STILLWATER, Okla.—Led by sophomore Haftu Strintzos (Victoria, Australia) and junior Josh Phillips (Belrose, Australia) who finished with nearly identical times at the top of the team lineup, Villanova finished in 20^th place overall at the 2020 Division I NCAA Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships on Monday afternoon. The team finish is the Wildcats highest finish since 2014 and was the result of a great team performance for a Villanova squad that was unranked in the national top 30 poll entering the national championships.
 
Strintzos and Phillips were the 66^th and 67^th place finishers in a field of 251 runners for the 10K men's race on the OSU Cross Country Course. They crossed the finish line with times of 31:11.0 and 31:11.1 to pace the Wildcats lineup for the second time in as many meets during the abbreviated spring portion of the season. The pair had also been the top two finishers for Villanova at the BIG EAST Championships just 10 days ago in their first official races in more than a year.
 
The five scoring runners for the Wildcats were the same as at the BIG EAST meet, with junior Charlie O'Donovan (Dublin, Ireland), senior Nick Steele (Harvard, Mass.) and senior Paul Nichols (Latham, N.Y.) running third, fourth and fifth in the lineup. O'Donovan came in 109^th overall with a time of 31:36.1, followed by Steele in 132^nd place (31:59.6) and Nichols in 168^th place (32:24.0) in his first career race at a national meet.
 
Villanova has earned a team berth to each of the last three NCAA Championships in cross country and has qualified for the national meet 16 times in the 23 years that Marcus O'Sullivan has been head coach. The team's performance on Monday was a successful one for a team that was on the rise and coming off a BIG EAST title following the 2019 season before the COVID pandemic interrupted the Wildcats progress.
 
The wait to return to high-level competition made the result even more impressive for Villanova, which finished ahead of eight nationally-ranked teams and came in 60 points ahead of a Georgetown squad which had narrowly placed ahead of the Wildcats at the BIG EAST meet earlier in the month. Villanova also closed the race on a strong note, as official splits showed that the team moved up a spot in the standings over each of the final two kilometers in the 10K race.
 
Rounding out the lineup were graduate student Justin Weber (South Milwaukee, Wis.) and junior Jack Fredian (Arlington Heights, Ill.) who came in 213^th (33:13.1) and 232^nd (34:37.2), respectively.