First to the Finish Recap

 

Talking with a number of coaches I heard estimates of the course being anywhere from 25-45 seconds slower than usual. Coach Schweda of Rolling Meadows even did some comparative analysis between this year and last (when conditions were great) and came up with 41 seconds. If we subtract 41 seconds across the board, we can safely say we had a successful day with the overwhelming majority of our boys running lifetime bests. Unfortunately, it's cross country and your time is what it is and you have to deal with the conditions as they come... anyone remember Sectionals at KLM last year? It's all about how you compete and race and in that I'd say we had just an OK day on Saturday.

 

Here is a link to the meet results:

 

We finished Saturday's meet as the 15th place team out of 47. It wasn't awful by any means, but the team had set their goals higher than that and were looking for a breakthrough race. In reality, we probably finished about where we "should" have based on rankings and whatnot, although we are absolutely aware of the fact that we are a lot better than a lot of other teams, coaches, and reporters think we are. We can take solace in the fact that last year we placed 18th at this meet last year and went on to be the 12th best team in the entire state in November when it counts.

 

We did have some very positive performances in that varsity race despite the overall performance that left us wanting more. Stephen Pipilas made his season debut and ran well to finish 20th overall in 15:41. It generally takes a couple races to really get back into "race shape" so for him to do that without any races under his belt bodes well for the races to come. Another really bright spot came from sophomore Nick Dziedzic. Nick ran a tremendous race to finish in 16:46 as our 4th man. Looking at the season ahead, we know we are really going to need our 4th-7th runners to get closer to our top 3 and Nick cut the gap dramatically from the LT meet to Peoria. Our 5th, another sophomore James Weigel did virtually the same thing by finishing a bit closer to Dziedzic than the LT meet, thus closing the gap on the 1-3 as well. 

 

The Open Race saw a huge pack of Mustangs go out and race their best. Sophomore Brock Royle led the charge for DGS running 17:33 on the sloppy course (5 of our top 7 times were sophomores... the other two were juniors). Following Royle were a pair of seniors that seem to be finding their form a few meets into the season. Both Zack Wascher and Luke McGrath ran solid races finishing in the high 17s.  Following that pair was a trio of freshmen that would all have hypothetically been under 18 minutes on a better day. John Norris, Canyon Stage, and John Heneghan all had very strong races and finished close to each other. Our freshman group is showing tremendous promise already. They are the largest group we've ever had but have also seemingly bought in to the hard work and culture of the team and are seeing some solid improvement on a weekly basis. A sign of the kind of talent we have, as well as the competition between the freshmen is evident by the fact that in 3 meets we've had 3 different top freshman finishers.

 

With all this talk of bad conditions and slower times, I need to acknowledge those athletes who transcended the conditions and still ran a season best time. Jeremy Canfield, Henry Mora, and Keven Gonzalez all ran faster than their times from LT while Josh Tinoco matched his time. Miguel Saucedo and Sam Kirk both ran close to their times and as first year CC guys in their junior year ran their finest races yet.