CROSS COUNTRY

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Dan McKenna

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA - The University at Buffalo men's and women's cross country teams took their strongest runners to the Penn State National Open on Saturday, finishing in the middle of the pack in both races. UB's women tied Syracuse for 16th place with 458 points among 34 teams while the UB men placed 17th in the 37-team men's field, scoring 526 team points. National women's number one Duke and Eastern Michigan's men, also nationally-ranked, won the women's and men's team titles with 22 and 100 points, respectively.

In the men's race, contested at 5.2 miles, UB junior Dan McKenna (Liverpool, NY/Liverpool) finished ninth in a field of 294 entrants in 25:36. It was the fourth top-10 finish this season for McKenna, the MAC Men's Runner of the Week for the past two weeks. Joining McKenna as the Bulls' next two runners across the finish line were junior Andy Leonard (Spencerport, NY/Churchville-Chili) in 26:48 for 98th place and sophomore Dan Giza (Lancaster, NY/Lancaster) in 26:53 for 109th place. Giza improved his time on the Penn State course by 35 seconds from the PSU Spiked Shoe Invitational on September 24.

Jen Jezorski

For the UB women, senior Jen Jezorski (Elmira, NY/Elmira Southside) was the top finisher in 22:21 along the 6K course, to place 55th in the 259 runner field and cut 13 seconds off her time from the Spiked Shoe race. Freshman Mary Veith (Derby, NY/Lake Shore) and junior Kate Kohout (Clarence, NY/Clarence) also cut their times down from the Spiked Shoe meet. Veith finished 90th in 22:50 while Kohout was 118th in 23:13, an improvement of nearly 20 seconds for both runners.

Providence's Martin Fagan won the men's race in 24:56 outracing his teammate, Ahmed Haji, who finished second in 25:21. Duke senior Shannon Rowbury won the women's race in 20:34 as the Blue Devils placed the top three runners in the field and five of the top 11 to easily win the team title.

The Bulls travel to the Cornell Invitational on Friday, October 21 for their next action.