Casey and Davidson Finish Top 5 At County Meet

Senior Ben Casey and junior Brett Davidson continue to show their toughness as they both raced to top 5 finishes at the Lake County Invite hosted by Round Lake and run on a challenging Lakewood Forest Preserve Course.     From the start of the race, Casey and Davidson went with the leaders.   Stevenson's Sam Oh was able to pull away as Casey took 2nd place (15:44.9).   Davidson tried to get away from a small pack of runners as he was in 3rd for a good portion of the race.   Two runners got by him in the final 800 meters as he finished in 5th place (16:06.4).   Last year he was 44th in the Varsity County Meet, but worked hard this summer to improve to a top 5 finisher!   After the Giants top two finishers, there was a big gap before the number three runner, sophomore Jonathan Rosenfeld (3rd for the team for the second straight meet).    Rosenfeld (21st, 17:04.0) knows that he and his teammates need to start to close the gap on our top two if this team is going to have the success it has been working hard to achieve.     Senior Dylan Kahn (38th, 17:44.3) was the next finisher for the team followed by another strong performance from freshmen Nate Amster (40th, 17:50.8).   

The open race was very exciting for HP fans as several of our runners took a risk and had very strong races.   Senior Zack Goldberg got the team out as he took the very early lead followed closely by freshmen Alex Frank.   By the mile Frank was with the leader and by the time he came to the 2 mile mark he had the lead and was trying to pull away.   This was a gutsy effort by a freshmen in his first high school race!    Not far behind was a pack that included sophomore David Heller and right behind them was sophomore Charlie Skurie.   By the time the leaders came out of the forest with just over 400 meters to go, it was Frank and Skurie leading the charge (last year Skurie was 59th place in the open race).   Heller was in the chase pack and Goldberg had teammate junior Alejandro Gutierrez catching up to him.   In the end Skurie and an great last 400 to get the victory (18:51.4) while Frank (19:14.2) was passed by a few runners to take 6th with a tremendous start to his racing this season.   Following them we had Heller (8th, 19:25.9), Goldberg (10th, 19:35.4), and Gutierrez (11th, 19:40.9) all in the top 11.   

Overall the team continues to show improvement over where we were last year, but they know we need even more improvement then what we are getting.   This Saturday at Hinsdale will be an outstanding test as we will be going up against some of the top programs in the State.