BETHLEHEM, Pa. --- The Moravian College men's cross country team hosted the Moravian Invitational Friday evening at Bicentennial Park in East Allen Township on the boarder of Bethlehem and Northampton.
The men's team was third of six teams and had a team total of 71, finishing ahead of two of the other three Landmark Conference schools that scored in the meet on the course that will host the 2016 Landmark Conference Championships on October 29.The meet was the first home regular season meet for the Hounds in over 20 years.
Freshman Gregory Jaindl led the Greyhounds with a ninth place finish of 67 runners on the 8,000-meter course in a time of 27:01.54. Freshman Gavin Kemery was 12th in the race in 27:03.93 while freshman Justin Beasley-Turner finished 14th with a time of 27:15.32 as the trio led the Hounds while running 8,000 meters for the first time in a college race.
"We're really happy with the men's race," noted Head Coach Jesse Baumann. "We had a few objectives, first and foremost was to get a young team to acclimate to the 8k distance, and we put four guys on our all time list even with one of our top 5 being a little under the weather. We also wanted to see how we stacked up against Juniata since they're a key conference rival. As expected, they're good and we need to have a great race in order to close the gap to them, but we still took a lot of positives out of today."
Sophomore Devon Harris was 18th in 27:30.01 while sophomore Benjamin Smith was 25th in a time of 28:21.44 to round out Moravian's top five. Sophomore Peter Milewski was one spot back in 26th in 28:22.18 while freshman Anthony Donatelli finished in 27th place in a time of 28:43.33.
The Greyhounds had six other runners in the race including freshman Devon Fogel with a time of 29:00.18, freshman Alex Tursi running 29:07.56, senior Andrew Mitchell posting a time of 29:16.30, freshman Connor Irwin running a time of 29:34.48, junior Mike Kopach posting a 30:13.92, and sophomore Aaron Hofmann running a time of 30:53.51.
Moravian has a week off before returning to action on Saturday, October 1 in the Paul Short Run hosted by Lehigh University.
