Trojan Men Place 16th at NAIA National Championships
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The 67th-annual NAIA Men's Cross Country National Championships took place Friday morning at the Apalachee Regional Park in Tallahassee, Florida, where the No. 14 Taylor men (88-50) finished 16th out of 36 total teams.
Friday marked the ninth-consecutive national championship appearance for the Trojans, where they finished runner-up in 2019 and won the first national championship in the history of Taylor Athletics in 2020.
After an 11th-place finish in 2021, a young crop of runners energized Taylor to yet another solid finish now in 2022.
Three personal-best times served as the foundation of Taylor's second-best team time of the season, 2:08:27.3, which accrued a total of 480 points for a 16th-place finish in Tallahassee.
Junior, Ben Eiffert, executed a remarkably strong finish to Friday's national championship race, finishing as the top Trojan with a personal-best time of 25:30.1. Eiffert consistently worked his way up the pack, leaping from 143rd at the 4000M mark up to the 95th-overall finish. In the final 1000M of the race alone, Eiffert surpassed 23 runners en route to his career finish.
Back on September 9 at the IWU Twilight Invitational, TU's native of Columbia, Missouri, posted the top Trojan time, which he did so again in the season's final race at the NAIA National Championships.
Freshman, Luke Harber, meanwhile was the second Trojan to cross the finish line Friday morning, marking the third race in-a-row in which he finished second among the Trojan top five. Harber finished as the 99th-overall runner with a time of 25:30.1, capping a freshman campaign in which he finished within Taylor's top-five runners in each race.
Fellow freshman, Ryan Hanak, achieved that very same feat, finishing among the Trojan top five in each race this season, as he posted a personal-best time of 25:43.3 at Friday's national championships.
The fourth Trojan to score en route to Taylor's 16th-place finish was senior, Josh Harden. TU's senior leader had finished among the Trojan top-three in each race thus far in 2022, though he secured a fourth-place team finish in Tallahassee with a time of 25:52.5.
Taylor's final runner to score was senior, Nathan Streitmatter, who posted a career-best time in his final collegiate race with a mark of 25:53.4 for the 146th-overall finish.
Freshmen duo, Joel Mumaw and Bryce Noble, meanwhile finished as the sixth and seventh Trojans to cross the finish line, with times of 26:04.6 and 27:11.7, respectively.
36 total teams and 319 individuals competed at Friday's national championship race, in which Taylor posted five of its runners among the front half of the field.
Dordt finished in first place as a team with a total of 97 points, while Milligan finished in second with 116 points and The Master's landed in third with 152 points.
Taylor finished as the fourth of six Crossroads League teams to compete at the national championships, with Indiana Wesleyan, Grace, and Huntington each placing among the top-10.
Alongside Harden and Streitmatter, Cody Sonnenberg marks the third TU senior to have closed the books on his collegiate running career Friday morning, while 21 others are set to return in 2023.
