PITTSFORD, N.Y. – The Cortland women's cross country team finished in fourth place finish out of nine schools at the St. John Fisher Rodenbeck Invitational in the Red Dragons' 2024 season opener.
 
Cortland finished with a team score of 120 points, edging fifth-place Nazareth by four points. Geneseo won the title with 41 points, followed by RIT with 57 and St. John Fisher with 90.
 
The Red Dragons were led by Melissa Innocent (Elmont/Valley Stream North), who finished 12th out of 117 runners with a time of 16 minutes, 11.3 seconds over 4,000 meters. Geneseo's Ari Reback won the race in 15:07.5.
 
Cortland's next seven finishers all earned top-50 showings. Kristin Ieva (North Babylon) crossed the finish line in 24th place in 16:42.2 and Brooke Keitel (Manorville/Eastport-South Manor) was 27th in 16:49.3. Julia Benton (Addison) placed 36th (17:00.7), Devin Reilly (Irvington) was 40th (17:05.3) and Phoebe Peer (Saranac Lake) finished 43rd (17:07.6). Anne Barney (Oakland, NJ/Indian Hills) was clocked in 17:14.4 for 46th place and Bri Ostheller (Penfield) placed 49th in 17:25.1.

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.