ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Six Red Dragons placed in the top half of the field at the University of Rochester's women's cross country Yellowjacket Invitational.

Sydney Smith (Niskayuna) led the Red Dragon contingent with a 40th-place finish out of 226 competitors with a time of 24:19.9 over 6,000 meters at Genesee Valley Park. Geneseo's Genny Corcoran won the race in 21:50.1. Sam Himes (Amherst/Sweet Home) finished in 47th place in 24:26.9 and Madison Ciuffetelli (Dix Hills/Half Hollow Hills East) was 57th in 24:39.2.

Courtney Maurin (Pine Bush) finished the course in 24:59.0 to place 66th. Eliza Nichols (Smithtown/Smithtown West) was 98th in 25:48.8, with Cat Zamroz (Levittown/Island Trees) about five seconds behind her in 103rd place (25:53.8). Courtney Schoepflin (Chaffee/Pioneer) rounded out Cortland's top seven with a 116th-place finish in 26:24.3.

Cortland finished 10th out of 16 teams with 252 points, 31 points better than Division II Le Moyne and just seven points behind St. John Fisher. Division I Cornell won the meet with 41 points, followed by Geneseo (59) and Rochester (60).

Cortland will compete next Saturday at the Roberts Wesleyan Harry F. Anderson Invitational.

Complete Results:
Women
Men

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.