Women's Weekend Preview

ITHACA, N.Y. – The Cornell men's cross country team is splitting up this weekend, with its top seven runners heading to New Jersey for the Princeton Invitational and the rest of the team going to the Rochester Invitational. Both meets take place on Saturday.

While the plan for this weekend originally was to take the team to Penn State for its usual post-Paul Short Invitational run, the coaching staff decided it would be best to bring its top runners to Princeton to help with the Heptagonal Championships in two weeks.

For only the second time ever, the Heps will be held away from New York City's Van Cortlandt Park. This year's championships will take place at Princeton, a course on which no Cornell team has ever run.

Assistant coach Robert Johnson anticipates the team could finish as high as third at Heps, and learning the course this week could make a huge difference.

“For that to happen, everything will need to go our way and I think being familiar with the course could make a difference,” Johnson said. “I went ahead and scored the Paul Short meet with just Ivy League teams here and realized just five points would separate third from fifth. … I normally think being familiar with a course is very much overrated as it's the same course for everyone, but clearly it could make a couple of spots difference per man and that might move you from third to sixth in such a tight year.”

The Princeton Invitational field – which will run an 8K course – should have somewhere between 15 and 20 teams. While it isn't expected to be a top-tier level of competition, Ivy League competition Yale and Princeton will be bringing their top squads while Columbia and Penn will send B-teams. Defending Division III national champion Haverford will also take part and could provide the biggest competition for Cornell.

Making the trip to Princeton will be Brett Kelly, Kevin Johnson, Chandler Kemp, Gabriel Heck, Max Groves, Matt McCullough and Ben Potts.

The rest of the team will be traveling to Rochester, and Johnson expects the freshmen to gain valuable experience as they are forced to be in scoring position. Johnson thinks the top four will end up going to Heps as the program aims to get 12 runners in the championships on Oct. 29.