By: Tony Miller
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Goshen College men's cross country team has qualified for the NAIA national championship for the second straight season and the third time in program history. The NAIA announced the national field Tuesday evening.
The Maple Leafs were one of five teams from the Crossroads League to qualify for the 36-team field, which was made up of 25 teams that qualified automatically through their conference championships and 10 at-large bids handed out by the national selection committee.
The 65th Annual NAIA Men's Cross Country National Championship is set for Friday, April 9, at Seminole Valley Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mount Mercy University of the Heart of America Athletic Conference is the host school.
This is the ninth time that a Goshen team has qualified for the NAIA national championship and the first time a Maple Leaf program has qualified in back-to-back seasons: while the national championship is taking place in calendar year 2021, it represents the capstone of a 2020 season that was extended by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to the men's cross country national trips in 2014 and 2019, the women's basketball team qualified in 2004 and 2016 while men's soccer reached the final site in 1971, 1973, 1977, 2006. Furthermore, Goshen has sent 28 individuals — 17 men and 11 women — to the national cross country championship in years when the team did not qualify.
The men's race will begin at 12:30 p.m. EDT (11:30 a.m. local time) next Friday and will be broadcast for the first time on the NAIA Network presented by Stretch Internet. The awards ceremony will follow at approximately 2 p.m. EDT.
The Maple Leafs finished sixth in the Crossroads League championship, held in November at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion. While that race locked Huntington University into the national field by virtue of the conference championship, the remaining teams were left to the mercy of the selection committee, which looked at competitions held as recently as last weekend. GC added a second-place finish in the Mustang Preview Meet held on March 20 on the same course.
Nelson Kemboi was guaranteed to qualify as an individual thanks to his first-place finish in the conference meet. Each conference receives either four or six individual berths to hand out to its top finishers whose teams do not make nationals.
Edwin Kimutai finished 27th while Jackson Steinmetz was 37th, Liam Elias 43rd and Emanuel Villanueva 50th.
GC finished 27th in the national meet in 2014 and was 20th in 2019.
The Seminole Valley course is hosting the national meet for the second time in three seasons after making its debut in November 2018. The NAIA began sponsoring a cross country championship in 1956 and Goshen's first season of varsity competition was 1976.
Stay tuned to GoLeafs.net and the Maple Leafs' official Twitter accounts (@GC_MapleLeafs and @GCMapleLeafs_XT) for more information as the meet nears.