PITTSFORD, N.Y. – The Cortland men's cross country team opened its 2024 season with a fourth-place finish out of nine schools at the St. John Fisher Rodenbeck Invitational.
 
Cortland finished with a team score of 107 points, 10 better than Rochester and 10 behind third-place Nazareth. Geneseo won the title with 27 points, followed by RIT with 51.
 
Lenny Diaz (Newburgh/Newburgh Free Academy) was Cortland's top finisher on the 6,000-meter course with a 16th-place time of 20 minutes, 33.8 seconds. A total of 125 runners competed. RIT's Derick Koen won the race in 19:34.2.
 
Brandon Mulholland (Syracuse/Westhill) finished 22nd in 20:41.0. Cortland's next three finishers hit the finish line within a few seconds of each other. Paul Tommolino (Stony Brook/Ward Melville) placed 36th in 20:58.5, followed by Matthew Mullen (Medford/William Floyd) in 37th (21:02.0) and Robert Davidson (Setauket/Ward Melville) in 38th (21:02.5).
 
Rounding out Cortland's top seven were Vincent Smaldone (Red Hook) in 45th place (21:10.9) and Daniel Patrick (Manlius/Fayetteville-Manlius) in 47th place (21:16.2).

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

This turned out to be a pretty fun start to our season!

Since we had never been on this course before, those aspects were a bit of an unknown, making our race plan a bit of a guess more than we would normally like. When you combine that with the number of new folks that we don't really know yet, this whole experience felt a bit like going back to the Wild West!

We're pretty proud of how the teams did overall! We feel like there was pretty good execution of the various aspects we were working on: being relatively even in our splits and working really hard through the final 20 – 30% of the race. While we can't say that we executed this aspect perfectly with everybody that raced today, we feel really good about the fact that where we didn't we had a pretty good learning experience to improve on the next effort.

Obviously Melissa Innocent and Lenny Diaz were stars today for their finish (and setting the Cortland program records on the course), as were firstyears Brooke Keitel and Vincent Smaldone (for their strong races and setting the Cortland program rookie records)! A couple of other folks that stood out with pretty stellar efforts on the day would be firstyear Julia Benton who was steamrolling the field in the second half of the race – passing 30 people (!) – and junior Anthony Cawley, who put together one of the strongest races of his career to open up the season.

The long weekend gives us a chance to get some quality work in, and we should start to feel a good sense of routine as we go through our second week of classes. We're excited to work on some additional aspects of how to race – as well as to get some folks back into the routine of racing after illness or minor injury – next week for the invitational at Oswego on Saturday the 7^th.