DGS Victorious v. Leyden and Morton

The DGS boys CC team opened their season on Monday with wins on all levels against Morton and Leyden. 

Conditions were not ideal to run very fast times as the temperature was near 90 degrees, which was complimented by humidity and long grass at O'Brien Park. Despite those factors and the Mustangs likely a bit sluggish after a very tough stretch of training, the boys stepped up and ran quite well. The meet was contested as just one large race with 122 finishers between the 3 teams. Afterwards, coaches designated which respective classes each of their finishers were and calculated scores on each level from there.

Despite missing a couple key returners at the varsity level, the Mustangs were able to get the best of our WSC Gold rivals. Sophomore Stephen Pipilas led the charge with his first varsity win. Pip hung within striking distance of the lead throughout, running as far back as 7th in the early portion of the race, but made a big move with 400 to go. At that point he caught, passed, and pulled away from Morton's Eduardo Martinez (state qualifier in 2014) for the win. Pip seemed to have plenty in the tank at the end and when asked how he felt during the race, he replied, "I felt pretty good... we weren't running very fast" which is indicative of his solid summer of training and current level of fitness. Despite the conditions being far from ideal, Pip was only 9 seconds off his time at Sectionals last fall. His winning time was 16:04.

Behind Pip, DGS put 6 other runners in the top 11 overall. Alan Zhou placed 3rd, Austin Rutkowski 4th, Freshman Eddie Siuda was 6th, Zach Scheffel was 7th, Chris Lippi 9th, and Zack Wascher 11th.  DGS beat Morton 22-36 and Leyden 15-50 at the varsity level.

As mentioned, Eddie Siuda was the top Freshman for DGS and overall in the race. In the field of 122 runners, DGS had 8 freshmen finish in the top half which helped the Frosh team to victories of 24-33 against Morton and 17-46 against Leyden.

The Sophomore team had a great day winning big against both rivals with perfect 15 point scores against each. Akhil Ghosh was the top finisher in the sophomore race placing 13th overall, followed by Marc Alvarez and Rylan Dreyer in 14th and 15th. Grant Connolly and Ryan Gage were the 4th and 5th sophs for DGS.

Impressively, this was the first high school CC race by Ghosh, Wascher, and another newcomer Luke McGrath who placed 30th in his first ever CC race. Also notable, Rylan Dreyer's performance was nearly 2 minutes faster than his best last fall, obviously illustrating the hard work he's put in over the last 10 months.

Overall, it was a tremendous start to the season for the Mustangs. The next meet is on Saturday when DGS heads to Lyons Township's South Campus for the Lions Pride Invitational to face some of the top teams in the state.