1st place in Peoria!

The DGS varsity team traveled to Detweiller Park in Peoria for the Peoria Central Invite and came away with decisive team victory! The Mustangs score 63 pts to finish well ahead of Prospect (108 pts) and Oswego (153 pts) in the 33-team meet.

The strength of this team has been our ability to pack up our scoring runners, and on Saturday the pack was at its best. As a team, our goal is to keep our 1-5 split at 30 seconds or less. That was accomplished and then some by our 23 second split on Saturday. That was much improved over our 55 second split at Naperville last week.

This week, Becky Versaskas (So) and Katie Stapleton (Sr) ran together for the entire race and eventually finished together in 9th and 10th places. Despite a course that was softened from 2 days of rain, the duo both ran season best times of 17:47 and 17:48 to lead the team into the finish chute. Becky’s time was a lifetime PR and Katie was within 12 seconds of her lifetime PR.

Erin Reidy (Fr) has missed meets early on in the season due to both injury and illness, but she is back healthy and ready to race. Erin proved that as she hung close behind Katie and Becky for much of the race. A strength of Erin is that she runs with a fearless style that many girls struggle to achieve. By the end of the 3-mile race, Erin finished only 3 places and 12 seconds behind Katie and Becky in 13th place with a great PR time of 18:00.

Both Brenna Cohoon (Fr) and Melissa Weidner (So) have provided a solid nucleus for our pack all season long. Working together, they have been steady and consistent in passing people, and moving up in every race. On Saturday, it was no different as they both moved together after the 1st mile and closed the gap on our other 3 runners. Brenna (18:06) and Melissa (18:09) both ran PR times, but most importantly, they closed out our team scoring with fantastic 15th and 16th place finishes.

Kennedy Warden (Fr) continued to impress as she ran 18:44 to finish in 31st place while Olivia Duax (So) ran a season best 19:13 to finish in 64th place. Both girls have shown in workouts that they are capable of closing the gap with the first five and making our team even stronger. Once they achieve that, our team will be even tougher to beat. Right now, our goal is to continue to improve a little bit each week as we get closer to the State meet and the end of the season.

DGS individual times/splits can be found on the Schedule/Results page and full meet results can be found on athletic.net.