ROCHESTER, N.Y. – The Cortland women's cross country team placed 11th out of 17 schools at the University of Rochester Yellowjacket Invitational, held Saturday at Genesee Valley Park.
 
Cortland registered a team score of 314 points, easily ahead of Division I Le Moyne's 355 points. Geneseo won the title with 32 points, followed by Division I Colgate with 82 points.
 
Anne Barney (Oakland, NJ/Indian Hills) and Kristin Ieva (North Babylon) were Cortland's top two runners in 68th and 69th place, respectively, out of 220 competitors. Barney covered the 6,000-meter course in 25 minutes, 6.3 seconds and Ieva finished in 25:08.4. Geneseo's Penelope Greene won the race in 21:49.4.
 
Cortland's next three finishers placed in the top 100. Julia Benton (Addison) was 82nd in 25:21.1, while Devin Reilly (Irvington) finished in 89th place (25:27.3) and Deirdre Sullivan (Tappan/Tappan Zee) was 100th (25:43.4).
 
Rounding out the Red Dragons' top seven were Phoebe Peer (Saranac Lake), who crossed the finish line in 107th place (25:51.2), and Brooke Keitel (Manorville/Eastport-South Manor), who placed 115th (26:00.8).

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

It was nice to get into a bigger field and to see how we responded to that level of competition. As this was the first full-length race of the year, we had that dimension as something to work on as well.
 
We're pretty pleased with how the women's team performed today! We had a number of tough efforts by the women as a whole, and for the most part even when we didn't execute every part of the race as well as we might have hoped for, we were accountable for where we could have done better. The great folks at Leone Timing were providing splits and scoring every 2000 meters, and the way in which we move up in the race (and decreased our score) was pretty dramatic and showed that we are well on the right track. While our firstyear women did a very nice job with handling the longest race distance of their lives, Julia Benton really stood out with an extremely strong final loop on the course to be our third finisher!
 
While the men had a few more mistakes than the women today, we had some pretty satisfying results out of that group as well! Two of our 'pace groups' made entirely of firstyear athletes really committed to working together and executing the race plan, which is a great way to tackle the first 8k of the year! We had a very small time gap from our first to our fifth, which is quite exciting as we are moving forward. We have a lot of areas to improve upon, but that's not unexpected for September; we're confident that the steps we are taking are moving us down the right path! I'd like to point out specifically how well Christian Wissa and Hunter Rautenstrauch did in working together on moving up through the race to end up as our 6th and 7th runners today.
 
We'll be back in Rochester next weekend to race at Roberts Wesleyan on Saturday!