LOGAN TOWNSHIP, N.J. and TULLY, N.Y. – The Cortland men's cross country team finished in 12th place out of 29 schools at the Rowan University Inter-Regional Border Battle. In addition, the Red Dragons sent a handful of runners to SUNY ESF's Mighty Oak Invitational, held in Tully.

Cortland ended with a team score of 386 points in New Jersey. Carnegie Mellon (51) and Johns Hopkins (54) claimed the top two spots.

Cabel McCandless (Lindenhurst) finished in 50th place out of 256 runners with a time of 25:27.9 over the DREAM Park 8,000-meter course. Patrick Watson of Stevenson University was the individual champion in 24:00.1.

Mike Verde (Hopewell Junction/Arlington) recorded a time of 25:42.8 to finish 64th and Clayton Santiago (Bethpage) turned in an 82nd-place time of 25:57.3. Nolan Vest (Coram/Longwood) was 103rd in 26:16.4, and Dan Gross (East Moriches/Center Moriches) ended in 133rd place (26:37.6).

At the ESF meet, Cortland officially finished third out of three teams with 70 points. Some schools did not have enough runners to post a team score. St. John Fisher won with 23 points, followed by SUNY-ESF with 34 and Cortland with 70.

Gavin Watkins (Endicott/Owego Free Academy) finished 11th out of 58 runners in 17:29.6 over 5,000 meters. Josh Nogaret (New Berlin/Unadilla Valley) was 12th in 17:41.3, Cameron Szabo (Owego/Owego Free Academy) placed 16th (17:51.5) and Tom Adamescu (Canandaigua/Canandaigua Academy) was 17th (17:58.5). Rich Samuels (Wallkill) rounded out the Red Dragons' top five in 22nd place (18:11.7).

Cortland will send runners to Cornell University's John Reif Memorial Run on Friday at 4:30 p.m.

Complete Results:
Women - Border Battle
Men - Border Battle
ESF - Both Races

Coaches Corner - Comments from Cortland's coaching staff following Rowan and ESF meets:

Head Coach Steve Patrick regarding meet at Rowan:
 
This trip can be pretty frustrating, as it is a pretty far trip and we always have to be a little concerned about how the course will play out there.  On the other hand, it offers up pretty good competition and when the weather cooperates like it did today, it can be a pretty fast course!
 
We went into today with the goal of pushing our comfort zone pretty far after the first mile of the race.  For the men, we did a great job of this!  A lot of the guys were in the strange position of feeling like they were moving really slow at the end, but it was only compared to earlier races when they may have had too much left.  It's good to have an opportunity to see where the 'red-line' is, so we can learn both how to handle being there and how to move that line to our advantage.  We're very confident that this is was a breakthrough for a lot of the men, and that we can capitalize moving forward.  While we had eight performances that we were quite pleased with, I think that Clayton Santiago, Nolan Vest, Dan Gross, and Ryan Behre all stood out a bit more on the day.  We weren't thrilled with the team score, but we did lose one of our top runners to illness on the day, and had a guy with a calf issue that crept up in the last mile; he still ran a lifetime best for the 8k!
 
The women's squad was batting about .500 on the day, which isn't where we wanted to be.  We certainly had a number of folks that did a great job of pushing that comfort zone into new territory, especially freshwomen Sera King, Lexi MacAneney, and Rachel Castello.  Most of the rest of the squad at Rowan did 'OK,' and hopefully we have been able to point out where we missed some opportunities for the future, and learn from it.  It's frustrating in that we didn't perform as well as we are capable of, but on the positive side we didn't have very many 'poor' performances today.  It's also encouraging because just like with the men's squad, our ladies had some issues to deal with as we were missing one of our usual top five runners, and another typical member of our top five ended up tripping and falling early in the race.
 
Assistant coach Jordyn Naylon regarding ESF meet:

We took a small group at the ESF Mighty Oaks Invitational, with a main goal of getting in a quick and low-key 5k, especially for some of our freshman men who are coming back from some minor injuries.  This course is relatively flat with some hills in the later part of the looped course.  It was a good learning experience for our team to realize that hills might slow us down while climbing them, but that we need to get back on pace after cresting them.  We may have let that slide a bit today.  Our top finishers, freshmen Gavin Watkins and Josh Nogaret, both put together pretty reasonable efforts; on the women's side sophomore Dorena Motta ran a really tough race, where she hit her paces well and pushed through the tough part of the course to finish strong the last mile.  That's exciting to see after she had a pretty long and frustrating layoff from injury.

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We're heading into the championship part of the season, with the SUNYAC championships in two weeks at the Hudson Valley SPORTSDOME.  Most of the team will be preparing for that through next weekend, while a small contingent will be racing a 5k over at Cornell University next weekend.