ROCHESTER, N.Y. – The Cortland men's cross country team finished in seventh place out of 17 teams at the Rochester Yellowjacket Invitational 8K race on Saturday morning, hosted at Genesee Valley Park.

Cortland finished with a team score of 212, one point better than Oneonta and one point behind Oberlin. Geneseo was the team champ with 24 points.
 
Hunter Rautenstrauch (Buffalo/West Seneca West) was the top finisher for Cortland in the 218-runner field, placing 50th in a time of 26:45.8. He was in 70th place after six kilometers, but posted a time of 6:19.6 over the final two kilometers to pass 20 runners. 
 
Jon Slick (Beekmantown) was next in 55th place with a time of 26:51.7, and he also closed with a strong final two kilometers to pass 21 runners during the final quarter of the race. Landon Fracasse (New Paltz) placed 63rd in a time of 27:01.9, and Vincent Smaldone (Red Hook) registered a time of 27:06.8 to finish in 65th place. Carter Naginey (Groton) was the fifth finisher towards the team scoring for the Red Dragons, ending in 69th place with a mark of 27:10.4.
 
Other Red Dragon runners finishing in the top half of the 212-runner field included Daniel Dunn (Oswego) in 79th place in 27:22.6, Kyle Friedel (Irondequoit) in 102nd in 27:49.1, Christian Wissa (Somers) in 107th place with a time of 27:57.6, and Sawyer Sweet (Utica/Thomas R. Proctor) with a 28:02.3 to place 111th. 

Coach's Corner - Comments from Cortland Director of Cross Country/Track and Field Steve Patrick:

I'm happy to step in with some thoughts on the weekend as Coach Chad Dunham has a wedding he is attending this weekend.

We had a great team effort at Genesee Valley Park today! We entered today with some strong goals for pack running and committing to each other; if you're inclined to look at the splits available through www.leonetiming.com you will see excellent evidence of our team achieving this at an exceptionally high level!

We are quite impressed with how we moved up over the efforts today: the women's team was in 7th at 2k, 6th at 4k, and then finished in 4th (even more impressive as we were without senior Melissa Innocent, who was attending a great academic opportunity through the weekend with her department); the men's squad rose from 15th at 2k, to 11th halfway, 10th at the 6k, and finally up to 7th. For both squads to work well together, to be patient early in the race, to be strong in the middle and to be close hard exemplifies how we want to approach racing!

I'd like to make special mention of junior Phoebe Peer who earned a spot in our all-time top 10 list for the course which is quite an achievement considering the number of times this has been an NCAA regional course, as well as firstyears Sawyer Sweet and Mason Brozowski for earning spots in the firstyear top 10 list on the men's side.

We're already excited about putting in a good week of training and looking forward to returning to Rochester to race at Roberts Wesleyan College on this Saturday the 26th.