Lions Pride Meet Recap

Saturday was a fantastic start to the CC season for the Mustangs!

We started the day placing 4th out 15 schools in the JV race behind some perennial top tier programs which illustrated that we have some solid depth to our team this fall. Luke McGrath led the way with a big PR (personal record) followed by Jimmy Slowik, Ryan Gage, Grant Connolly, and Sayuj Shah who comprised the top 5 scorers for the Mustangs. Connolly's race was a big breakthrough running 17:45 and his first time sub 18. The 6th man for DGS was Jack Hudec who ran a fantastic race with a PR of about a minute to run 18:49. McGrath and Hudec were both recognized by their teammates as two of our team MVPs for the day.

The second race of the day saw us place 6th in the varsity race out of the 15 schools entered. The race was a bit of a mixed bag with some very solid runs and some others that even from the athletes perspectives weren't their best by any means. One factor working against us was the decision to only run 6 guys instead of seven and hold out our returning top runner from last year Stephen Pipilas. Without Stephen, sophomore Eddie Siuda took over as the leader for the Mustangs. Eddie had a big breakthrough performance running 15:27 for 3 miles and cracking the top 10 of a very stacked meet. The other bright spots for the varsity squad came in the fact that juniors Akhil Ghosh and Rylan Dreyer both ran 30+ second personal bests.  Even better was the fact that neither were satisfied with their races despite being personal bests for each. With Stephen in the mix and adding in some of the sophomores that were kept down in that race, we would have been in the mix for top 3 so it appears we're taking last year's strategy of flying under the radar or being "sneaky good" all over again.

The third race was exciting to see our large freshman squad make their debut. John Heneghan led the way placing 10th and garnering a medal in the process. Following John were a flurry of Mustangs coming in one after another. John Norris, Canyon Stage, Tyler Bleau, and Ben Skibbe were the scorers for DGS as we had a split of only 38 seconds between our 1-5 runners. As a team we placed 4th behind the same teams that were ahead of us in the JV race.

The last, and from our team's perspective, the most exciting race of the day was the Sophomore Race. The boys ran a courageous and tough race to ultimately place a close 2nd behind Maine South. After the gun went off, James Weigel and Nick Dziedzic immediately moved to the front to put themselves in great position for the race. After the top two from Maine South and Lincoln Way West pulled away a bit, the pair of Mustangs worked beautifully together for the majority of the race running side by side and pushing one another. Hopefully the rest of the team took note because that's exactly how it should be done!  Nick ended up pulling in front of James but the two ultimately placed 3rd and 4th with personal best 3 mile times.  Despite the great races turned in by James and Nick, George Willer stole the show. George started back maybe around 25th place early in the race. He continued to work his way up passing runner after runner. He ran a truly inspiring race with over a 1 minute PR to run 16:40 and place 5th overall!  Other scorers for the Mustangs were Brock Royle and Ben Laurich.  Overall our sophomore group came to race with nearly all of the boys running lifetime bests. George was yet another MVP picked by his teammates.

Lastly, congrats to not only the Freshmen group for completing their first high school race, but we also had a couple new faces among the upper class that made their CC debut. Juniors Sam Kirk, Miguel Saucedo, and AJ Janos all ran and finished their first high school CC race and each did a great job. They'll certainly see their time from yesterday drop precipitously as the season goes on!

Especially considering this was our first race of the season and we competed against a number of teams that were probably on race 3 already, the coaches all felt it was a very nice starting point to the season.