Rutgers walked out of Bethlehem with a sweep, and the men’s result came down to the kind of razor-thin margin cross country is built on.
Gavin Rossi and Micah Lawson finished three-tenths of a second apart Friday night on the Goodman Campus course, and that tiny gap helped Rutgers edge Saint Joseph’s 35-36 in the men’s 6,000 meters. The women made it easier, rolling to a 26-68 win over the Hawks at the Lehigh Invitational to open the Scarlet Knights’ 2026 season.
On the men’s side, Rossi, a junior transfer from Monmouth and the lone transfer on Rutgers’ men’s roster this offseason, won in 18:17.6. Lawson, a senior, was right behind him in 18:17.9. Saint Joseph’s senior Gavin Mogck followed in 18:22.5, and that 4.6-second stretch between Lawson and Mogck ended up being the difference in the meet.
Hisham Ettayebi placed fifth in 18:39.5, giving Rutgers three runners in the top five. Saint Joseph’s then packed the next wave, with Ethan Fingerhut sixth in 18:43.5, Brendan Hefferan seventh in 18:44.7, Matt Hoffman eighth in 18:49.5, and Ian Romea 12th in 18:55.6 as the Hawks completed their scoring five.
Rutgers answered with Kyle Rakitis in 13th at 19:00.6 and Jack Moran in 14th at 19:02.1. That gave the Scarlet Knights a 1-2-5-13-14 scoring line for 35 points, while Saint Joseph’s finished 3-6-7-8-12 for 36.
Even so, the Hawks were the tighter team by the numbers. Their top five were separated by 33.1 seconds, while Rutgers’ five scorers stretched 44.5 seconds from Rossi to Moran.
Saint Joseph’s also won the fifth-runner matchup, the one that often decides these close meets, with Romea finishing two spots ahead of Moran. Four of the race’s top eight finishers wore Saint Joseph’s colors.
None of that changed the fact that Rutgers got the top two spots. If Lawson had slipped one place, or if Mogck had found a way past him late, the score would have flipped and Saint Joseph’s would have taken the meet 36-35.
Rutgers’ team time of 1:33:17 beat Saint Joseph’s 1:33:35 by 18 seconds across the five scorers. Host Lehigh finished third with 78 points in the nine-team field.
The women’s race never offered that kind of suspense.
Lorena David, a senior, won in 21:25.1 and crossed 21.8 seconds ahead of the next scorer, junior Kelseigh O’Neil at 21:46.9. Both were Scarlet Knights.
Rutgers kept stacking finishers after that, with sophomore Maeli Gleason at 22:09.4 and freshman Molly Domurat at 22:09.6, just two-tenths apart in fifth and sixth. Senior Sofia Condron rounded out the scoring five in 22:35.6.
Freshman Daphne Roskowski followed in 22:39.1 and junior Cassidy Kidd came through in 22:46.7 as displacers. Rutgers averaged 22:01 across its scoring five, compared with Saint Joseph’s 22:34, a 33-second per-runner edge in a 10-team field.
The Garden State Track Club, entered as a club team, took third with 78 points, and Lehigh was fourth with 108. Because the club scored and unattached runners did not, the finishing order and the scoring order diverged through the top 15.
The freshman class was impossible to miss.
Domurat, the Flemington product and Group 3 champion, scored fourth for Rutgers in her first college race and finished within a fifth of a second of a returning sophomore. Roskowski was the team’s sixth woman. On the men’s side, Alex Patelski ran 19:06.9 to finish 18th overall and slot in as Rutgers’ sixth man, while Gavin Leffler (19:23.5) and Blake Sealy (19:24.1) finished within a second of each other behind him.
That means four of the 14 runners who made up Rutgers’ top seven across the two races were freshmen. Jay Adimala, the most credentialed recruit in the group, had a quieter debut at 19:50.6, while Lydia Bereznetski (23:10.9) and Jasmine Hall (23:29.3) filled out the women’s side behind the scoring group.
There are still plenty of reasons to keep Friday in perspective. Rutgers was the only Big Ten program in the field, and much of the competition behind Saint Joseph’s and Lehigh came from Division II and Division III programs like Kutztown, Rowan, Moravian, DeSales, Muhlenberg, and Ramapo. A season opener on a Friday night in early September does not say much about how the Scarlet Knights will fare against the teams they’ll see later in the fall.
What it does give them is course knowledge. Rutgers will return to Goodman twice more, for the Paul Short Run on Oct. 2 and, more importantly, the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional on Nov.
- The season’s toughest stretch still comes before that, with Nuttycombe on Oct. 9 and the Big Ten Championships three weeks later in Madison, with the Princeton Fall Classic on Oct. 16 in between.
A one-point win over a Saint Joseph’s team that was stronger as a unit is not proof that Rutgers has closed the gap with the biggest names on its schedule. It is proof that the gap is at least worth arguing about now. The Scarlet Knights opened the year by winning two races with four runners who had never raced a college meet before, and that’s a pretty sharp way to start.
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