LOGAN TOWNSHIP, N.J. – The Cortland men's cross country team, ranked fourth in the Niagara region, finished in ninth place out of 36 schools in the championship race of the Inter-Regional Border Battle, hosted by Rowan University.
 
Cortland finished with a team score of 292 points, three ahead of Carleton. RPI claimed the team title with 39 points, followed by Geneseo (77) and Lynchburg (79).
 
Hunter Brignall (Seneca Falls/Mynderse Academy) was Cortland's top finisher in the 309-runner field with a 22nd-place time of 25 minutes, 27.4 seconds over 8,000 meters. RPI's Matthew Lecky won the race in 24:15.1.
 
Ryan Cory (Beacon) placed 29th in 25:46.7, Harry Tomasi (Port Jervis) was 54th in 26:05.1 and Cameron Szabo (Owego/Owego Free Academy) finished 64th in 26:12.0. Rounding out Cortland's top seven were Ben Zinger (Liverpool) in 150th (27:38.2), RJ Davis (Cicero/Cicero-North Syracuse) in 155th (27:40.5) and Robert Davidson (Setauket/Ward Melville) in 162nd (27:47.2).
 
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.