HOUGHTON, N.Y. - The Cortland men's cross country squad finished in ninth place at the Houghton College Highlander Invitational.

The Red Dragons posted a score of 212 points. RIT was the team champion with 30 points in the 11-school field.

Freshman Mike Verde (Hopewell Junction/Arlington) was Cortland's top finisher in 28th place out of 140 runners with a time of 28:51.6 over the muddy 8,000-meter Houghton Field of Dreams Cross Country Course. RIT's Otto Kingstedt won the race in 26:15.6, almost a minute ahead of the runner-up finisher.

Freshman Clayton Santiago (Bethpage) placed 45th overall in 29:28.1, sophomore Pat Carew (Levittown/Division Avenue) was 72nd in 30:48.8, and sophomore Brian Thurston (Long Beach) was 80th in 31:08.5. Rounding out Cortland's contingent of six competitors - all freshmen and sophomores - were sophomore Jake Anweiler (New Hartford) in 96th place (31:55.2) and sophomore Ryan Behre (Flemington, NJ/Hunterdon Central) in 110th place (33:08.9).

Cortland heads to Glassboro, N.J., next Saturday for the Rowan University Inter-Region Border Battle.

Complete Results:
Men
Women

Coach's Corner - Comments from Head Coach Steve Patrick following the Houghton Highlander Invitational

For the second time in as many weekends, we were running under the very strange conditions of warm, humid, and incredibly muddy!  I suppose that we should be thankful that the rain stopped and the forecasted thunder and lightning storms never materialized.
 
We chose to focus a number of our top performers on getting a quality workout in this weekend, so we weren't running at full strength.  That being said, we certainly had some really nice performances!  For the ladies earning 6th as a team was a pretty solid accomplishment; Courtney Maurin, Jill Leggiero, Catherine Zamroz, and Gabby Vogt had really great efforts, especially as compared to our first 6k of the season just three weeks ago.  We had a lot of positive movement as compared to some other runners we have seen consistently across the season!  It's a lot of fun to see the hard work paying off and the improvement coming!  There's still work to be done, but we have to feel pretty darn good about where we are right now.
 
While the men's team didn't fare as well on the scoreboard, the work that we did was pretty outstanding.  Using a few key individuals from other schools that we have seen at other meets already this year, our top two freshmen guys – Mike Verde and Clayton Santiago – have shown great improvement.  They have gone from being about 30 seconds behind those 'markers' to 30 seconds in front over the span of the three weeks from their first 8k until today.  That's quite good progress, and should be quite helpful for us down the stretch.  Pat Carew also had a pretty stellar effort today, especially when looking at some of 'index runners' from other programs.