ROCHESTER, N.Y. – The Cortland men's cross country team finished eight out of 18 teams at the University of Rochester Yellowjacket Invitational.
The Red Dragons posted a score of 245 points, two better than Division II Le Moyne and four spots better than Division I Colgate. Another Division I program, Cornell, won the team title with 46 points, followed by Geneseo (89) and Rochester (96).
Cabel McCandless (Lindenhurst) was Cortland's top individual with a 32nd-place finish out of 229 runners. He covered the 8,000-meter layout at Genesee Valley Park in 27:08.2.
Mike Verde (Hopewell Junction/Arlington) was 41st in 27:21.6 and
Chad Dunham (Central Square/Paul V. Moore) was 43rd in 27:23.8. Cornell's Rishabh Prakash won the race in 25:45.5.
Cortland's next five finishers were all within the top 100 of the field.
Clayton Santiago (Bethpage) finished 56th (27:34.5).
Jose Cruz (Ellenville) and
Cameron Szabo (Owego/Owego Free Academy) placed 82nd (28:16.1) and 83rd (28:19.7), respectively,
Pat Carew (Levittown/Division Avenue) was 88th (28:31.1), and
Dan Gross (East Moriches/Center Moriches) finished 97th (28:35.9).
Cortland will compete next Saturday at the Roberts Wesleyan Harry F. Anderson Invitational.
Complete Results:
Men
Women
Coach's Corner - Comments from Head Coach Steve Patrick
We lucked out in a pretty big way today in terms of having cooperative weather! That always makes things a little more enjoyable.
For today's meet, it was the first 8k of the year for the men, and the first 6k of the year for the women, so our emphasis was on learning how to run these races more than anything else. We went in with the intention of getting primarily a good workout-type effort in to learn about the distance and racing in a bigger field, and walked out with a number of lifetime PRs, while most of the squad ran their fastest time for this course ever by a large margin. Both teams, overall, had really strong committed efforts, which is a great habit to be getting into! For the seven ladies that ran this course both last year and today, we averaged close to 1 minute 55 seconds faster; the six men who ran last year averaged nearly 1 minute 17 seconds faster this year. While she didn't have our largest improvement, senior Courtney Maurin did run over two and a half minutes faster this year as compared to last, and broke the 25-minute barrier for the first time as our fourth runner today!
We're battling some injuries and illness on the women's side, but are certainly happy with the efforts we had there! Our top four ladies were within 2 seconds of each other at the 4000 meter mark, which is what we were looking to do; we had some pretty darn fast final 2k splits from nearly the entire team! Getting some good work in tomorrow and through this week should help make next week's 5k effort at Roberts Wesleyan College a great one!
The men's team was also focusing on being controlled for the majority of the race, and then trying to close hard over the final 2000 meters. We had great success in this department, with a large majority going much faster over the final 2k than the rest of the race. We had a couple of men make our top 10 list for rookies, with junior
Jose Cruz (on his birthday, no less, in his first season of cross country) and true freshman
Cameron Szabo taking a couple of spots away. When you consider that most of our top 10 list comes from regional championships held on this course, it's quite an achievement to break into that list so early in the season.
We'll probably switch to focus on more pack running tactics for the 8k this upcoming weekend at Roberts Wesleyan, which will be a good step for our team's development for the eventual championship season in November.
