— For just the second time in program history and for the first time in a decade, the nation's 24^th-ranked Colorado Mesa University women's cross country team will compete with a full squad at the NCAA Division II National Championships this Saturday in Sacramento, California.
 
The Mavericks last qualified for national championships as a team in 2014, finishing 22^nd in Louisville, Kentucky, and will look to set a new program standard when they race over six kilometers at the Arcade Creek Cross Country Course in California's capital city this weekend.
 
The women's race will begin at 11:15 a.m. PST (12:15 p.m. Mountain) following the earlier men's 10-kilometer event, which begins 75 minutes earlier at 10 a.m. PST (11 a.m. Mountain).
 
Both can be streamed for free on NCAA.com and live results can be found here.
 
More information about the meet, including course maps can be seen on the championship microsite.
 
Last Time Out
 
The Mavericks earned their trip to the national championships after turning in a strong ninth place finish at the Nov. 9 NCAA Division II South Central Regional Championships held in snowy conditions at Washington Park in Denver.  That regional meet proved to be the deepest of the eight from around the country as the Mavericks were one of the nine teams selected from the region in the overall field of 34 teams for this weekend's national championships.
 
Each of the eight regions had three automatic qualifiers while the other ten spots were chosen at large with the South Central Region picking up six of those at-large berths.
 
The Mavericks finished with a team score of 239 points as Kirstin Williams led the Mavericks with a 30^th place individual finish.  She posted a time of 23 minutes, 4.9 seconds on the 6-kilometer course, grooved out of snow piles after a major winter storm hit the area in the days and hours leading into the championship.
 
The Mavericks placed six of their seven runners in the top 70 of the 172-runner filed and had a 5-runner pack time of just 66 seconds.
 
A full meet recap can be seen here.
 
A look at the lineup
 
Each of the 34 qualified teams are permitted to send seven runners to the start for Saturday's race.  The top five runners will determine each team's score while the sixth and seventh runners will displace runners from other teams, thus hurting opposing teams' scores. 
 
Additionally, 26 other individual runners have qualified for the national championships by virtue of their placing at the various regional championships.  They will run alongside the team-qualified runners but will not factor into the team scoring process.
 
Maverick Head Coach Travis Floeck plans to race his full allotment of runners and will bring the same eight women, including an alternate, that he took to the regional on the trip to California.  However, Floeck has not yet finalized his exact lineup of who will run on Saturday.
 
His lineup will come from this list of Quin Gregg (67^th), Megan Hodges (40^th), Kate Linstedt (49^th), Brooke Miller (88^th), Autumn McQuitty (53^rd), Shirley Weaver, Kendall White (69^th) and Kirstin Williams (30^th).  Weaver was the Mavs' alternate at the regional.
 
The individual placement at the regional of each of the others is listed in parenthesis above.
 
National Experience
 
Although the Mavericks are competing as a team at the national championships for the first time since 2014, Kirstin Williams will have previous NCAA Championship experience after qualifying as an individual for last year's national meet.  The fifth-year senior out of St. George, Utah finished 61^st at last year's national meet in her first year at CMU. 
 
She came to the Maverick program last fall as a graduate transfer from Division I Utah Tech in her hometown and led the Mavs in all five of her races in 2023 earning both First Team All-RMAC and USTFCCCA All-Region accolades last fall.  She also claimed Indoor Track & Field All-RMAC honors in the 5,000 meters last winter and is the Mavs' outdoor 10K school-record holder.
 
Assuming she starts on Saturday, Williams will become just the third Maverick woman to ever have run in multiple national championship cross country races, joining elite company Alexis Skarda (2008, 2010) and Alexia Chapman (2014, 2016).
 
Williams has led the Mavericks in three of her four starts this season and earned a second consecutive All-RMAC honor after placing a team-best 20^th at the RMAC Championships before again leading the Mavericks to a 30^th place finish at the regional.  She also took a Maverick best fourth at the season-opening Mountaineer/Cowboy Open and was 31^st at the Lewis Crossover, finishing just three spots and 2.6 seconds behind Brooke Miller (28^th) at that meet.
 
Miller Time
 
Converted middle-distance runner Brooke Miller was the Mavs' top finisher at the Lewis Crossover and had also led the Mavs for the first time at the Roadrunners Invitational, where she took 18^th with a career-best 6K time of 22:28, a meet that Williams did not compete in.
 
Miller, a redshirt junior from Homer, Alaska, is the Mavs' indoor and outdoor 800-meter school record holder on the track and earned Second Team All-RMAC honors in the 800 last spring, which proved to be a breakout season.  She had dabbled in cross country earlier in her collegiate career but was always more focused on the middle distance events on the track prior to this fall.
 
Veteran presence
 
The Mavericks potential lineup for Saturday includes four upperclassmen in the aforementioned Williams, Miller as well as other redshirt juniors Megan Hodges and Kendall White, both of whom are in their fourth year on the Maverick roster.   They both redshirted in 2021 and would be eligible to return for a fifth year next fall.
 
Kate Linstedt, a redshirt sophomore, is also in her third year with the program and has run in all four previous conference and regional championships in her career over the past two seasons after redshirting in 2022.
 
True sophomore Autumn McQuitty has also competed in both championship meets over the past two years and has consistently been in the Mavs' lineup since the start of her career.  Her father David was a 3-time NCAA Division II Cross Country All-American at Adams State, where her mother Jennifer also ran.
 
Shirley Weaver is the only Maverick freshman in the Mavs' potential lineup.
 
Gunning for Honors
 
In addition to their team aspirations of improving upon their 22^nd place finish from 2014, the Maverick runners will also aim for USTFCCCA All-America honors that will go to the top 40 individual finishers in Saturday's race.
 
If any are able to earn the plaudits, they would join elite company as only two Maverick women have combined to win three All-America cross country honors.  Alexis Skarda finished 19^th at the 2008 National Championships and placed eighth in 2010 as the program's highest national finisher and only 2-time All-American.  Current Maverick Kira MacGill, who has missed this entire season due to injury, is the Mavs' only other all-American.  She placed 29^th at the 2022 National Championships after qualifying for that year's championship as an individual.
 
In the Polls
 
The Mavericks came into the regional championships ranked tenth in the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association's regional rankings and were 29^th in the national poll.  However, they were able to finish 43 points and a place higher than then No. 27 Dallas Baptist, which finished tenth, which proved to be the difference for selection to the national meets.  The Patriots ended up missing team qualification for the national championship but did have an individual qualifier in Lesli Salas, who finished 28^th.
 
Since, the Mavericks have moved up to No. 24 in the latest USTFCCCA National Poll and have now been ranked in three consecutive polls after being amongst the others receiving votes category for four of the first five polls of the season.  These recent national rankings are the first for the program since 2015, when the Mavericks were ranked 11^th in the preseason and Week No. 1 polls, largely based on their 2014 national championship performance.
 
They were ranked 23^rd heading into the 2014 national championships after a successful regional championship effort.
 
Additionally, CMU's women are ranked 18^th in the FloTrack College XC NCAA Division II Rankings presented by HOKA, which were most recently published on Tuesday.  Those rankings are done on a more mathematical and head-to-head result basis using a modified ELO system ranking.

CMU was ranked 17^th before the regional meet.
 
The Mavericks also have two women in the top 100 of the FloTrack individual rankings in No. 61 Lauren Williams and No. 96 Megan Hodges, who surged 63 places in the rankings after a strong 40^th place finish at the regional championships, where she was the Mavs' second runner.  Kate Linstedt also had big 49 place improvement in the FloTrack rankings, moving up to 116^th after taking 49^th at the regional meet as the Mavs' No. 3 runner.
 
The Mavericks' other ranked runners include Shirley Weaver (127^th), Autumn McQuitty (134^th), Quin Gregg (148^th) and Kendall White (156^th).
 
Battle Tested
 
The Mavericks are certainly battle tested this season having competed at the Lewis Crossover Invitation, the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Championships and the South Central Regional Championships in their last three outings.
 
Their strong tenth place finish out of 36 teams at the Lewis meet on Oct. 12 in Romeoville, Illinois just outside of Chicago, proved to be quite beneficial as the Mavs racked up multiple wins over other teams in consideration for the at-large spots in the national championships.
 
The Mavs then turned in a seventh place finish at the RMAC Championships on Oct. 26 in Las Vegas, New Mexico.  Including the Mavs, their were and still are eight RMAC teams ranked in the USTFCCCA National Poll, including three of the top five and five of the top nine.
 
The Mavs then secured their trip to the national meet through the Nov. 9 regional, which included ten nationally-ranked teams including five of the top nine in the latest USTFCCCA Poll.
 
Up Next
 
Saturday's race will conclude the cross country season.  The Mavericks will then begin the indoor track & field season on the weekend of Dec. 7.