Estrada Wins Wheeling Invite

After a very dissapointing performance at the Niles West Pat Savage Invite last weekend, the Giants were hoping to bounce back with a better race at the Wheeling Invite.   Some runners were able to do that.  The varsity team knows that they still have to step up their efforts if they are going to have success the rest of the season.    

In the varsity race senior Angel Estrada was looking for payback against last week's Pat Savage Invite Champion from St. Viator.   With about 800 meters to go in the race the lead was held by a pack of three (St. Viator's top runner, Barrington's top runner, and Estrada).  The  Barrington runner started to fall off pace first, then with about 600 meters to go Estrada made his first big move to gap the other runners.   In the final 400 the St. Viator runner tried to close but Estrada still had more in the tank and pulled away for about a 9 second victory in 15:33.9 for the 2.98 mile course.

After having a bad race last weekend, junior Ben Casey had a much better showing here with a 15th place finish in 16:20.3.   Casey knows he has to get back closer to Estrada for the team to have a chance at post-season success.    Sophomore Brett Davidson had another solid race finishing in 42nd (16:56.3).   He has been working extremely hard and is waiting for his big breakthrough race which will help give the team a very strong 1-2-3.    At that point the rest of the top 9 in the varsity race struggled to be in the positions they are needed in.   The top 7 were rounded out with seniors Jeremy Bloom and Griffin Bojan, juniors Dylan Kahn and Andrew Huddleston.     These guys know that they have put in the hard work and now it is a matter of being tougher while racing and executing the race plan from start to finish.    This is gut check time and we need people to step up with those breakthrough performances.    

The Open Race ended up being one of our big highlights of the meet.   We decided to put our top 7 freshmen freshmen in this race to see if any of them deserved to be in the top 12 for the State Series.   These freshmen along with several other non-freshmen Highland Park runners ran this race with focus, determination, and toughness!   This was the type of performance we need from everybody at the conference meet next weekend!   The team was led by freshmen Jonathan Rosenfeld.   He ran with no fear as he battled towards the front of the race.   He pushed himself throughout and dug down deep for a strong final 400 (which was the 2nd fastest on the team only behind Estrada).   Rosenfeld finished in 8th with a time of 17:38.4 for 2.98 miles (beating the winner from the freshmen race at the Niles West Pat Savage Invite who finished in 15th).   His time was the 5th fastest for the team on this day!   We hope this is just the start of a very special high school career for this tough and hard working young man.    The Giants were able to put 5 guys in the top 30.   After Rosenfeld, we had freshmen Matthew Drummond (17th, 18:07.1), sophomore Daniel Arias (25th, 18:21.4), freshmen Josh Drummond (28th, 18:24.1), and freshmen Juan Estela (29th, 18:26.5).   These were great races for all of these young runners including a huge breakthrough race for Estela.   Highland Park finished 3rd as a team in the Open Race behind Barrington and Lake Zurich.

Check out the results and splits for information on all the other performances by the team.