CANTON, N.Y. – Sam Himes (Amherst/Sweet Home) and Sydney Smith (Niskayuna) each recorded top-50 finishes to help Cortland earn a 10th-place team showing out of 20 schools at the St. Lawrence Ronald C. Hoffmann Invitational.
 
Cortland finished with 295 points, with Rochester (59) and RIT (92) taking the top two spots.
 
Himes was 46th out of 220 runners over 6,000 meters in 24:33.4, and Smith finished 49th in 24:36.6. Parley Hannan of Ithaca was the individual winner in 22:08.9.
 
Three other Red Dragons finished in the top 75. Madison Ciuffetelli (Dix Hills/Half Hollow Hills East) was 62nd in 24:53.6, McKenzie Dombroski (Chittenango) placed 66th in 24:59.6, and Courtney Maurin (Pine Bush) ended 75th in 25:10.8.
 
Rounding out Cortland's top seven performers were Cat Zamroz (Levittown/Island Trees) in 106th place (25:41.8) and Sera King (Oceanside) in 126th place (26:01.6).
 
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:
Women
Men

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.