ROCHESTER, N.Y. – The Cortland men's cross country team earned a seventh-place finish out of 21 teams at the Roberts Wesleyan Harry F. Anderson Invitational.

The Red Dragons finished with a team score of 190 points, 18 behind Fredonia and 27 ahead of Houghton. The host school won the meet with 23 points, followed by Geneseo (69), St. Bonaventure (155), Penn St. Behrend (160) and Le Moyne (164) in the top five.

Cortland placed three runners among the top 40 in the 256-competitor field. Mike Verde (Hopewell Junction/Arlington) finished 20th with an 8,000-meter time of 26:49.5. Christopher Sims of Roberts Wesleyan won the race in 25:15.7. Cabel McCandless (Lindenhurst) was 32nd in 27:16.6 and Cameron Szabo (Owego/Owego Free Academy) finished 36th in 27:20.9.

Four other Red Dragons earned top-70 showings, led by Clayton Santiago (Bethpage) in 60th place (28:04.2). Ryan Konotopskyj (East Amherst/Williamsville North) was 65th (28:09.4), while Dan Gross (East Moriches/Center Moriches) and Chad Dunham (Central Square/Paul V. Moore) basically crossed the line together in 69th (28:13.2) and 70th (28:13.4) place, respectively.

Rounding out Cortland's top 10 performers were Pat Carew (Levittown/Division Avenue) in 78th place (28:26.2), Gavin Watkins (Endicott/Owego Free Academy) in 84th place (28:42.9), and Nolan Vest (Coram/Longwood) in 87th place (28:53.5).

Cortland returns to action next Saturday at the Geneseo Mike Woods Invitational in Mount Morris.

Complete Results:
Men
Women

Coach's Corner - Comments from Cortland Head Coach Steve Patrick:

We had a really nice trip back to the Rochester, NY area today to compete at Roberts Wesleyan College.  This meet has been consistently pretty good for us in the past year, and this year proved no exception.  We were once again blessed with beautiful weather, and a fun fast course with good competition.
 
This fall the calendar has 'shifted' a little bit, so we have had an extra weekend built into both September and October.  With that in mind, today was an opportunity to try and work on improving the team by having some folks hold back early to help pace runners that are normally a bit more back in the pack.  We understood that it might impact our team score negatively today, but that it would greatly help our team score in the meets that really count for us!
 
For the men, seniors Cabel McCandless and Chad Dunham did great work to help bring some of our other runners 'up to speed; sophomores Mike Verde and Clayton Santiago also put their individual goals on the back burner to help the program.  We had some great success with this strategy today, as freshman Cameron Szabo ran a tremendous race to finish in 26th overall with a pretty big improvement in time.  Since Cam has been our 6th or 7th runner the past few weeks, knowing that he can place that high gives us a lot of confidence moving forward!  His time puts him on our top-10 leaderboard for freshmen on this course, which is great!  Today's strategy seemed to really help out a lot of our returners to take a step in the right direction as well, with big efforts from sophomore Dan Gross and junior Pat Carew, as well as great progress back from injury for seniors Ryan Konotopskyj and Nolan Vest.  Freshmen Gavin Watkins, Josh Nogaret and Ryan Cory all took a step in the right direction as well!
 
For the Lady Red Dragons, junior Sam Himes did a lot of pacing work today, but you wouldn't know it from her overall finish.  She absolutely crushed her last mile, running under 6 minutes to move through the field after a controlled first two miles!   Having the chance to go back down to a 5k after the 6k last week was a nice treat, and allowed us to emphasize running a bit faster, which is also good preparation for the rest of the season.  Sophomore Sydney Smith led the team and earned a spot on the all-time top 10 list for this course, while freshman McKenzie Dombroski had a nice run as our #3 to earn a spot in our top 10 list for freshman.  Both of those are quite exciting to consider!  While a lot of the women's team had really solid efforts today, junior Cat Zamroz really stood out in terms of how strong and consistent her effort was today.
 
We're looking forward to a hard week of training as we head into the part of the season that can count for NCAA advancement purposes, beginning with a 6k and 8k next Saturday at Letchworth State Park.