UC San Diego won both team races Friday night on the same Terre Haute course that will host the 2026 NCAA Cross Country Championships. Elle Marsyla led the women with a second-place finish in the 6K, and Joseph Vargas took second in the men's 8K as the Tritons swept the Nike XC Town Twilight team titles.
Marsyla missed the individual victory by six-thousandths of a second, according to UCSD's official recap. Behind that near tie, the women's score came from a tightly placed group. Shea Elmore and Sabrina Zennetto earned seven and eight points. Dasha LeFaivre and Michelle Huerta followed with 11 and 12, putting five Triton scorers within the first dozen scoring positions.
Anna Desormeau added a 15-point result in her UCSD and collegiate debut, and Stefania Sesock scored 25. Every Triton point-scorer finished inside the top 25. That distribution matters more to a team result than one fast runner alone. Cross-country scoring adds the places of the first five finishers; a small gap behind the leader can erase an opponent's individual win.
Vargas completed the men's 8K in 24 minutes, 58.8 seconds. Ryan Stanley, Tate Meaux and Jeffrey Keeney also finished in the top 10, earning four, seven and nine points. Bradford Stegge and Shane Badcock contributed 12 and 13, while Marco Franco took 17. The front four created the advantage; the next group kept the score from reopening behind them.
The field included Texas Tech, Florida Gulf Coast, Indiana East and Southern Indiana among other programs. It was the first meet this season in which both UCSD teams won. The result also came with course intelligence. Racing the national championship site provides turns, footing and pacing references that cannot be reproduced from a map, though October weather and field density may differ when the NCAA meet arrives.
The debut notes add another layer to the team score. Desormeau and Avery Carlson raced for UCSD for the first time, giving the staff a competitive result instead of only a training estimate. Marsyla, meanwhile, led the Triton women's lineup for a third consecutive race. That contrast—one established front runner and new athletes entering the group—shows how the scoring pack can change even when the first name stays the same.
One meet does not establish a national trend. The school recap does not provide a complete comparative team table in its narrative, and the championship field will be selected through results beyond Friday. The immediate evidence is narrower: both UCSD groups placed enough runners near the front to win, and their leading athletes held second against a multi-program field.
The Tritons now get two weeks before the Highlander Invitational at UC Riverside on Oct. 17. Recovery and training replace competition in the short term. Friday supplied a useful split between headline speed and team compression: Marsyla and Vargas were the first UCSD runners home, but the titles depended on the scorers following them. On a course selected for November's championship, the packs held together long enough to leave with two wins.