Following summer transition with assistant Flores replacing Carpenter as interim head coach, Sagehens still remain strong contender for second Division 3 national title after COVID-19 pandemic erased opportunity for repeat last year

By Landon Negri for DyeStat

When he was elevated to the status of head coach Aug. 11, Pomona-Pitzer coach Kyle Flores got an “interim” tag to go along with it.

And should his men’s team win a second consecutive NCAA Division 3 cross country national championship Saturday morning, will that “interim” tag be gone?

“I sure hope so,” he said, laughing.

Pomona-Pitzer’s men, though, have been no joke in 2021.

They enter Saturday’s NCAA Division 3 Championships as one of the favorites to win the national title. For the Sagehens, that would follow the national crown they won in 2019, the last time the championships were contested.

Pomona-Pitzer’s men, ranked No. 3 nationally, race in the men’s 8-kilometer championship at E.P. “Tom” Sawyer Park in Louisville, Ky., at 11 a.m. EST, with the women’s race – which also features Pomona-Pitzer – following at noon. Both races will be streamed live at NCAA.com.

That Pomona-Pitzer managed to maintain this excellence through the last two years is both a testament to a committed roster and to leadership smart enough not to fix what wasn't broken. Not only did the Sagehens face the same pandemic obstacles other programs faced, but they also made the transition from former coach Jordan Carpenter to Flores seem .. well ... seamless.

“They really know how to work together and be together,” said Flores, who was an assistant with the team for four years before becoming the head coach, “and after winning that title, they knew what we had was special and they knew what we needed to do to keep it going.”

In 2019, Pomona-Pitzer broke through in a huge way on the same Louisville course with the same No. 3 ranking entering the Division 3 championship.

Led by sophomore Ethan Widlansky, who was seventh, the Sagehens won with 164 points, defeating runner-up and No. 2 North Central, Ill. (182 points) and top-ranked Williams (183), who was third. It was the program’s first top-five finish.

From there, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the following March and the 2020 cross country season was wiped out. Among the many obstacles was the fact that coaches were not allowed by the NCAA to hold official practices.

But Pomona-Pitzer’s runners stayed on their game thanks to tremendous advanced planning. They would schedule workouts around the country, usually with an unattached road race involved.

“We’re lucky to have some very motivated individuals,” Flores said. “And they figured out how to train together without the coaches being there.”

Pomona-Pitzer runners showed up to work out in places like Portland, Ore., Bend, Ore., Park City, Utah and Asheville, N.C.

“We did not tell them to do this,” Flores said.

Last summer, Carpenter left for a Division 1 coaching job at Boston University, and Flores found out he was made interim head coach just before the team left for its summer camp in the San Bernardino mountain community of Wrightwood.

Asked if he tried to keep things exactly the same, Flores said, “I think that’s fair to say. We obviously found a formula for success in 2019, and that was something we could build upon for a couple of years.”

Widlansky said Flores played the transition right.

“I think Kyle, who was really a continuance of Jordan’s coaching style, is really big on running with your heart,” he said, “running for your teammates, and running with them, as opposed to competing against them.”

Out of the gate, Pomona-Pitzer placed third in September at the UC Riverside Invitational while Widlansky set a new 8-kilometer program record. Sophomore Lucas Florsheim led the team to a win at Cal State San Marcos a week later.

Always pushed by neighboring Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, Pomona-Pitzer downed CMS by eight points at the conference championship meet Oct. 30. Widlandsky was second; a pack of sophomores – Colin Kirkpatrick, Florsheim and Jack Rosencrans – helped the Sagehens win the conference title.

Widlansky especially noted the strength of the Sagehens’ sophomores as a team foundation.

“I’ll be gone in a couple of years from now,” he said. “And I think we're going to remain one of the top dogs.”

At Saturday’s NCAA Division 3 West Regional, Widlansky – the regional champ from 2019 – finished fourth, while Florsheim, Kirkpatrick and Paul McKinley placed sixth, seventh, and eighth, respectively, as the Sagehens won the regional title to set up this week’s championship attempt.

“It’s obviously a different team, but we have a really great group of guys, and so I feel very comfortable going on that start line, running for them, and running with them,” Widlansky said. “That’s something that’s a chemistry we have to develop over the course of the season.”

All this leads up to Saturday, and finally, the opportunity for the Sagehens to defend their title. It will also be a rematch for Pomona-Pitzer against top-ranked Wartburg, which edged the Sagehens by a 39-46 margin Oct. 16 at the Augustana Interregional Invitational in Illinois.

“I think our guys need to run their race,” Flores said. “They’re ready. .... They’re training. They’re motivated and they’re focused. They just need to run their race.”

MIT and SUNY Geneseo are also in contention for their first national titles, just like Wartburg, with Williams seeking its first championship since back-to-back crowns in 1994-95.

“We know there’s a lot of good teams there,” Florsheim said. “We just want to compete. We know the teams we have to beat. We’re just looking to defend our national title.”