Manhattan College XC Invitational 2024: Princeton Girls Shine
The Manhattan College XC Invitational is one of the biggest and best XC meets on the East Coast. The course is unique, both because it loops through historic Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and because it is 2.5 miles instead of the usual 5K. The strange distance makes times somewhat irrelevant, but it shifts the focus to the competition — and the Manhattan Invy attracts some of the best competition from across the Northeast every year.
The Princeton girls competed in the preeminent race of the day: the Eastern States Championship. They finished 4th in the race, helped along by good teamwork between running buddies.
Kajol Karra and Grace Hegedus ran together and pushed each other for the first two miles. Karra moved ahead in the final stretch and finished 23rd in 15:34, and Hegedus crossed the line just a few seconds later, securing 28th in 15:41. According to TullyRunner’s speed ratings, both Karra and Hegedus ran even better here than at the Bowdoin XC Classic or Shore Coaches Invitational — which is saying something, because they were impressive in those races, also.
Phoenix Roth and Eowyn Deess ran side by side the entire way, and they used their teamwork to great effect. After finding themselves around 50-55th place after the first mile, the sophomore duo moved up together with a big second mile, catching 10+ girls and ultimately finishing in 38th and 39th.
Senior Florica Eleches-Lipitz rounded out Princeton’s scoring with a 50th place finish, after also moving up several spots in the last half of the race.
In the merged results of all 132 teams, Princeton’s superior depth pushed them up from 4th in their race to 3rd place overall, and 1st among NJ teams. Most notably, the merged results have Princeton finishing ahead of Ocean City, who won the Varsity D race. Ocean City is ranked #2 in the New Jersey — just ahead of #3 Princeton — by both MileSplit and NJ Advance Media, yet Princeton averaged 16:06 to Ocean City’s 16:10. Considering Ocean City ran their whole top five while Princeton had two potential scorers run the XC Fall Classic on Friday instead, that’s a serious statement!
Peddie also made the trip to historic VCP for the first time! Four of their girls ran in the Varsity D race, led by senior Matilda Kardhashi with an impressive 16:32 to get 17th place in her race (and 122nd out of 954 varsity runners overall). The Peddie boys finished 8th out of 21 teams in the Varsity B race. Their top runner was Baker Pott, who missed last week’s Shore Coaches Invitational but came back to run a strong 14:15 for 15th place here. Fellow senior James Hamnett got 26th in 14:42.