BETHLEHEM, Pa. -- The Yale men's cross country team ran its best race of the season on Friday for a mightily impressive seventh-place finish at the Paul Short Run. The Bulldogs were the first of five Ivy League teams across the line, beating out Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn and Columbia. The result bodes well with only four weeks until the Ivy League Heps Championship on Oct. 28. 

Every single one of the 10 Bulldogs who toed the line ran 8k PRs, many of them by more than a minute. But even more encouraging was the team's ability to work together and run in strong packs throughout the race. Towards the front, Cade Brown, Varun Oberai and Sean Kay moved through the field as a unit on their way to placing 26th, 29th and 30th respectively. Brown ran 23:28 for the 8k distance while Oberai and Kay were separated by just a 10th of a second as they both came in at 23:29. Richard Sturtevant and Stephen Moody also formed a group and worked their way to 116th and 132nd in times of 24:11 and 24:19 respectively. The average time for that scoring five was 23:47, close to two minutes quicker than the average time of the scorers for the Bulldogs in this meet last year (25:38). In fact, this year's entire team ran faster than that 25:38 time. 

The quality of the Bulldogs' performance cannot be emphasized enough. This was without doubt Yale's best team performance in several years. The Bulldogs displayed incredible depth, as Winslow Atkeson, Martin Riddell and Ryan Smithers all dipped under 25 minutes for the first time, and Drake Prince and Jack Sendek came close while taking large chunks off their PRs.

The Bulldogs have a weekend off before their next race, the IC4A Championships on Friday Oct. 14 at Van Cortlandt Park. Confidence will be sky high for the entire team after such a strong performance in Bethlehem. Full results can be found here. 46 teams and 416 runners finished the race, which was won by nationally ranked North Carolina (13th).