Matthew Conway competes in a race. Conway placed 79th at the Paul Short Run last year. (Rowan Athletics)
The Profs have brought home two third-place finishes so far this season, and now, they’re gearing up for a Friday afternoon race at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The “Paul Short Run” at Lehigh is one of the biggest events in the Northeast and brings in thousands of competitors across all NCAA Divisions.
The Profs will compete in the “White Race,” which is full of top competition from Division III.
“With a field that big, the race dynamics certainly change because it’s hard to get off the start,” Matthew Conway said. “You got to find people to pass that, you know, we have target teams that we’re looking for in this race that we want to beat, so we can get above them in the rankings. We hope to make it to nationals in November, and this is one of those big races to do it.”
Towards the top of last year’s White Race were runners from Lynchburg, NYU, SUNY-Geneseo, Tufts, and Middlebury, among many others. The Profs did have a top-20 finisher, Joshua Cason, who was a senior and graduated in May 2025.
The Profs will travel up to the event on Friday morning to run that afternoon, rather than the typical Saturday race day that the team is used to.
The team focused on a workout for Tuesday, rather than Wednesday, which is a little more typical during a race week. That Tuesday workout included a run on the Williamstown-Glassboro bike trail, where there are some dirt roads and good spots to warm up.
It’s flat and relatively uneventful, which is very similar to the course itself at Lehigh. “Fair” was the word used by Dimit when referring to the terrain.
“Just a very historic place,” head coach Dustin Dimit said. “This race has been going on for a very long time, this race has become one of the largest in the country, with four different races per gender and thousands of runners.”
Conway’s mentality with the quantity of runners is to ensure he gets off to a good pace and doesn’t lose the front pack off the start.
“There’s several hundred people on the line, and it narrows down real quick,” Conway said. “And so what you end up with is a bottleneck where if you’re not kind of at the front of that pack already, you’re stuck.”
It’ll be a big chance for Rowan to gain some key points over schools ahead of them in rankings, and a chance for the team to compete with some of the top competition in the country in preparations for a postseason ahead that the squad hopes is an exciting one.
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