PREBLE, N.Y. - The Cortland women's cross country team opened the 2021 season with a first-place finish out of three schools at the Cortland Short Course Invitational, hosted by the Red Dragons at Dwyer Memorial Park in nearby Preble. 
 
Cortland finished with 25 points, followed by Oneonta with 37 and Oswego with 71. Tompkins Cortland Community College also competed but only had two runners in the race. 
 
Vanessa Burkard (Newfane) placed first out of 36 runners on the 4,000-meter course in 15 minutes, 55.7 seconds. Oneonta's Megan Francoeur was second in 16:09.2, followed by Cortland runners Khalifah Tracey (Greenville) in third (16:24.2) and Rachel Castello (Cheektowaga/West Seneca East) in fourth (16:28.7). 
 
Rounding out the Cortland top seven were Cat Zamroz (Levittown/Island Trees) in eighth place (17:22.9) and Sophie Steger (Montgomery/Valley Central) in ninth place (17:23.2), Devin Reilly (Irvington) in 12th place (17:41.7), and Marlee Angus (Penfield) in 15th place (17:53.3). 
 
Cortland will travel to Rochester next Saturday for the University of Rochester Yellowjacket Invitational.

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

First and foremost, it's important to take a moment or two and reflect on how lucky we are to be able to practice as a program again, let alone to be able to race. Certainly the events of the past 18 months have been trying, and doing anything on the anniversary of the attacks on our country should, if nothing else, be treated as great opportunities to challenge ourselves, and not get taken out of context. It's important that we solemnly remember the attacks on our country, as well as the lives lost on that day and in defense of our nation.
 
Secondly, we're lucky to have had the opportunity to host at Dwyer Park, and are appreciative of the efforts of the County, our campus, administration, volunteers and team members not racing today to pull it off. Even a relatively small meet like this is a large undertaking with a lot of moving pieces to make it run well.
 
We're quite pleased with the team efforts today (of course, picking up two invitational wins is always fun)! For some of our team, this was the first race they have done of any sort since February of 2020. That's a long time to go without racing! For all of our sophomores, this was their first collegiate cross country race, but you wouldn't have known it by the results.  In particular three of our top five for the Lady Red Dragons (Vanessa Burkard, Khalifah Tracey, and Sophie Steger) are all sophomores who raced with a great deal of maturity and poise. We couldn't be more pleased with how they executed their race plans today! We have a lot of learning (and training) to do as a team still, but feel very pleased with how we have started things off!
 
The men's team had an equally impressive day – overall the guys may have had a few more folks not performing as well as we expected, but the depth of the program covered us. The men's team has been making a really conscientious effort to work together as a team, and it definitely showed through the overall performances today. You could spot the pace groups working together through the first half of the race, and that put us in pretty good position to grind out the final 2000 meters. Ryan Cory was especially impressive today – Ryan is one of those folks that hadn't raced since early 2020, and was training entirely on his own from November of 2020 until two weeks ago. He clearly put in a great deal of effort over that time period, and it's great to see the reward come through for him individually and for what it meant for the program.  I'd also like to make mention of freshman Matt Mullen, who showed a lot of patience early in the race, and a great deal of toughness late when it matters!
 
We're looking forward to the trip to Rochester next weekend to race the full 6k and 8k distances!