HOUGHTON, N.Y. – Cortland placed 10 runners in the top half of the field on its way to a fourth-place team finish at the Houghton Highlander Invitational men's cross country meet.
 
The Red Dragons finished with 120 points. RIT was the champion in the 10-team field with 35 points.
 
Clayton Santiago (Bethpage) finished 20th out of 123 runners with a time of 27 minutes, 3.0 seconds over 8,000 meters. Matthew Mullen (Mastic/William Floyd) was 22nd in 27:08.6. Daemen's Jonathan Moore won the race in 25:30.1.
 
Ben Zinger (Liverpool) turned in a 27th-place finish in 27:18.8, followed directly by Robert Davidson (Setauket/Ward Melville) in 28th (27:20.6) and Tom Adamescu (Canandaigua/Canandaigua Academy) in 29th (27:26.6). Brandon Mulholland (Syracuse/Westhill) was close behind that group in 31st place (27:33.0).
 
Cortland's next four runners included Daniel Patrick (Manlius/Fayetteville-Manlius) in 38th place (27:48.4), Marc Lucasey (Dobbs Ferry) in 44th place (28:07.0), Nate Wilsoncroft (Horseheads) in 47th place (28:13.4) and Alex Brodmerkel (West Babylon) in 57th place (28:36.6).
 
Cortland will head to New Jersey next Saturday to compete at Rowan University's Inter-Regional Border Battle.

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

Since the men raced first I'll begin with comments about their race effort today. Things went about as good as we could have hoped for overall. We went into today to work on how our main group could 'close' over the final two miles, so the group was intentionally reserved through the 3 mile mark (we also held out our top 4 guys to focus on training, so we weren't worried about the overall team score). It was quite a sight to see a pack of eight men come around the corner at the 3 mile mark, looking very relaxed! Those top eight really pushed over the final two miles, as each of them ran a faster pace over the final two miles as compared to the first three. It's worth noting that Brandon Mulholland, in his first 8k, broke our firstyear record for the course!

We had a similar strategy for the women's team to stay intentionally relaxed and packed together through the two mile mark. It was a really nice surprise to see a pack of eight together still at the three mile mark! The top seven were able to get faster over each mile of the race, which is very encouraging for next week's race at Rowan. Having the team stuck together (our top five were only separated by 10 seconds at the finish) is a pretty remarkable achievement. I think the way that Vanessa Burkard and Khalifah Tracey focused on the team performance as compared to their individual efforts was very important to help us grow as a program, and it is very much appreciated.

The upcoming 'Inter-regional Rumble' at Rowan is a great opportunity to see how we stack up next weekend. We've been putting in good consistent work, and are excited for the chance to really compete next Saturday.