Season Starts With Meet Hosted By Stevenson

After a long summer of training the Highland Park High School Boys Cross Country Team competed in their first meet.   It was against Stevenson and Buffalo Grove at Half-Day Forest Preserve.   Despite losing to both teams, the Giants had some positives.    After a strong summer, senior Angel Estrada led the Giants as he tried to stay with BG's number one runner (one of the top returning runners in the state).   Estrada ended up finishing in 15:24.45 for the 3 mile race to take second place.   HP's next finisher was junior Ben Casey who finished in a time of 15:59.03 for 6th place.   The rest of the top 5 finishers for the Giants included senior Jeremy Bloom (16:52.82), junior Dylan Kahn (17:23.18), and junior Andrew Huddleston (17:25.37).    

Every Highland Park runner that ran on this course last year improved their time (some by over a minute).   This showed that the hard work put in over this summer is and will continue to pay off as the season progresses.   The team also looks forward to getting all those that did not compete to get racing soon.    The team has big goals once again for this season!

Another big positive for the team was the performance by the freshmen.   They were led by a very strong top three...Jonathan Rosenfeld (18:19.79), Josh Drummond (18:29.34), and Matthew Drummond (18:48.9).     These were really solid times for their first race of the season.   The top 5 HP freshmen included David Heller (19:35.1) and Ian Goldberg (19:35.61).   The freshmen had a total of 13 runners average under 8:00 per mile pace.   The future looks bright for these young Giants if theye are willing to make the commitment and work hard!