Preseason polls in Ohio high school cross country carry more weight than they probably should. Nobody has raced a real 5K against real competition yet. The polls the Ohio Association of Track and Cross Country Coaches released this week for all eight divisions are built almost entirely on memory: who graduated, who's back, and most of all, who stood on the podium at Fortress Obetz last November. That last part turns out to be the single best predictor of how this week's ballot reads, and also the source of its most interesting wrinkles.
We pulled the actual 2025 state championship results and lined them up against this week's polls. In three divisions, the coaches simply reran last year's outcome. In four others, the reigning state champion got passed on the ballot entirely, sometimes by a wide margin. And in Boys Division IV, the poll appears to have missed a team altogether. Here's what the numbers actually show.
The three dynasties nobody wants to bet against
Some outcomes weren't close calls for the voters, because the teams involved haven't given anyone a reason to doubt them.
Bishop Watterson's girls won the Division II state championship in 2025, and the Eagles opened this preseason poll at No. 1 with all twelve first place votes on the ballot. That's about as close to unanimous as this sport gets, and it's earned. Watterson has been the standard in Division II for years now, and nothing about this offseason suggested that was changing.
Ottawa Hills is in a similar spot in Division IV. The girls program won the 2025 state title and reopens 2026 right back at No. 1, with Liberty Center and Rittman picked to round out the podium behind them, the same three programs that separated from the field a year ago.
Then there's Woodridge, which might be the best story in the entire poll. The Bulldogs' boys team won a state record eleventh cross country championship last fall, their first since 2020, and coach Jeff Howard called it one of the best teams the program has ever had. The coaches clearly agree that the group returning from that title run is still the class of Division III, sending Woodridge back to No. 1 on both the boys ballot and, remarkably, the girls ballot as well, where Woodridge checks in at No. 4 behind Huron, Oakwood, and Minerva.
The champions who got passed on the ballot
Here's where the poll gets more interesting, because in four divisions, the team that actually won it all last November isn't the preseason favorite this time around.
The most striking example is Beavercreek's boys team in Division I. The Beavers won their first ever state championship last November behind seniors Jackson Davis and Aiden Allen, a group that coach Howard Russ said promised each other as freshmen they'd eventually bring home a trophy. It's the kind of program-defining moment that usually buys a team the benefit of the doubt in a preseason poll. Instead, Beavercreek opens 2026 at No. 6, behind Mason, Springboro, Thomas Worthington, Olentangy Berlin, and Mentor. Some of that is graduation. Some of it is that Division I is loaded enough that even a defending champion has to prove it again. Either way, the reigning state champs are being asked to climb back up the board.
Something close to the same thing happened in Division II boys. Lexington won the 2025 title convincingly, scoring 110 points to outdistance Bowling Green's 190. This week's poll has Lexington at No. 5, picking up only two first place votes, well behind CVCA, which grabbed all ten first place votes at No. 1, along with Hoover, Massillon Perry, and Bowling Green. CVCA has been building toward this for a couple of seasons, and the coaches are signaling they think this is finally the Royals' year, defending champion or not.
Division IV boys tells a similar story with an extra layer. Convoy Crestview won the 2025 state title running away, scoring 86 points to Columbus Grove's 99. The preseason poll has that finish essentially upside down: Columbus Grove opens at No. 1, Tinora at No. 2, Cedarville at No. 3, and Convoy Crestview, the actual defending champion, all the way down at No. 4. Whatever the coaches saw over the summer, they clearly don't think the champs are the favorites anymore.
And on the girls side, Oakwood's Division III team put together one of the more dominant championship runs in the state last fall, winning its first ever title by 39 points over Huron. This week, the coaches flipped that finish, tabbing Huron at No. 1 and dropping Oakwood to No. 2. Huron was right there a year ago and clearly has the coaches' confidence that this is the season it closes the gap.
Even Division I girls has a version of this. Gahanna Lincoln won its first ever state championship last November by a comfortable 81 points over Hilliard Davidson. This week's poll has Milford at No. 1 with seven first place votes, with Gahanna Lincoln picking up three and sitting at No. 2. Milford clearly made an impression on somebody this preseason. Whether that impression holds up once teams start racing each other in September is exactly the kind of question a preseason poll can't answer and a state meet eventually will.
The team that isn't on the ballot at all
All of that is the normal churn of a preseason poll: reasonable people looking at incomplete information and disagreeing about who's better. Boys Division IV has a different kind of problem, and it's worth separating out from everything above.
Mount Gilead spent 2025 racing in Division III. For 2026, the school's enrollment moved it down to Division IV, the same reshuffling that happens to dozens of Ohio programs every two years. That's an easy team to lose track of if you spent all of last October thinking of Mount Gilead as a Division III program, and it appears that's exactly what happened here. Mount Gilead does not appear anywhere on this week's 27 team Division IV boys ballot.
That's a real gap, because the returning runner numbers say Mount Gilead should be in the conversation for the best team in the division, not absent from it. Using the five fastest returning 5K performances for every Division IV program, Mount Gilead projects a five runner average right around 16:35, the fastest mark in the division, ahead of Convoy Crestview's 16:38 and well clear of Columbus Grove's 16:53, the coaches' actual No. 1. Stretched across five scoring runners, that gap adds up to real minutes of separation, not a rounding error.
To be fair to the voters, they didn't miss the division entirely. Convoy Crestview at No. 4 and Russia at No. 5 both check out against the returning numbers too, so the coaches clearly know this is a loaded field. They just built that ballot without the one team that might be the fastest of the bunch, because that team wasn't playing in their division the last time anyone checked.
Where the poll knows something the numbers don't
It's worth saying plainly that this cuts both ways, and that's part of what makes a coaches' poll worth reading in the first place.
St. Xavier landed at No. 7 in the Division I boys poll with real point support. A pure returning runner projection doesn't have St. Xavier inside the top 20 at all, because that kind of model only knows about the runners who already raced varsity 5Ks last season. It has no way to account for a transfer, a breakout sophomore, or a program with St. Xavier's track record of reloading with talent that wasn't on last year's varsity roster. The coaches, who actually watch summer camps and early meets, are catching something the data physically can't see.
That's the honest tension running through this entire poll. The teams that won it all last fall and return most of their roster are, unsurprisingly, still favorites. The teams that lost key seniors are sliding, sometimes further than the raw numbers alone would suggest. And every so often, a team changes divisions or a new name breaks through, and the ballot needs one more look before it goes to print.
Ohio's cross country season isn't decided in August. It's decided in late October, on courses that don't care what any poll said back in preseason. But this poll sets the terms of the conversation for the next ten weeks, and on the numbers, it got far more right than wrong. It just has a little more catching up to do in a couple of spots, starting with a fast team in Division IV that nobody put on the list.
