Hart just misses Pendergast course record

By Michael Newman

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Naperville – Expectations were high entering Wednesday night’s Naperville Twilight Invitational Girls Varsity Race. Six of the top seven toed the line in which fans that crowded Naperville North’s campus course were hoping for a great race.

They were not disappointed as this was perhaps the best girls race ever in this meet.

It was the patience of Naperville North’s top-ranked state team as it waited for the right move to make a charge to the front. When that happened, none of the other teams stood a chance. The Lady Huskies placed four runners in the first fifteen to repeat as meet champions with only 57 points.

“You have to keep your head, you have to run your race, and you have to run it to the best of your ability. That is what we really focused on,” Naperville North Dan Iverson said. “You can’t play defense in this sport.”

The goal for Naperville North’s teams traditionally is staying in control for the first part of the race and then go into attack mode starting to pass people in the field. Sarah Schmitt and Alex Morris were fifth and sixth at the half way point in the race. By the time they finished, the top two Huskie runners crossed the line finishing second and third.

“They (Schmitt and Morris) looked really good. But that is exactly the race that we are after,” Iverson added. “We think we are confident in it. If someone can beat us in that race, great. You do the best job you can in the moment and if you can, great.”

“We know the race was going to go out fast. We wanted to have fun with. There was a lot of hype around it,” Schmitt said after her run. “We just wanted to go out and run our race and worked out perfectly. The times showed that.”

Naperville North had four runners under 18-minutes on their home 3-mile course led by Schmitt (16:37.6) and Morris (16:39.4). Hannah Ricci was the third North runner in as she finished seventh overall (17:01.4). Claire Hill finishing 15th (17:36.9) and Wagner Osborne placing 30th (18:04.3) rounded out their top five. So far, this season, Naperville North has been matching or beating their team times on courses that they have run on. This program was doing the same thing two years ago but finished second in the state meet behind Minooka. They are not getting complacent this season. This team does have the focus in their eyes when they race.

“You keep worrying, I think, that the longer you coach, you see teams that lose it,” said Iverson. “They start thinking too much of themselves. So far, we have a long season still to go, I like their focus. They are pretty level headed and realistic with themselves. We can’t take any of the teams that we ran tonight for granted. I think we are a good team. How good it is hard to tell. We are bettering our team averages in every meet we run. The team that we are bettering is the 2015 team. We were a very good team then but we did not win. We don’t have to look very far. We just have to remember where we want to finish.”

Yorkville finished second (84 points) behind top 10 finishes from Alyssa Edwards (fifth) and Helena Kleronormos (10th). Emily Eberhart (14th), Nicole Greyer (23rd), and Olivia Borowiak (33rd) rounded out their top five. Downers Grove South did not run its best race of the year but still finished third (130 points) behind Brenna Cohoon’s 16th place finish. The Mustangs still displayed some good pack running as they had their top five runners within 26 seconds of each other. Wheaton-Warrenville South, led by the 19th place finish of Samantha Poglitsch and 20th place finish from Maria Rucoba, finished fourth just one point behind Downers Grove South (131 points) and 34 second split on their scorers. Glenbard West (141 points) and Hinsdale Central (147 points) finished fifth and sixth.  Minooka was close in sixth (164 points).

Glenbard West’s Katelynne Hart took the lead in the first 100-meters of the race and refused to look back. Going through the first mile in 5:19 and then two miles in 10:50, Hart’s goal was to break the record of 16:15.2 that state champion Judy Pendergast ran in 2015. Hart gave everything that she had coming down the middle of the football field towards the finish diving across the finish line. Her time just missed by seven tenths of a second (16:15.9). You should remember this: Pendergast ran 15:53.8 at the state meet a month later. Hart is on pace to do something special like that.

“I haven’t raced for a few weeks. I just wanted to see where I was at,” Hart said afterwards. “It’s something to learn from. The idea is to get better individually and as a team.

Glenbard West’s fifth-place finish was powered by Hart’s win and Lindsey Payne finishing fourth overall running under 17-minutes (16:53.8).

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