CANTON, N.Y. – Cortland finished in 13th place out of 21 schools at the St. Lawrence University Ronald C. Hoffmann Invitational as the Red Dragons' top nine runners all placed within the top half of the 277-competitor field.
 
Cabel McCandless (Lindenhurst) was Cortland's top finisher with a 77th-place time of 27:18.5 over 8,000 meters. Dadley Ogetii of St. Lawrence won the race in 25:26.2. Chad Dunham (Central Square/Paul V. Moore) was 93rd in 27:35.0 and Nolan Vest (Coram/Longwood) placed 98th in 27:37.5.
 
Clayton Santiago (Bethpage), Mike Verde (Hopewell Junction/Arlington) and Hunter Braun (Rochester/Victor) crossed the finish line with a few seconds of each other. Santiago was 107th (27:43.9), Verde finished 110th (27:47.7) and Braun was 111th (27:47.8).
 
Ryan Konotopskyj (East Amherst/Williamsville North) rounded out the top seven for Cortland in 126th place (28:08.5). Dan Gross (East Moriches/Center Moriches) and Jake Anweiler (New Hartford) ended 135th (28:17.5) and 136th (28:18.8), respectively.
 
Cortland finished with 410 points. Ithaca won the meet with 54 points, followed by St. Lawrence with 64.
 
Cortland will have runners competing next weekend at the Rowan Inter-Regional Border Battle in New Jersey as well as at a meet hosted by SUNY ESF in Tully.

Complete Results:
Men
Women

Coach's Corner - Comments from Cortland Head Coach Steve Patrick:

An outsider might look at the results from today and be concerned that we didn't do well; I'm extremely pleased with how things went overall today!

We made the trip up to St. Lawrence with two main goals in mind: first, it was a chance to get on the course that will serve as the regional championships in November, and to learn how the course runs and how other teams run the course.  We haven't been up here since 2013, so we definitely needed to come back up and have the team learn it.  Our second goal was to give our top folks a lighter week in terms of racing and to use the 'power of the pack' to help our next group of performers to run a stronger race.  It's amazing when you just focus on staying with a teammate how much better you can do!  That worked out pretty well for the group as a whole today, but it seemed to go especially well for Nolan Vest, Josh Nogaret, and Jake Anweiler for the men, and for Courtney Maurin and Sera King in particular for the women.

In terms of working on specific aspects of racing, it's pretty worth noting that based on the 'live' scores at 2 miles, our men moved up six spots as a team and our women moved up nine by the finish!  That's an aspect of racing we really wanted to emphasize today, and we did that quite well.

Today was definitely a good step forward for the program; next weekend at Rowan and at ESF should be good opportunities to see where we stand prior to the conference championships.