In Play(er) of the Week, our goal is to highlight outstanding athletes or moments from games that deserve extra attention.

Alex Kermath ’26 is a member of the Wesleyan men’s cross country team, and recently became the first Cardinal in program history to be awarded the NESCAC Runner of the Week Award. Kermath won the award for his performance at the NCAA Pre-National Championship, where he led the Cards with a personal best time of 24:51.21, finishing 14th in a massive field of 405 runners. The performance secured a seventh-place finish for Wes out of 46 teams, and they placed ahead of three nationally ranked teams, becoming nationally ranked themselves for the first time since 2015 (at no. 26, now no. 25). The Argus recently sat down with Kermath to talk about the successful season so far and his hopes for the coming races.

A: When did you first start running cross country, or get involved in any track and field in general?

AK: I think seventh grade was when I first started, but my parents had me running little 5K events all the way since fifth grade. I guess I really committed in seventh grade, and that was when I really started loving the sport. But my parents always thought I was going to be a runner at one point or another. 

A: What made you fall in love with it from those early ages? 

 AK: Originally it was soccer and cross country, and I was doing both, and I really love both sports still, but there was something about the community of cross country that really sat well with me, both because you have a bunch of guys that are getting on the line to compete with each other, but at the same time, everyone is incredibly supportive. You want to beat the people that you’re racing against, but at the same time, you wouldn’t wish anything but the best for every one of them.

A: You talked about the community of cross country, but from the outside it can look like a more individual sport. How do you and your teammates stay together and keep a team mentality in mind? 

AK: It’s a lot easier in cross country, because we do get placed as a team, and we’re competing against other teams. So you want your teammates to do well, because that means you’ll do well. But we just had such a drive this season, because we’re trying to get nationally ranked. And it was crazy how everybody bought into the dream right away. And we are nationally ranked right now, so it’s looking really great for the season. But every race, we huddle up, and we talk about how we’re out here to perform for each other and every step you take should be for this team, and I feel like that adds an extra element of drive that you don’t usually have when you’re racing on your own or for yourself.

A: From your time at Wes, what’s the most rewarding thing, and then also the most challenging thing about being a student-athlete?

AK: It is really intense with the workload and just getting in all the races and all the workouts. But I feel like some of the most rewarding moments have been finishing a tough workout, and you’re really tired, but then you get yourself up with your team and go study. And you’re like, “Wow, this was a really tough day, but I pushed myself through it.” And it makes you feel optimistic for your capabilities, because you’re managing two things at once, but you’re still performing well in both of them.

A: So the reward is kind of in the challenge?

AK: Exactly, yeah. 

A: So at the beginning of the season, what were your personal hopes and your hopes for the team as an emerging program?

AK: To start off last year, we were eighth in the NESCAC. But I really just felt like this was going to be an amazing year for us. I was like, we’re going to Nationals, and I don’t know what it was, because based off our times, we had no chance of qualifying and putting ourselves on the national ranking board, but I really felt like everybody on the team really cared and really wanted to perform well. And so my only focus of the whole season was, “How can we get ourselves on the board?” I really wanted to race well, but I was only racing to get the team farther ahead. And I feel like that was what made the season so successful for me too. 

A: At the beginning of this year, what do you guys do to incorporate the first-years and bond as a team to establish that team-first mentality that you’re talking about?

AK: We have two weeks of preseason to start off, which is really great because the freshmen are really unfamiliar with the campus, and so we show them around a little bit. And we’re going on really long runs together, so you’ll have an hour and a half of running where it’s just you talking with these guys. And I think that really brings some people out of their shell.

A: For your performance at the Pre-National Championships, you became the first Cardinal in program history to be awarded the NESCAC Runner of the Week award. How does it feel to get that recognition?

AK: It was a really incredible feeling. I didn’t expect it at all. And the feeling of crossing the line was really unreal because I saw all my teammates coming through right after me, and we knew we had a good performance. There were teams that we needed to beat that were nationally ranked to put ourselves on there. And the second we realized that we had it, we just all popped off, jumping around. That feeling was insane. And then it settles in, and we get the national ranking, and then I get this award too. It really made me feel so hyped for the season, because it was our second race, and we were already having such an incredibly strong start. It made me hungry for more. I wanted my times to get faster, but I also wanted to keep the team moving. I think that feeling after we finished the race is probably the coolest moment I’ve had here at Wesleyan.

A: At the NESCAC Championships, you guys improved your place from last year, and held onto your national ranking. What do you remember about that race?

AK: So that was a tough one—I lost my shoe in the first half-mile—but [Liam] Calhoun [’26] really stepped up. The last couple years, NESCACs have been really challenging for us. A lot goes wrong. This time, the same thing happened again, where we’re all a little bit off kilter. But that was also what really made me love the team, because I was having issues, but I got back up there, and I was trying to score for the team, and then I see Calhoun up there putting on a show for the whole team, getting the points that we needed. So that made me even more hype. And we pulled together and placed fifth. We wanted to do better, beat Middlebury, beat Tufts, but it was exactly what we needed to stay nationally ranked. 

A: What do you think it is about this team that allows you to still finish really strong in a race like that with a lot of adversity?

AK: When I lost my shoe, I had to stop, and put it back on. So I’m starting the race pretty much dead last, and I’m trying to get back up to the front. I was talking to people afterwards, and the mentality across the team was just electric. People saw me drop out, and they were like, “When I saw you coming back up, I was getting ready to move people out of the way. I knew you needed to be there.” And then other people were like, “When you dropped out, I started speeding up to step up for the team.” Everybody in a situation like that are usually like,“Oh crap, we’re in trouble,” but everybody was just locked in that race, and they knew that someone need[ed] to step up. Calhoun stepped up, and we had a bunch of other people that had really great races. Everybody was buying in.

A: Now, in this two-week break before the NCAA DIII Regionals and National Championship, how are you and the team staying focused on the goal?

AK: Right now, we’re really focusing on bringing ourselves back, lowering the volume to keep ourselves healthy, and setting up all the training we’ve done over the summer, and over the whole season, to get ready to have a phenomenal performance in regionals. So I think the whole atmosphere is just gliding our way into the performance.

A: Finally, you’ve been running here for three years. So do you have any advice that you would give your first-year self about running, academics, or anything about your life at Wes?

AK: I had a really rough start to my freshman year. From running to sleep to academics, everything wasn’t clicking into place. The advice that I would give to myself would be to just focus on improvement. You can get down on yourself for not hitting the marks that you want to hit immediately. But just keep pushing yourself and focus on that improvement, because you can’t change what happened before, and so the only thing you can do is just make sure it doesn’t happen again. And thinking about how upset you were over something that happened is just gonna waste the time that you can be using to improve yourself. I definitely would just give the advice to focus on the improvement and focus on bettering yourself despite what happens.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Ethan Lee can be reached at ejlee@wesleyan.edu.