LOGAN TOWNSHIP, N.J. and TULLY, N.Y. – Cortland, led by three runners in the top half of the field, finished in 19th place out of 27 schools at the Rowan University Inter-Regional Border Battle women's cross country meet. Cortland also sent some runners to compete at SUNY ESF Mighty Oak Invitational, held in Tully.

Sam Himes (Amherst/Sweet Home) led the Red Dragon contingent in New Jersey with a 31st-place finish out of 224 runners. She finished the 6,000-meter layout at DREAM Park in 22:33.4. Geneseo's Genny Corcoran won the race in 20:24.9.

Madison Ciuffetelli (Dix Hills/Half Hollow Hills East) finished 76th in 23:28.6 and Courtney Maurin (Pine Bush) was 106th in 24:04.0.

Cortland's next four finishers all placed within six seconds and 11 spots of each other. McKenzie Dombroski (Chittenango) was 130th (24:28.0), Cat Zamroz (Levittown/Island Trees) ended 137th (24:29.9), Jill Leggiero (East Greenbush/Columbia) finished 139th (24:31.2) and Sera King (Oceanside) was 141st (24:34.0).

Cortland finished with a team score of 451 points, 14 behind Mary Washington and 37 ahead of Denison. Johns Hopkins easily took the team title with 26 points, followed by Dickinson with 76.

At the ESF meet, Cortland was fourth in a four-team field with 97 points. St. John Fisher won with 24 points, followed by SUNY-ESF (40), Potsdam (82) and Cortland.

Dorena Motta (Manahawkin, NJ/Southern Regional) led Cortland with an 15th-place time of 22:35.5 over 5,000 meters. Riley Corey of St. John Fisher won the 42-runner race in 19:51.9. Maryrose O'Connell (Hampton Bays) was 18th in 22:46.1, followed by Lauren Hernandez (Beacon) in 19th place in 23:03.9. Avery Tompkins (Apalachin/Owego Free Academy) (28th, 24:36.8) and Christina Marchitelli (Staten Island/St. Joseph by the Sea) (36th, 26:52.8) rounded out Cortland's entrants.

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.