GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.— The Colorado Mesa University cross country teams will compete in their most important meet of the regular season on Sunday when they head to Lawrence, Kansas for the NCAA Division II Pre-Nationals Meet at Rim Rock Farm.
Sunday's meet will give the Mavs a chance to preview the course that will be used for the NCAA Division II National Championships in December and an opportunity to pick up head-to-head wins over out of region opponents that will be critical to the at-large selection process for the national meet.
Sunday's meet, which is hosted by Northwest Missouri State, will feature an 8K race at 9:30 a.m. CDT (8:30 a.m. Mountain) followed by a women's 6K at 10:15 a.m. CDT (9:15 a.m. Mountain).
Live results and course maps can be found at the links above.
Last Time Out
The Mavericks opened their season three weeks ago at the Roadrunners Invitational hosted by MSU Denver at Washington Park on Sept. 19.
The CMU women finished second out of ten teams behind only nationally-ranked Division I foe Colorado and beat three other NCAA Division I teams in Wyoming, Northern Colorado and Air Force. The Mavs also finished the highest of five Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference squads in the meet, including two top-ten ranked squads in No. 4 Colorado School of Mines and No. 7 UCCS.
Jordan Staniszewski led the Mavs with an eighth place time of 22 minutes, 9.53 seconds on the 6K course as the top RMAC finisher in the field while scoring just six team points. All five of the Mavs' scoring runners finished inside the top 25 overall.
Meanwhile, the Maverick men took fourth out of nine teams. They finished higher than a pair of Division I foes in Wyoming (5
th) and Northern Colorado (7
th) as well as a pair of RMAC opponents (MSU Denver, Regis).
Sophomores
Clayton Wilson and
Colton White led the solid Maverick effort finishing 12
th and 15
th, respectively. Wilson posted an 8K time of 25:43.7 and scored just ten team points while White was just ten seconds behind in 25:53.9 while adding 12 team points.
Full Women's Recap | Full Men's Recap
Maverick Entries
Here is a list of the Maverick entries for Sunday's races.
Men (10):
Chase Brown,
Nick Clark,
Dillon Elliott,
Owen Frank,
Daxin Holtzen,
Bode Klein,
Dominick Muller,
Ryan O'Loughlin,
Colton White,
Clayton Wilson.
Women (10):
Quin Dedrick,
Addie Hollmann,
Wehazit Kelati,
Daisy Lalonde,
Kate Linstedt,
Autumn McQuitty,
Lily Nichols,
Jordan Staniszewski,
Chloe Swan,
Shirley Weaver.
Why It Matters
Sunday's races will be critical to the at-large portion of the selection process for the NCAA Championships and will be CMU's lone chance of competing against teams from other regions around the country.
Thirty four teams will eventually be selected for the NCAA Championships, to be contested on Dec. 4. Twenty four of those teams will earn automatic selection as one of the top three finishers in each of the eight regional championships on the weekend of Nov. 21.
The remaining ten spots are determined at-large— one at a time— through comparisons made between the fourth place finishers from each region. Once that first team has been selected, the fifth place team from that team's region will be compared with the remaining fourth place teams from the other seven regions. The process will repeat with the next team up being put in to the comparison process.
A full explanation of the process,
can be seen here.
With limited opportunities to race teams from other regions, meets like Sunday will have a major impact on the process, which heavily relies on head-to-head results and result differences amongst common opponents.
In 2024, the Maverick women finished ninth in the perennially powerful South Central Regional but received one of those at-large spots after taking tenth place out of 36 teams at the Lewis Crossover meet, which proved to be enough fuel to get the Mavs in to the NCAA meet for the first time since 2014.
In 2025, The Maverick women finished fourth out of 36 teams at the Lewis meet, once again propelling them to the national meet after taking seventh at the regional championships.
A Look back to 2025
The Maverick women qualified as a team for the NCAA Division II National Championships for the second straight year and posted their best ever national championship finish, taking 20
th at the championship meet in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Prior to that, the Maverick women finished sixth at the RMAC Championships and then earned an at-large berth into the national championships thanks to their seventh place finish at the South Central Regional.
The Maverick women were nationally ranked throughout the season, reaching as high as No. 14 after a strong fourth place finish out of 36 teams at the Lewis Crossover Invitational.
The Maverick men, who were quite youthful in 2025, also had a strong end to the 2026 season, taking ninth at the NCAA South Central Regional Championships, the team's best finish in three years.
In the National Rankings
The Maverick women are 15
th in this week's edition of the
U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association's National Coaches' Poll. They were ranked 13
th in the preseason edition of the poll and dropped to 14
th before running in the first regular season edition of the poll, released on Sept. 16. They then remained 14
th in the next edition of the poll on Sept. 30 before moving down one more spot after not running since Sept. 19.
The CMU women have now been nationally-ranked in 15 consecutive polls dating back to the Week No. 5 poll of 2024 after receiving votes in the previous three editions.
Regional Rankings
The Maverick women have remained in the No. 6 spot of the
USTFCCCA's South Central Regional Rankings throughout the season.
The Maverick men are ranked ninth in the regional rankings and have been so in the last two and three of the four sets of rankings. They started out ninth in the preseason rankings and were dropped to tenth behind Texas A&M-International in the first regular season rankings before the Mavs' ran in Denver.
Following that effort on Sept. 19, the Mavs' moved back up to No. 9 in the Week 2 rankings on Sept. 29 before slipping back to tenth in this week's rankings.
Deep Competition
Sunday's meet is slated to include 18 women's and 16 men's teams.
Nearly half of the men's field is nationally-ranked with seven teams that are in this week's USTFCCCA Poll. That list is headlined by No. 7 Western Colorado, one of three RMAC teams in the field, including the Mavs. MSU Denver will also represent the conference.
The other nationally-ranked squads are No. 14 Cal Poly Pomona, No. 16 Washburn, No. 18 Nebraska-Kearney, No. 19 Pittsburg State, No. 27 Missouri Southern and No. 13 Missouri S&T.
The Mavs are one of eight nationally-ranked women's teams in the field. Five of the nation's top ten are slated to run, including No. 3 Colorado School of Mines, No. 5 Western Colorado and No. 7 UCCS. Missouri Southern State, ranked ninth, and Pittsburg State, ranked 10
th will also toe the line alongside the 15
th-ranked Mavs, No. 23 Nebraska-Kearney and No. 28 Cal Poly Pomona.
RMAC Polls
The Maverick women were tabbed fifth in the RMAC Preseason Coaches' Poll, released last month. The Maverick men were picked eighth out of the 15 teams.
Year No. 3
Travis Floeck will begin his third season with the Mavs on Saturday. Named as CMU's Director of Track & Field/Cross Country in the summer of 2024, Floeck has guided the Maverick women to back-to-back NCAA Division II Championship team qualifications, a first for the program.
They turned in a 20
th place finish in 2025, the Mavs' highest national championship finish in program history, after taking 23
rdin 2024.
The Mav women also finished sixth at last year's RMAC Championships and seventh at the NCAA South Central Regional. Both of those finishes were the program's best since 2014, which was the only other year when the Mavs qualified as a team for the national meet.
The Maverick men also had their best regional finish in three years under Floeck last season.
Up Next
The Mavericks will take another week off next week but will the race at home on Saturday, Oct. 24, hosting the High Desert Dental Maverick XC Invitational at Lincoln Park. That race will be the third and final regular season meet of the season before the Mavs begin the championship half of the campaign at the Nov. 7 RMAC Championships in Rapid City, South Dakota.
