The men's cross country team must be used to the weather in State College, because it doesn't affect them anywhere else. On Friday half the team ran at the Adidas Notre Dame Invitational in South Bend, Ind.

Sophomore Dan Mazzocco continued his great start, running to an 11th place finish with a time of 24:52.

All the runners finished with times under or around 26 minutes, which suited Groves well considering that they ran in rainy conditions. Penn State ran in the fourth race of the day and by then the course was muddy.

A problem that is being worked on is trying to get someone to close the gap between Mazzocco and the next runner. Joel Moceri came in at 32nd place.

"The gap was not a factor, the race was heavy with good teams and good runners," Penn State men's cross country coach Harry Groves said.

In fact Penn State finished fifth at the meeting, with teams like Notre Dame (No. 17), Michigan (No. 12), Eastern Michigan (No. 10), and Duke (No. 27) finishing ahead of them. Groves said that any time his team finishes in the top five it is a good day.

Chris Pruitt came in after Moceri at 25:35; Shawn Cavanaugh finished at 25:47 and Scott Munro rounded out the scorers for Penn State at 26:21.

On Saturday the "B" team ran in the Paul Short Invitational in Bethlehem, Pa. They finished 17th out of 33 teams.

Josh Loren placed 60th of 233 runners, to finish as Penn State's top runner. Loren will be a part of the team during the Big Ten season because the Big Ten places each team's top nine runners instead of the top seven.

"[Josh] can make a difference in the top seven if he can get in there," said Groves.

Competitiveness doesn't seem to be a problem when the top five runners finish around a minute of each other and the team finishes among several ranked teams.

"Others were complimenting [us] and were very impressed," said Groves. "They ran a heck of a race."