LOGAN TOWNSHIP, N.J. – The Cortland women's cross country team, ranked 10th in the Niagara region, turned in a 12th-place finish out of 36 schools in the championship race of the Inter-Regional Border Battle, hosted by Rowan University.
 
Cortland finished with 375 points, four better than Christopher Newport and eight behind Rowan. Geneseo won the team title with 37 points, followed by Carleton at 38 and RPI at 109.
 
The 6,000-meter race featured 308 runners. Khalifah Tracey (Greenville) was Cortland's top performer with a 44th-place time of 23 minutes, 36.2 seconds over 6,000 meters. Vanessa Burkard (Newfane) was 50th in 23:43.4. Carleton's Clara Mayfield won the race in 20:48.4, more than 30 seconds faster than the runner-up.
 
Marlee Angus (Penfield) placed 97th in 24:29.1, Devin Reilly (Irvington) was 111th in 24:44.0, and Adrienne Martin (Cincinnatus/Norwich) finished 112th in 24:44.9. Closing out the Cortland top seven were Kristin Ieva (North Babylon) in 135th (25:03.3) and Savannah Adami (Guilderland) in 182nd (26:04.6).
 
Cortland's next competition will be the Cornell University John Reif Memorial Run on Friday at 4:30 p.m.

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

Mostly we had a pretty successful day for the women's program across both the 'championship' and 'open' races. We made a number of mistakes, but they weren't tragic, and being here was great in that it exposed those mistakes so that we can learn from them. It's always great to see where we stack up against teams both inside of and outside of our region and having the opportunity to take down teams ranked in front of us is a nice achievement. In particular, the four ladies that ran in the 'open' race (Francesca Frasco, Emma Murphy, Anika Parnell, and Deirdre Sullivan) had very strong efforts – they were able to learn from mistakes made earlier in the day by the folks in the 'championship' race, and didn't repeat them. That's a pretty good sign from the program overall – when we are focused on improving, we'll get where we want to be.
 
The men's races showed significantly more mistakes. This was our first real race against a strong field, and we didn't rise to the occasion the way we expected. That does provide us with a good learning experience. To be clear, we didn't 'race soft' or give up (for the most part); our mistake was not being focused enough on what we needed to do in the moment as compared to being focused on running hard. That's an understandable error, and it should be one that we are able to correct moving forward. We also had a few injury issues that held us back, and despite our misguided focus, we had some reasonable performances – Hunter Brignall actually set our new 'course record,' which even though wasn't what we wanted, is a positive to take note of.
 
For the most part we are training through the next two weeks for the SUNYAC Championships, although a few folks will get a shorter race effort in this upcoming Friday over at Cornell.