Hornet/Red Devil Invite
DEERFIELD HUMBLED AGAINST ILLINOIS' TOP TEAMS AT HORNET/RED DEVIL INVITE
West-suburban Chicago is a hotbed of cross country. It could be argued that it is the most highly concentrated area for top-notch programs and individuals in the entire nation. Deerfield ventured into this territory with confidence and competed hard but got knocked around more than expected, both literally and figuratively.
This was the long-awaited debut of Deerfield’s varsity squad, with only one top runner still sidelined with an injury.
Deerfield drew a tough starting position in Box 2 on the outside and downhill from the rest of the field with very little room to spread out before a forced merge. This was a brand new and untested starting line because of recent construction at the park. And that gave the Warriors trouble from the start. They got jostled for positioning, were immediately separated from each other, and never regrouped the whole race.
Lucas Moskovitz weaved his way through the thick crowd pretty effectively to finish in 35th place in 15:57 to lead the Warriors. After Moskovitz was Carter Levinson, this summer’s most improved runner, who dropped a minute and 33 seconds from his best time last year to run 16:07 for 43rd place. But anyone who had seen Levinson at practice knew this was coming. However, after Levinson was trouble. Cole Bernstein had a semi-scare before the race forcing him to make the tough decision to switch to safer shoes right before the race started. He then got forced pretty far back in the stampede of runners at the start and could not work his way up to Moskovitz and Levinson where he belonged. And Deerfield's fourth finisher Eric Lakemaker went flying sideways at the start from a shove from an opponent and did not recover to his expected positioning. It was a tough debut for these guys, some of it in their control, some of it not. And while finishing 13th out of 19 teams might seem discouraging, there is some solace in that these were some of the best teams the state has to offer.
The three lower levels finished similarly below these powerhouse programs in the team standings, but they produced some great individual performances. The sophomores race was loaded with PRs. The top two finishers who have made a big varsity impact this year so far were the only two sophomores who did not PR. But from Ryan Jones down, all the sophomores PR’d. Most notably, Zach Bolon crushed this race in 19:16 which is a new PR by a minute and 32 seconds. Asher Siegel PR’d by 1:07, and Eric Hogenkamp and Grant Borucki both PR’d by 50+ seconds. In the JV and freshman races, the performances were harder to evaluate due to the odd 1.93-mile race distance, but it is clear that many of the freshmen would have set new two-mile PRs by minutes no matter how you extrapolate the times. Regardless of the team results, Deerfield left this meet with improvements and lessons learned for the future.
Next weekend the Warriors will split their squad to two different meets. Fourteen runners will race on the State Championship course at Detweiller Park while the rest of the team will race at the fast Harvey Braus Invite at Lake Park.
