FREDONIA, N.Y. – The Cortland men's cross country team claimed the top four individual places and six of the top 10 to repeat as champion at the season-opening Fredonia State Invitational.

The Red Dragons finished with a score of 17 points, easily better than host Fredonia's runner-up 46 points. Oswego placed third (57) and Onondaga Community College was fourth (90).

Senior Cabel McCandless (Lindenhurst) won the 6,000-meter race in 20:10.83, followed by senior Chad Dunham (Central Square/Paul V. Moore) in second in 20:17.45. Sophomore Clayton Santiago (Bethpage) crossed the finish line third in 20:35.75 and sophomore Mike Verde (Hopewell Junction/Arlington) was fourth in 20:41.83.

Senior James Forte (Merrick/Sanford H. Calhoun) turned in a seventh-place time of 20:52.25 and freshman Cameron Szabo (Owego/Owego Free Academy) placed ninth in 20:56.33. Freshman Gavin Watkins (Endicott/Owego Free Academy) rounded out the Red Dragon top seven with an 11th-place finish (21:08.05).

Cortland will compete next Saturday at Hamilton College's Short Course Invitational. The race is scheduled for 11:30 a.m., with the women opening the event at 11 a.m.

Women's Results
Men's Results

Coach's Corner - Comments from Head Coach Steve Patrick

This was a really fun meet to open the season with!  As a program we demonstrated a great deal of maturity and commitment; the leadership of our returning student-athletes was quite helpful as well in terms of getting the team results we wanted out of today!
 
The 2019 season was opened by the Red Dragon Men, who put on a pretty good show.  Despite sitting out a couple of seniors who are returning from injury a 17-point performance, even in a small field like this, is pretty darn enjoyable to be a part of!  While our two seniors up front (Cabel McCandless and Chad Dunham) did a great job, sophomores Clayton Santiago and Mike Verde were pretty exceptional, running nearly 90 seconds faster than they did a year ago to place 3rd and 4th overall is the race!  What might be even a bit more exciting, however, is having five freshmen that ran faster today than those guys did last year – the efforts from Cameron Szabo, Gavin Watkins, Tom Adamescu, Ryan Cory, and Josh Nogaret were something special to watch today.  I'd be pretty remiss if I didn't also mention what a great race senior James Forte had to be our 5th guy, and the 7th overall finisher.
 
The Lady Red Dragons performed incredibly well, with our top five running as a tight pack through the race; all five ladies (by order of finish Sydney Smith, Sam Himes, McKenzie Dombroski, Madison Ciuffetelli, and Courtney Maurin) running faster than our #2 runner did last year at this meet.  They worked incredibly well together to earn the 2nd – 6th spots in the race, for an eventual score of 20 points.  We went into the race hoping to have 'pace groups' working together for most of the race to help us prepare for the bigger races later in the season.  At the halfway point in the race, we had all five of our groups still intact; this is a pretty rare occurrence in distance running to have folks be that focused and performing!  The other example of how exceptional the women's team was today is that all 20 of our ladies ran either even splits today, or ran negative splits.  The course at Fredonia is a 2000-meter loop that the ladies run twice; all of our women either ran the same time for both loops, or ran faster on the second loop.  That was one of the main goals we had for the team today, and to have a 100% success rate is just great!
 
We're looking forward to a good week of training, and the short trip to Hamilton College next week for another short-course race.