He Prefontaine-ed it, as we still like to say

Chris Korabik moves to the lead of the 1600-meter run at the 3A IHSA state meet with just over 400 meters to go. Korabik is about the take the race lead from Patrick Perrier and Zack Smith.  Jake Hoffert, Jessie Reiser, and Ryan Clevenger are in the mix.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

I started my coaching life in what must have been a spring season in the early 1990s when I was an assistant for my daughter’s one season on a tee ball team.  Not long afterwards I began a longer career as an American Youth Soccer Organization coach, rising up the ranks to become a clinic instructor and head of all the coaches for our Region 751 in Hyde Park.

As a tee ball and  soccer coach, I watched one very successful coach for many years.  From his sideline position—and with a loud voice—he carefully directed the actions of his tee ball and soccer players, play by play.  His kids listened carefully and performed well.  They did what he told them to do.

But it never seemed like the right way to teach kids how to play on their own.  It always seemed to me that you have to let kids make some mistakes so that they learn the right way to do things.

We have some rules that we teach our distance runners.  Run in lane one.  Don’t waste energy in a race; sit still if you can.  When you decide to pass someone, do it convincingly—and keep going.  We prefer even pacing—and negative splitting.  It takes a lot of energy to lead a race for a long time; it is better to have the lead at the end.  Make sure you run all the way through the finish line.

We have race plans that we talk about with our boys.  We ask them to participate in making those plans.

But we know that the boys are not going to learn our rules without making mistakes and breaking them.  And we know that on the track, the boys have to learn how to make their own decisions.  They have to be their own race strategists, too.

Our kids are smart.  They learn their lessons—and they run their own races.

On Saturday his coaches sent Wolfpack runner Chris Korabik onto the race track at Eastern Illinois University for the 3A IHSA state championship 1600-meters with three different race plans.  But it was up to Korabik to make his own decisions and execute the race as he thought best.

Korabik was one of just four runners in the race who had not run an earlier race that day—along with York’s Alex Bashqawi, Yorkville’s Jake Hoffert, and Downers Grove North’s Ryan Clevenger.  So race plan number one was to make sure the race was fast enough from the start.  A tactical race would allow the runners doubling back from the 4×800, 3200, or 800 a chance to conserve energy for a big finish—particularly dangerous, it would seem, in the case of Danville’s Johnny Leverenz, who had run 1 minute and 52.0 seconds to win the 800.    Korabik would push on the first turn to put himself in position near the front of the race, and he was prepared to take the lead on the first lap if necessary to make the pace honest.  He would give it up once the race was rolling.

As it turned out, Hoffert seemed to have an even more aggressive race plan—and he took the lead and pushed the pace right away, opening a significant ten-meter gap on the field from the start.  Korabik slid easily into second place at the front of the chasers.  Hoffert reached 200 meters in 28 seconds, with Korabik at 30.4.  In fact, just after the 200, first O’Fallon’s Patrick Perrier and then more aggressively Downers Grove North’s Zack Smith stepped into the space between Korabik and Hoffert—and closed the gap down quickly.  The race, it seemed clear already, would not be slow and tactical.

Smith, in fact, kept running right past Hoffert and into the lead as the runners came past the 400-meter mark.  Korabik, running in lane one, had already slid back to sixth, with 3200-meter winner Jessie Reiser from McHenry  pushing past him in chase of Smith and then Clevenger, too,  passing him outside his shoulder on the straightaway.  Korabik’s split was 62.4.

Korabik never left his position in lane one, and he never accelerated.  He patiently kept his spot in the line.  Around the curve, Reiser pushed back into lane one as Korabik gave way, but Clevenger stayed outside in lane 2.  On the straightaway and then around the turn the group was still in a line behind Smith—Perrier, Hoffert, Reiser, Korabik, with Clevenger still on Korabik’s shoulder outside.  Korabik was 1:33.6 at 600 meters.

Race plan number two was my plan.  It was not going to be a slow tactical race.  But Korabik, we knew, was not the fastest sprint finisher in the field.  In fact, he had been beaten in a sprint finish—off a slow tactical pace—just two weeks before in the Chicago Catholic League championship 1600-meter run by Fenwick’s Sal Flight, who had a personal best almost ten seconds slower.  Korabik knew he would have to run 60-seconds on the final lap of the state race.   But off an honest but not fast pace, he would also have to take the finishing kick out of some of the others—or have a lead he could hold onto.  The plan was the one Hicham El Guerrouj used to beat Bernard Lagat in the 2004 Athens Olympics 1500.  From about 800 meters out, Korabik would take the lead—and then carefully wind up the race.  He would apply more and more pressure at the front of the race, never pushing too far into the red, but never letting anyone pass him, either.  It would be Korabik’s decision, though, to decide if it was developing into a kicker’s race in which he would have to wind up the pace.

Coming into the home straightaway, Korabik positioned himself for a move off the curve.  Then down the straightaway he moved from lane one into lane two and was in position to move all the way around the group now bunching behind Smith.  He went smoothly by Reiser, then Clevenger.  He pulled up along side Hoffert.  Smith and Perrier were side by side in the lead just another step away.

Here was a moment of decision.  Before the race, in the EIU indoor track, we had laid out all Korabik’s options.  He is a 4.0 student at Ignatius.  He is a senior who has run many races.  He could understand complicated options.  With 800 to go, he would have to assess the race.  Was it fast enough?  Who was still in it?  Could he get to the lead efficiently and easily enough without anyone fighting him?  What did he have in his tank?

He had moved to put himself in position to try the El Guerrouj.  But then he made his choice.  He would wait.  His split at 800-meters was 2:06.3.  The race was moving fast enough; the kickers would be tired at the end, too.  He was still close to the front.

Korabik pushed his way back into lane one around the curve, in front of Clevenger and behind Hoffert, in fourth.  Reiser responded by moving around Korabik again on the outside.  Clevenger pulled up on his shoulder again.    At 1000-meters he was in sixth again at 2:38.4.  For a third lap it was still an honest and even fast pace.  He had made a good decision.

Around the curve, Smith was still in the lead, with Perrier on his shoulder.  Then Hoffert held on behind Smith, with Reiser behind him on the outside.  Then Korabik, with Clevenger beside him.

Boxed in with just over 500 meters to go, Korabik patiently waited for his opening on the straightaway–and then he moved to the lead. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Plan number three came from our assistant coach Steven Bugarin, with an assist from assistant coach Nate McPherson.  They had worried the El Guerrouj plan would force Korabik to move too early and drain him for the last lap.  He should wait until 500 to go, they thought—and then move to the lead.

As the runners neared the 500-meter mark, we watched carefully, waiting to see what Korabik would do.  There might be a problem.  We weren’t sitting together, but talking after the race, we had all noticed the same thing:  Korabik looked like he was boxed in.

But the other runners no doubt had last lap plans, as well.  Off the main grandstand curve the front group was moving quickly.  Down the straightaway Reiser moved closer to Perrier on the outside.  It was not quite three abreast—Smith, Perrier, Reiser, with Hoffert crowding behind Smith looking for a place to go.

Korabik inched forward as Reiser did so—and Clevenger, perhaps thinking Reiser would move out to Perrier’s shoulder, moved out a bit wider out to lane three.

And then Korabik struck.  He went past Clevenger on the inside, with perhaps a brush of arms between the two.  He moved past Reiser to his inside.  And then he accelerated past Perrier and Smith.

Perrier made his own move a split second later to step ahead of Smith.  The others followed—Hoffert still chasing, then Reiser, then Clevenger, with Conant’s Zach Dale following and Smith fading quickly.

But Korabik had the jump, and he got to the lead and back into lane one all on the straightaway.  He went by 1200 in first at 3:10.4.  Perrier and the others were sorting things out behind him.  Korabik accelerated around the curve.   Perrier still followed closely, but a gap opened behind Perrier back to Hoffert.  Three meters, four meters, five meters—the gap widened as Korabik accelerated, Perrier chasing close and the others falling back.

Later another coach told us that Korabik’s courageous move had brought tears to his eyes.  It was the kind of move coaches want their boys to make–and train them to make.  As we sometimes still say, he was Prefontaine-ing  the race.  He didn’t hold back and try to run for second or third.  He made a move to win the race.  If it cost him in the end, so be it.  He was trying to win the race with a long 400-meter dash to the finish.

Korabik covered the 200 meters in right about 30 seconds.  He had dropped the pack, but he couldn’t drop Perrier.  At the 200 mark, which comes early on the EIU track with another 15 meters to the curve, Perrier accelerated into the lead.

Korabik chases Perrier and leads Dale, Hoffert, and Clevenger in a race to the finish. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

But Korabik did not give up.  He doggedly took up the chase.    Around the curve, Perrier’s lead grew to a second step, then a third.  Korabik was losing ground, but he was still moving quickly.  The wheels were still moving.

Behind Korabik, the others had begun to chase.  Conant’s Zach Dale was catching up.  With 90 meters to go, Perrier was well ahead, but Korabik seemed to find another burst of energy.  Perrier was no longer gaining, and Korabik was holding Dale off down the straightaway.  From behind Dale, then, came Clevenger moving faster than all the others.

Perrier won with his arms upraised.  Then the next three reached the finish line almost simultaneously, three across the track.  Korabik leaned in lane one.  Dale was beside him, more upright.  Clevenger actually seemed ready to go by them both, but he eased up at the finish line, standing straight upright.

Clevenger’s leg may have crossed in front of Korabik’s, but with his lean Korabik’s shoulder had beaten Clevenger’s chest to the line.

Officially Perrier was timed in 4:10.34.  Korabik’s time was 4:11.194—more than a three-second personal best–with Clevenger third in 4:11.199.  Dale fourth in 4:11.28, and then Hoffert made it four runners in the 4:11s, 4:11.71.

Korabik’s last lap had been a tick over 60 seconds.  If he had run 59 seconds, he might have been closer to winning the race.  But it had been a really smart final lap—and he won second place by running the fastest last 500 meters of the race.

He had run virtually the entire race in lane one.  He had stayed calm and still in the pack, moving only to take position when he needed to do so.  When he made his move, he did it with conviction and commitment.

He also won second place with his lean.

The night before Korabik and his teammates Chris Hawkins and Conor Dunham visited the O’Brien track dressed in caps and gowns, while junior teammate Andy Weber followed them with an Ipad and a speaker playing the “Pomp and Circumstance” graduation march.  Back in Chicago, their classmates were graduating in the University of Illinois at Chicago Forum.

“They’re up to the P-s,” Dunham informed me, looking at his mobile phone.  Apparently he was getting alert texts from the seniors in Chicago.

The boys took some photos on the awards stand.  They took photos in front of the IHSA banner.  And then they took some photos running in their caps and gowns—finish line photos.

Korabik practices his lean. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

The evening light was challenging for photographs, and it took several tries for assistant coach and team photographer Bugarin to get a focused version of the group.  Once, twice, three times—the boys ran past the finish line.  You can see one photo on the previous blog post; here’s another.

Korabik leaned every time.

It turned out to be good practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo finishing high school

Photo by Steven Bugarin

I prepared this for our news people back at Ignatius, a recap of our first day at the state track meet.  And I owe Chris Korabik (@Cknation29), on the left above, a thank you for the tag line!

On the second day of the IHSA Boys Track and Field Championships today, four Ignatius athletes will compete for medals and team points.  In the preliminaries yesterday, the Wolfpack moved into serious contention  for four events.

In the 110 meter hurdles, senior Conor Dunham won his heat to advance to the finals in a time of 14.49 seconds; it is the second fastest time in school history, behind only Dunham’s own 14.15 mark in the sectional meet last week.  Senior Chris Hawkins also competed in 110s, running 14.79, but he did not qualify for the final.  He did, however, finish sixth and win his flight in the preliminaries of the triple jump, where he leaped 44 feet and 11.5 inches; that jump leaves him just two inches from third place.  He gets three jumps today to close the gap.  Dunham returned to the track in the 300 intermediate hurdles, where he battled long-time rival Imani Payton of North Lawndale College Prep in his qualifying heat.  Payton won by a step in 37.85 seconds, with Dunham at 38.14, but they were the fastest of the nine qualifiers for today’s final.  Finally, senior Chris Korabik finished second in his heat of the 1600-meter run to advance to the final, running 4 minutes and 14.80 seconds, second fastest of the rounds.

Junior Andy Weber will also compete today in the 3200-meter run, which has no preliminary race.  Senior Emmett Boyle competed in the pole vault on Friday, as well, but he did not advance.

To attend the state meet, Dunham, Korabik, and Hawkins had to miss graduation back in Chicago on Friday night.  Instead they made a cap and gown visit to the track in the evening during the open track meet there.  They marched around the infield as Weber carried a music player blaring Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”—and they took a few pictures.

“Our seniors made some sacrifices to be here,” said Coach Ed Ernst.  “We have a chance to score some points tomorrow.”

The Wolfpack finished fourth at the state meet last year.

 

A meet to remember—and forget

Conor Dunham was third and Chris Hawkins second behind Eric Walker of St. Rita in the 55-meter high hurdles, as the Wolfpack moved out to an early lead at the Chicago Catholic League Indoor Championships. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Less than an hour after leaving the University of Chicago’s Henry Crown Field House following the Chicago Catholic League Indoor Track and Field Championship meet, my family was on its way over the Skyway and the interstate to a Florida spring break road trip. The prospect of 18 hours of driving with two 7-year-olds supplied plenty of necessary distraction.

It was probably also just a good thing to leave the meet in the rear view mirror.

Our Saint Ignatius Wolfpack boys track team  competed well at the 2014 CCL Indoor meet, but the result was disappointing as our team came up just short in defending its 2013 title, finishing second to Loyola Academy, 121 points to 112.

For the second time this 2013-14 school year, our Saint Ignatius boys had the early lead in a  contest only to have Loyola’s team close with a rush for the win.  Back in October our cross country boys had a lead going into the last mile before losing 31-35 (low score wins).  At the CCL indoor meet on Saturday, March 22, as I tweeted after six events, it was Ignatius 57 and Loyola 49.  But Loyola took a lead 73-70 after the ninth event, and then pulled out to a bigger 19-point lead before the 1600-meter run.

Chris Korabik finished second in the 800-meter run, and then won the 1600-meters for the Wolfpack. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Seniors Chris Korabik and Taylor Dugas then stepped onto the track and executed a perfect race plan, with Korabik setting a strong pace up front and Dugas biding his team behind the chasers, which included Loyola’s Matt Randolph and Christian Swenson, along with Fenwick’s Sal Flight.  All the runners had competed in earlier events.  Korabik (2:01.49) and Dugas (2:03.81) had finished second and third in the 800, as Flight (2:01.46) nipped Korabik at the tape for first.  But in the 1600 Korabik was in the lead almost wire to wire, winning in 4:27.83—and Dugas made a strong move in the second half-mile to take second in 4:30.61, a personal best on a big meet stage.  But Loyola still scored important points as Randolph and Swenson held on behind them for fourth and fifth place.  That left the Wolfpack ten points behind.

Meanwhile results came in from the triple jump, as well, in the Wolfpack’s favor.  Early in the event senior Sheldon Pierce matched his personal best from last year’s outdoor season with a jump of 44 feet and 7 inches, which would hold up for the win.  But our second 44-foot jumper, senior Chris Hawkins, who had earlier finished second in the 55-meter hurdles, was struggling with a hip flexor injury that had begun bothering him in the long jump.  Hawkins managed one legal jump at 40-01.00 for fifth place.  Loyola’s Josh Word finished two inches and one place in front of him.

Going into the 200 meters, with two events left, the Wolfpack was two points behind.  But it was advantage Loyola.

In the 200, senior Conor Dunham, who had climbed out of a sick bed this week to finish third (6.87) in the 55-meter hurdles earlier in the meet, gutted out a fast closing race to finish in a virtual tie with Loyola’s John Miller in 23.54.  But the Fully Automated Timing system photo gave the literal photo finish to Word in fourth.  Dunham got fifth place points—and Loyola’s Javier Shelly finished seventh.

With only the 4×400 relay left, Loyola had a five point lead.  The Wolfpack would have to win the 4×400—and Loyola would have to finish fifth.  Dan Santino, who earlier had finished second in the 3200-meter (9:40.07) behind Swenson (9:33.04), went to the start line for Ignatius, with senior Nick Beltran, Dugas, and Korabik to follow.  It was a team that we figured, on their best day, each athlete could run 54-second 400s and finish as fast as 3:36—and it turned out not to be their best day as they ran 3:41.44 for third place.  Loyola countered with a team that included Josh Word, second- place finisher in the individual 400.  The race was over after the first leg, as Loyola moved out to a big lead right away, going on to win in 3:34..67.

In the end, Loyola had simply had more scoring athletes than our Ignatius team, which had depended upon scoring big points from fewer athletes—Pierce, Hawkins, Dunham, Dugas, Korabik, all seniors, most notably.  They had indeed scored big points—but not quite big enough.   The distance runners scored 43 points against a maximum possible 54 points—a strong effort.  There had been a few other good efforts.  Senior Mickey Smith cleared a personal best of 12 feet and 6 inches in the pole vault for second place, with junior Josiah Simmons, who had not had a chance to vault in a pit all season, in seventh place after clearing 9-06.  Junior Andy Weber was fourth in the 3200-meter in a strong time of 9:47.72.  The 4×800 relay team of juniors Kallin Khan, Sean Freeman, John Lennon, and Brian Santino finished second in 8:37.95.

But Loyola’s larger team effort had made the difference, with wins in all three relays—4×800, 4×200, and 4×400.  Loyola’s individual sprinters Word, Miller, and Shelly had scored important points in the 400 and 200, placing two in each event.

Our very realistic pre-meet calculations had scored Ignatius with 113 points, and we scored 112—so we weren’t really very far off our game.  We competed hard in the face of some adversity.

But Loyola simply outscored its seeded projections—outscoring even optimistic projections, perhaps.  To win we would have had to do that, as well.  Injuries and illness probably made our efforts realistic , as opposed to outstanding.

It has been a long indoor season—made longer by the snow which has only this week melted from our outdoor track.  We are used to practicing on the outdoor track sporadically all winter in recent years, and even in “bad” winters we have usually been able to practice on a clear track at least by early March.  We have been afflicted with the track and field version of “cabin fever” as we watched the snow continue to pile up in early March when it should have been melting.

Our team will have to improve—and get healthy—if we want to defend our CCL outdoor and IHSA sectional titles at the end of May.  Without the 20 points that Jack Keelan scored for us last year at the state meet, it will be hard to match our fourth place finish and 28 points there.  But our team still has a chance to do so.  We return Conor Dunham as the top returning finisher in the 300-meter hurdles, and Pierce, Hawkins, Korabik, and even Santino and Dugas are potential state meet points scorers, as well.

As disappointing as it was to lose the indoor CCL meet, we will hope to be at our best at the end of May, as opposed to the middle of March.  The next two and a half months will tell a different story, we hope.

Team touch across some generations

The Wolfpack track team takes a team photo on the National Mall in Washington, DC, with guests Tom and Joan O’Hara. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Before the start of the Jesuit Invite at Georgetown Preparatory School outside of Washington, DC, on Friday, February 21, sophomore Dan Santino approached Saint Ignatius alumnus Tom O’Hara, class of 1960, near the small grandstand beside the main straightaway.  After they had been introduced, Santino politely asked O’Hara a question:  “What did it feel like to set a world record?”

Fifty years ago, almost to the day, O’Hara twice set world indoor track records in the mile run, first running 3 minutes 56.6 seconds in New York on February 13, 1964, and then 3:56.4 on a small 11-laps-to-the-mile track in the Chicago Stadium on March 6.  More than 18,000 spectators were in attendance for the Chicago Daily News Relays, a hometown crowd for Chicagoan Thomas Martin Ignatius O’Hara, who was running for Loyola University in his senior year.  O’Hara, one of the greatest collegiate distance runners in NCAA history, would go on to make the United States Olympic team in the 1500-meters that summer.   Touted as America’s best hope to win a medal in the distance races in Tokyo, his portrait made the cover of Sports Illustrated, with a long profile story of a shy, small, red-headed young man from an Irish Chicago family.  O’Hara was hit with a strength-sapping illness before the games–likely a result of an even heavier training load than what produced the records, O’Hara admits, as he probably overdid it preparing for the big Olympic test.  He reached the Olympic semi-finals, but he didn’t qualify for the final.

In the amateur track days of the 1960s, it was difficult to sustain a running career after college.  After graduating from Loyola, O’Hara went on to become a life insurance salesman, based in Villa Park, IL—and a good one, it seems.  It is an asset to a salesman, I would assume, when people know you as a former world record holder.

A three-hour delay at O’Hare before flying to DC gave the team plenty of time to take a photograph with the O’Haras.

At Georgetown Prep, O’Hara and his wife, Joan, were guests of the generous benefactor who for the second year had funded the Saint Ignatius track team on its trip to the Jesuit Invite.  They flew with the team from O’Hare, enduring a three-and-a-half hour flight delay and a 1:30 am arrival at the Bethesda Residence Inn.  We had originally planned a tour of the U.S. Capitol the next morning, but we emailed a cancellation to let the boys—and the O’Haras—catch up on their sleep before the big meet that day.

On the night before he flew from Chicago with us, Loyola University honored the 50th anniversary of O’Hara’s 1964 records with a half-time ceremony that included showing the Loyola basketball crowd a video of the Daily News Relays race.  Available on Youtube, it was originally aired live on ABC’s Wide World of Sports television show.  In attendance at the 50^th anniversary event were members of the 1963 Loyola NCAA national championship basketball team.  O’Hara himself was an NCAA champion–in the mile and in cross country.

Dan Santino and his Ignatius teammates had watched that Youtube video in a classroom at Ignatius that same week.  Santino’s track fan father, Bill, had also gone on E-Bay to purchase copies of the Sports Illustrated magazine with O’Hara on the cover.  Santino, one of the top runners in Illinois and just a sophomore, would later present O’Hara with the magazines, which O’Hara autographed.

But their first conversation began with that simple question.  “How did it feel to set the world record?”

O’Hara thought a bit before he gave his answer.  Then he looked Santino in the eye and said, very simply, “Well, it felt pretty good.”

Santino’s coach, standing with the pair, sought a more complicated answer:  The first time he set the record, had O’Hara expected to do it?  Did he know he could run that fast?

Once again, the now grey-haired O’Hara gave a simple answer: “I knew that I was running pretty well at the time, yes.  My training was pretty good.”

Tom O’Hara’s two days traveling with Santino and the Ignatius team didn’t really include any profound moments of advice or encouragement.  He talked with the boys simply and directly, answering their questions–and telling some stories.

He struck the boys, most of all, as simply a very nice man, notably modest about his tremendous accomplishments as a runner.  At Jesuit schools we have a mantra that applies to a simple ethical idea:  “Men and women for others.”  Taking a couple days to travel with them, the O’Haras showed the boys what that means.

Two great milers: Ray Mayer, Ignatius class of 1951, and Tom O’Hara, class of 1960.

Most notably, perhaps, the boys watched O’Hara and his wife find small ways to attend and assist another Ignatius alumnus at the meet, Ray Mayer, class of 1951.  Mayer, in fact, was the benefactor for the trip–and it had been his idea to invite the O’Haras along for the ride.  A former Army career officer and then a successful real estate dealer in Northern Virginia, Mayer suffers from Parkinson’s.  O’Hara had recently had his own bout with medical issues; he has recuperated remarkably from a quintuple bypass last October.

The pair had met at a lunch gathering that afternoon, organized by Mayer’s friend and Ignatius teammate Tom Coyne, who had made the drive from Kalamazoo, MI, just for the lunch and the track meet.

Mayer had been a star runner at Ignatius fewer than ten years before O’Hara.

Among other things, of course, Mayer and O’Hara shared the tutelage of famed Ignatius coach Dr. Ralph Mailliard.  Both agreed that while they loved Mailliard like a father, for all his success Mailliard was not an expert coach when it came to the training of distance runners.

As it happened, O’Hara and Mayer had also shared a second coach, Jerry Weiland, at Loyola.  Mayer had gone from Ignatius to Marquette on a track scholarship, but, he said directly, “It didn’t work out there.  I was terribly unhappy.”  So he had transferred to Loyola, where his running still did not develop as well as he hoped under Weiland—although he did run a 4:12 mile.  Like Mailliard, O’Hara and Mayer agreed without any disrespect, Weiland might not have been the most knowledgeable coach for distance runners.

O’Hara had fared better at Loyola, he thought, partly because during his time at Loyola Weiland had taken on an assistant, Don Amidei.   Amidei had been the coach of phenom Tom Sullivan at Evanston’s St. George High School.  Weiland had hired Amidei, it seems, expecting he could recruit Sullivan to Loyola; Sullivan, at the last minute, chose Villanova, instead.  A 4:03.5 miler in high school, the fastest high school miler in history before Jim Ryun broke the 4-minute barrier in 1964, Sullivan never matched that time as a collegian; he did, however, become a doctor, a pediatric neurologist, in fact.  Sullivan’s loss was O’Hara’s gain.  Amidei left Loyola to coach at DePaul after a year, but it was Amidei’s training program, O’Hara said, that he followed through the glory years of his college career, with Weiland holding the watch for the workouts and providing motivation.

(As an aside and to complete the circle, in a way, Amidei went on to be the head track coach at Northwestern.  He was, in fact, my coach there when I ran track and cross country my freshman year.  But Amidei also returned to high school coaching after he left Northwestern, and he coached at Saint Ignatius from 1983 to 1985.  At Saint Ignatius Amidei coached Karamath Khan ’84, father of junior Kallin Khan.)

O’Hara said he really believed that Weiland had developed his own ideas as a track coach from his experience and interest in race horses.  He told a story to prove his point.  When the runners at Loyola complained about shin splints, Weiland showed up at practice one day holding a bottle with a strange chemical name on the label.  “It was horse liniment!” O’Hara laughed.  O’Hara didn’t let the coach anywhere near his legs with his horse liniment wraps.

Mayer, listening intently, didn’t miss a beat.  “Coach,” he whinnied to O’Hara, “we’re running as fast as we can.”

It was an entertaining lunch.

Senior Wil Hughes and sophomore Dan Santino visit with trip benefactor Ray Mayer.

Later, at the meet, Joan O’Hara procured an office chair for Mayer, which she thought would be more comfortable than his combination walker-chair.  O’Hara supplied him with water and candy as they watched the meet together.

The Ignatius boys, when they were not busy with the meet, stopped in for short conversations.

A year ago the Ignatius team had fallen behind early in the meet and then rallied to win at the end.  They had made Mayer very happy when he hoisted their trophy.

The meet features East Coast Jesuit school teams from New York City (Regis, Xavier, and Fordham Prep), Baltimore (Loyola-Blakefield), and the DC-area (Georgetown Prep and Gonzaga).  The New York teams were clearly resting some of their best runners, looking ahead to the big Eastern States meet closer to home in the Armory the following week.

In the 2014 edition of the meet, Ignatius fell behind once again but could not rally all the way to victory, as Fordham tallied 122 points to our 112.  Mayer said he was not disappointed with the outcome.  We noted that we still had a second-place trophy to take home on the plane to Chicago.

We also had some outstanding performances.  Senior Conor Dunham won the 55-meter hurdles in a time of 7.60 seconds, which at the time was the top performance for an Illinois high school runner in 2014; it was also a new meet record for the Jesuit Invite.  Senior Chris Hawkins, close behind Dunham, ran 7.77 seconds, at the time the number two performance for Illinois.  Dunham later won the 300-meter dash in 36.64.  Hawkins won the long jump with a distance of 20 feet and 5.25 inches.

Senior Chris Korabik won the 1600-meter run with a furious finish, as he closed a ten-meter gap with a 62-second final 400 to run 4:23.94.  His time beat the meet record set the previous year by Ignatius’s Jack Keelan.  Korabik now has the number two performance at 1600 meters for an Illinois runner in 2014.

The O’Haras had five children, who did some track and cross country running of their own.  Joan O’Hara described Tom running around the cross country course exhorting the runners—and especially his own kids.  He was more subdued at our meet.

Junior Kallin Khan and senior Chris Korabik enjoyed playing Frisbee on a sunny 64-degree day on the National Mall after a cold Chicago February.

On Saturday morning, after the Friday night meet, Tom and Joan O’Hara joined the team after we checked out of the Residence Inn in Bethesda and traveled by Metro to the National Mall for some sightseeing.   After the terrible cold of a hard Chicago winter, the boys and the O’Haras all seemed to enjoy the sun and 64-degrees of Washington, DC, as much as they did the Smithsonian museums they visited.  The boys spent more time playing Frisbee near our park bench “baggage camp” than they did sightseeing.  They did manage, however, to take some photos of their trophy in some interesting locations.

At the airport, after passing through the TSA with the trophy, Dan and his teammate brother Brian Santino approached Tom O’Hara with the Sports Illustrated magazines purchased by their father.  O’Hara graciously signed them.

The Santinos then presented one of their magazines to their coach.  O’Hara later told me, “I signed yours in gold.”

His inscription:  “Dear Ed, My best wishes.  Thank you so much for inviting me to the track meet.  I enjoyed it so much.  Tom O’Hara.”

Later, as they left the plane after arrival at O’Hare, O’Hara shook hands with each of the boys.

My friend and colleague Patrick McHugh, track coach and athletic director at North Shore Country Day School, has written in his own blog about an idea that he calls “team touch.”  It is important, he says, for teammates to make physical contact with each other during the day of a big meet—shaking hands, patting each other on the back, team huddles.

For a weekend, Tom O’Hara generously joined our Ignatius team—and touched our team.  We will be a better team because of it.

A little bit of vindication at Lake Park

The start of the Lake Park sectional. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

As the race developed from the mile to the two mile mark at the Chicago Catholic League championships two weeks ago, it looked like our Saint Ignatius team had victory safely in our hands.  Then we lost, as at least one of our key runners struggled home to the finish and Loyola’s runners came roaring back in the last mile to win, 31-35.

So when our Saint Ignatius team seemed to be sitting at 100 points just past the midpoint of the three mile race at the Lake Park Sectional on Saturday, we were confident about placing high enough to qualify for the state meet—but we still kept our fingers crossed.  Almost without fail at our annual sectional, the magic number for qualification in the fifth spot is about 150.

In the end we finished third with 127 points.  So in fact we were safe—but once again we also did not finish as strongly as we wanted to finish.

The dissection of number one ranked York’s improbable loss at the Lake Park Sectional continues in various online locations with a couple common themes.    York got off to a bad start.  Coach Joe Newton didn’t like the barriers at the start, and he seemed to say that his team got boxed in at the top of the hill on the first turn.  Because of the bad start, they couldn’t get their pack together until later in the race.  Then it seemed that their pack didn’t move up as easily through what was arguably a tougher field than they have been used to running against earlier in the season.

When we got our box assignment for the Lake Park sectional last week, we noticed right away that next to the Saint Ignatius box number 8 would be York in box number 7.  Coaches from the Fenwick Regional–where York had dominated– assured us that York’s strategy in the sectional would be similarly aggressive.  They would race from the front.  Our race strategy seemed pretty obvious—follow the York frontrunners.

When York didn’t get out aggressively with their pack, however, it created a little bit of a problem for our team, as well.

We had done some research on the course, including a visit on Wednesday before the two days of rain came, and we got helpful advice from Matt Haffner, whose Ignatius girls team runs Lake Park’s Harvey Braus Invite each year.  Get to the outside of the race mob on the first turn, we told our boys.  That would also help them get into position to run at the top of the hill on the ridge after the turn, where it would be drier after the rain.  The boys themselves had also given some careful thought to the 150 meters or so of pavement on the course; most of our boys put shorter spikes in their shoes so they would have the option of running on the pavement, instead of on the narrow paths on either side.

Mike Newman’s Dyestatil.com videos document Saturday’s race at several key points as it developed—at the start, at .75 miles or so, right before the mile, then at 1.25 miles.  Then he catches the runners again at 1.75 before the two mile and at 2.25 miles–and finally the finish.

Taylor Dugas and Andy Weber found their way to the outside of the starting mob. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

His start video suggests that our boys did a mixed job with those instructions, as they coped with York’s similarly mixed results at the start.  Senior co-captain Chris Korabik moved aggressively to the front of the race and made the turn easily among the first 20 or so runners.  Running unimpeded on the outside of the pack, sophomore Dan Santino is about even with Korabik.  Then senior co-captain Taylor Dugas and junior Andy Weber flash by, also on the outside as planned, well positioned, it would seem, for the race ahead.   On the other hand, junior Kallin Khan got caught inside toward the back half of the pack, probably around 90th place at the turn.  And at the very back of the pack, at what must have been around 135th place in a race with 140 runners, ran senior Patrick Manglano and junior Brian Santino.

A few moments further into the race, at about the quarter mile mark, I learned later, our assistant coach Nate McPherson had yelled at Khan to get farther toward the front of the race.

I was near Newman at the .75 mile mark, and I remember being pretty happy as the runners approached.    Among other things, Khan was now among the top 25 or so runners in the race—and he was still moving forward.  He must have passed 50 runners in two minutes to get there.  Korabik and Santino were just off the lead in the front pack.  Dugas was around 30th, with Weber not far behind in the top 40, chasing hard.

Kallin Khan found a clear path to run on the pavement. Halfway through the race the Wolfpack had three runners in the top 15, with two more trailing at around 30th–for a total under 100.   It was a virtual dead heat with New Trier and York–with Loyola close behind.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

When we asked him later how he managed to move so quickly through the packed crowd of runners, Khan’s answer was simple.  “I ran on the pavement,” he said.  “It was pretty clear because everyone else was on the grass.”

At 1.25 miles, the video shows the race taking much clearer shape.   For our Wolfpack, Santino was sixth, Korabik tenth, Kahn 18th, Dugas 25th, Weber 35th—with Manglano now moving up to 80th place or so.

The overall team race was clearer, too.

York had moved into position.  The race at that point didn’t match the way York’s four horsemen ran away at the Fenwick Regional last week, running a 15:04 that some people called a tempo run.  But they now had three runners up at the front of the race.

Nathan Mroz from York had taken a ten meter lead on the field, with Matt Plowman of York in the front of the chase pack among Santino, Chase Silverman of New Trier, Jack Carpenter of Maine South, and David O’Gara (running as an individual for Glenbrook South); Jonathan Vara of Lane Tech was up front,  as well, with teammate Pavlo Hutsalyuk.  Kyle Mattes of York was at the back of that front pack.  And in fact the other top six York runners—Alex Bashqawi, Max Denning, and John May– had managed to find each other, as well.  But they were back at about 30th place.  Still, York looked to be winning the race after the mile with around 80 points.

In terms of the other key teams in the race, a second tier of runners included three from Loyola—Christian Swenson, Teddy Brombach, and Jack Carroll—with Henry Mierzwa from Maine South and Kallin Khan from Ignatius.  A group from New Trier also lurked just behind the front chase pack, with Peter Cotsirilos, Tarek Afifi, and Austin Santacruz.  Taylor Dugas from Ignatius was in this mix, but a bit farther back, with Andy Weber from Ignatius chasing from behind the York runners.

We got our next look at the runners just after the halfway mark.  Newman marks his video as 1.75 miles.  Mroz was still firmly in charge.  Most of the runners were in the same place.

With Nathan Mroz in front and David O’Gara in second, Dan Santino of Ignatius battled for third. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

At 2.25 miles, Mroz had pulled away for a ten second lead on the front.  O’Gara had separated himself in second place from a smaller chase group of Silverman, Carpenter, and Santino.   Our Ignatius team looked to be in good shape, with Korabik in tenth and Kallin Khan now running steady at 17th–right behind New Trier’s chasers: Cotsirilos, Afifi, and Santacruz.   But Dugas had begun to fade, falling just behind teammate Andy Weber in 35th and 38th.  Loyola still had Carroll running with Korabik, and Brombach up front in the teens, but Swenson had begun to fade.

It was clear at this point of the race that York was in trouble.   Mattes was running around tenth, but Plowman had suddenly fallen all the way back to the York group of Denning, May, and Bashqawi, still running around 30th.

The team score, with less than a mile to go, appeared to be something like this:  New Trier 95, York 100, Ignatius 105, and Loyola 110.  It was really still anyone’s race from this point to the finish.

New Trier, of course, would close the race out with the best finishing charge—and a total of 79 points.  Silverman would challenge O’Gara, then finish third.  Cotsirilos surged in the last half mile all the way to fifth.  Afifi would finish 18th, Santacruz 23rd, and Om Kanwar 30th.  For York, Mroz took the win, with Mattes 10th; then Basqawi, Denning, and May would finish together in 27th, 28th, and 29th.  York’s total was 95.

Ignatius and Loyola struggled to the finish—each losing a large number of spots from key performers.

Dugas was already fading, all the way back to into the 40s, as he took the hard u-turn with 350 meters to go in order to enter the stadium space;  crossing a patch of grass, the runners jump onto the track for 300 meters to the finish.  On that grass patch, Dugas slipped and fell on the turn, partly, it would seem, out of exhaustion; he had run the race too aggressively up front.

Patrick Manglano started 135th out of 140–and he finished 53rd. His slow start, he said later, “was on purpose.” Photo by Steven Bugarin.

But almost magically, just as Dugas fell, Manglano appeared behind him.  He had moved steadily through the race from the very back at the start.  But even at the 2.25 mile mark, he had been around 70th.  Noting Dugas’s fade at that point, I had yelled to Manglano that the team would need him to finish strongly.  He obviously did so.

As he entered the track to discover Dugas on the ground, Manglano seemed to pause for a moment, reaching down almost to touch his teammate on the shoulder—and then he charged forward after the runners ahead of him.  He would finish 53rd in the team scoring.  Dugas would get to his feet and struggle home in 80th place overall, losing 40 points in the last half mile.

Meanwhile, with about a quarter mile left in the race, Teddy Brombach of Loyola was running just outside of the top ten.  Then he inexplicably slowed to a jog; later it was said he had some kind of cramp.  He finished just ahead of Manglano, in 48th.

But our drama at number five could not overshadow—or detract from—our strong team performance at the front of the race.

Santino ran what was arguably the best race of his young career, as he held on to fourth place in 15:03, close to a personal best.  Korabik was 11th in 15:13, his best race of the year. Khan, after his remarkable charge in the first mile, faded a little bit in the last mile to 25th, but it was his fifth personal best time in five weeks as he ran 15:24.  Weber had moved slowly forward throughout the race to finish 34th (15:33), showing he had recovered from illness and depletion that slowed him two weeks ago at the CCL championship race.

The moments after the sectional race are a nervous vigil, as teams try to calculate their results—and those of their opponents.  I initially gave my group inaccurate information, telling them we had safely scored around 100 points, our number earlier in the race.  I hadn’t quite figured in our fade at the finish.

I’ve been through this post-race moment meaningfully three times now.  In 2010, I had been measuring our team during the entire race against Loyola’s runners, whom I had figured as our competition for the sectional’s fifth spot.  We had clearly been beaten in that race duel—and as we walked from the Niles West stadium to the field house, I had begun to prepare my team for bad news.  What I had not noticed was a subpar performance that day by Maine South, who had entered the race, we thought, a better team than ours.  It turned out to be good news when the results were posted; we had scored 152 points for fifth place.  It was that experience, in fact, that gave me the “150 points to qualify” benchmark.

Last year we entered the sectional ranked as high as second in the pre-race speculation.  But we had had some adversity during the week entering the race; we were not 100 percent.  In the end, we just ran badly that day.  Even with Jack Keelan’s individual race win, I knew our score was well over 150 points after the finish, with our fifth and sixth runners—Manglano and Dugas–far back in the 80s.   But two of our runners up front—Santino and Weber—had underperformed, as well.  When the results were posted, there was a surprise.  Improbably the results on the wall said we had finished fifth with 183 points.  We celebrated wildly, no doubt because of the big surprise.  We had been prepared for bad news.  We took celebratory photographs with the team gathered around 1980 state champion and 1981Ignatius graduate Mike Patton, who had come to watch the race.

Then came the bad news.  Because of a chip scoring error, the results were missing a runner from Lane Tech.  When the runner was added to the race rank after a video review, we were relegated to sixth place.  As I noted in a blog post at the time, boys do cry.

There wasn’t much drama this year for our team, even with Dugas’s fall.  We had entered the race nervous but confident in ourselves.  We had run well, if not spectacularly.  We had a score safely under 150—maybe 110, maybe 120?

Tony Jones from Lane Tech asked me to help him identify runners in his Ipad video of the finish, with the meet results still in doubt among the coaches. Photo by Ilona Koziel.

But as carefully as teams had tried to calculate their scores and those of their close opponents during the race, there was clear confusion among coaches after the race about the results.  Tony Jones of Lane Tech was running through his finish line video on his Ipad.  He called me over to identify our runners.  Jones was talking positively about his runners at the front of the race, but then he was clearly worried to discover that both his fourth and fifth runners had apparently finished well back in the pack—48th and 63rd.

Meanwhile Loyola worried about Brombach’s puzzling finish, which gave them, like Lane Tech, fourth and fifth runners who finished back in the neighborhood of 50th place.  Their counters, it seemed, didn’t succeed in getting a good read on the race.  Assistant Coach Dave Behof had some information from New Trier’s coaches.  New Trier thought they had won the race, ahead of York.  Behof told me we were likely third, and he was hopeful that Loyola was fourth.  Fifth, for some reason, remained a mystery.

Our team was not celebrating, but it was clear that a weight had been lifted from their shoulders once the race was over, and our fate, if not certain, seemed pretty sure.  Maybe the pain of the previous year hung over our heads a little bit; there would be no premature celebration.  Of course, when we were told we had qualified last year, we had been told those results were official.  We had not been premature then, either.

In fact, once we did get the official news at Lake Park, there wasn’t much celebrating from our team, anyway.   All we did was take a few photographs.

The Saint Ignatius boys cross country team finished third at the Illinois High School Association 3A Lake Park Sectional on Saturday, November 2, to earn a coveted spot at the IHSA state championship race in Peoria next week. From left: Coach Ed Ernst, Assistant Coach Steven Bugarin, co-captain Chris Korabik, Brian Santino, Dan Santino, Patrick Manglano, co-captain Taylor Dugas, Andy Weber, Kallin Khan, Assistant Coach Nate McPherson.

As an aside, it is also possible that the boys were subdued because there had been bad news for our girls team.  Running without their number two runner, who had been injured the week before, the team had finished one point out of fifth place behind Loyola, 205-206.  It had been so close that the race was decided by the fifth runners for each team.    Of course, any of the top five Ignatius runners felt they could have scored the one missing point.  The only consolation was that junior Alexis Jakubowski had finished 14th and qualified as an individual to run in Peoria next week.  Our boys knew first hand the kind of disappointment the girls were feeling.

The official boys results gave New Trier their surprising victory with 79 points, with York at 95.  We scored 127, with Loyola Academy fourth at 144–and Lane Tech fifth (163).  Pre-race speculation said that six ranked teams were fighting for five spots.  Maine South with 170 points was the team left out in the cold.  Glenbard West (178) and Lake Park (182) had been surprisingly close to qualifying.

We had beaten three teams that had beaten us in head to head races the previous two weeks.  Loyola had won at the Chicago Catholic League meet; we had been third behind champion Lane Tech and Maine South at the regional the week before.  We had beaten teams that were ranked ahead of us, as well.

But we were the small news of the day.  The big news had been York’s defeat.  It threw the larger state picture into disarray leading into the state meet.  York had defeated the major contenders—Hinsdale Central and Hersey, and O’Fallon, most notably—head to head during the season.  York had been the unanimous number one choice in the season’s final coaches poll from the Illinois Track and Cross Country Coaches Association.  But all those teams, plus New Trier, seemed to have come on strong in the post-season, winning their sectionals.  In addition, the fifth sectional winner, Wheaton Warrenville South, appeared to have developed into a trophy-possible team.

There were two clerical matters to attend to before we left Lake Park.  First, I collected the state championship parking pass for the third place team finisher—the only tangible acknowledgement of our finish, other than the awards announcement.  It struck us a little bit funny that the previous year we had received two permits, one for each of individual qualifiers last year, Keelan and Korabik.

But the awards announcement in the stadium had also strangely announced Brian Santino, older brother to Dan, as the fourth place finisher in the race.  When we handed out the chips before the race, I had remarked to the brothers that it seemed odd that the list assigning the chips put Dan before Brian on the list.  Alphabetically, they should be reversed.  Well, apparently the chips as  assigned in the computer had been assigned alphabetically.  As I accepted our parking pass and thanked race director Peter Schauer, the Lake Park athletics director, for his work as host, I made arrangements to correct the results and put the brothers in their right order.

After our experience of the previous year, I also wanted him to know that the chip error had not been ours.

Looking ahead to next week, I am not much of a state cross country historian.  In my eleven years as a coach at Saint Ignatius, even, I have probably not attended half of the state meets during that time.  Palatine, it was interesting to notice, has qualified for the meet all of those eleven years!  So has York, of course.  There might be others.

Our 2013 team, for the record, is the fourth Ignatius team ever to qualify for the state meet.  In 1981 the team was 13th, in 1982 2nd, and in 2010 20th.

But for the first time that I can remember, the race on Saturday will be wide open–much more so, even, than in 2010.  York and the five sectional winners are not the only teams who think they are in the mix.

Almost but not quite déjà vu all over again

Dan Santino of Ignatius and Christian Swenson of Loyola battled for three miles at the front of the Chicago Catholic League Championship–with Chris Korabik of Ignatius and Sal Flight of Fenwick in pursuit. But the outcome of the team championship would be decided behind them.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

To get a full understanding of the almost cosmic drama at the 2013 Chicago Catholic League Cross Country Championship at Turtlehead Lake on Saturday, October 12, you probably have to look back at the last few previous championships.  Only the coaches and the seniors at the race—and a few parents—could have those memories.

In October of 2010 at the Chicago Catholic League cross country championships, Loyola Academy and Saint Ignatius came to the meet at Schiller Woods with what appeared to be evenly matched teams.  Loyola had narrowly beaten Ignatius at the CCL North division meet three weeks before.   Ignatius had not won the CCL meet since 1991 [Correction: since 1994] ; Loyola had won in 2008 and 2009–and five times total since 2000.

The Wolfpack CCL cross country championship in 2010 was the first since 1991. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

The 2010 CCL race probably meant a whole lot more to our Ignatius team.  Among other things our boys had become used to watching dominant Loyola teams win championships, while we had not even been able to compete.  Now we seemed to have a realistic chance to win.

At the front of the race in the first mile then sophomore Jack Keelan and senior co-captain Jack Cross from Ignatius locked horns with junior William Hague from Loyola.  But missing from that mix was a second top runner from Loyola, senior Mac Ford, who was struggling back in the pack.  We would later learn that Ford and his brother Todd had been suffering with illness all week.

As the race developed, Keelan pulled away for a ten-second win over Hague, running 14 minutes and 57 seconds to break 15:00 for the first time in his career, and Fenwick’s Steve Blazer moved up for third.   But in the pack as they approached the finish Ignatius had moved forward to take control of the race.

In 2010 Patrick Santino raced into fourth place–but then collapsed 50 meters in front of the finish line. He crawled to the finish as other runners passed him–and still finished eighth overall to help Ignatius to the team win. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Junior Patrick Santino had charged into fourth, a surprising turn in our favor—and perhaps a potentially deciding blow.  But then 50 meters from the finish line, he collapsed.  He got up, but he collapsed again ten yards from the finish.  He began to crawl toward the line.  Senior Tom Beddome from Loyola passed him to finish fourth, then Cross went by for fifth.  Senior Ian Barnett of Fenwick went by, then senior Tom Condreva of Brother Rice.  Santino crawled across the line just in front of junior Ryan Clardy of Fenwick for eighth place.

With the race still in some doubt, seniors Jack Doyle and Peter Devitt from Ignatius crossed in 12^th and 13^th to seal the win for Ignatius with 35 points.  Mac Ford, Loyola’s best runner for much of the 2010 season, would finish 16^th as their fourth finisher, and his junior brother Todd finished 26^th.  Loyola’s total was 55 points.

A year later a much improved Todd Ford would get his revenge, winning the CCL meet at Midlothian Meadows by outkicking Keelan, and Loyola would win the 2011 team title, 35-63.  Then in 2012 Keelan and Ignatius won convincingly, as Keelan set an amazing course record at Turtlehead Lake (14:29), and Ignatius finished 1^st, 3^rd, 4^th, 7^th, and 20^th to score 35 points, once again, to Loyola’s 53.

The 2013 CCL championship shaped up a lot like the 2010 race.  Dyestatil.com ranked Loyola 11^th in the state and Ignatius 12^th.  The Wolfpack defeated the Ramblers convincingly at the Palatine Invite at the end of September, but Loyola won the Pat Savage Niles West Invite in October– by just a point.

The race started somewhat slowly, with a large pack that included six Ignatius runners, five Loyola runners, three Fenwick runners, and a few single runners–senior Steve Sismelich from Providence Catholic, Dan O’Keefe from Mt. Carmel, and James Durkin from Brother Rice.  At the mile mark, Fenwick senior Brixton Rill had moved out to a ten-meter or so lead going just under 5:00, with the pack just a little bit over that.

As the runners headed up the hill north of the Turtlehead Lake, the pack seemed to break up a little bit—and Rill’s lead disappeared.  Ignatius sophomore Dan Santino, brother of Patrick Santino, and Loyola junior Christian Swenson moved toward the lead with Sal Flight of Fenwick in tow.  As the pack strung out, it seemed that the four remaining Ignatius runners were taking  positions among three  Loyola runners, with the sixth Ignatius runner also in front of Loyola’s fifth.  This seemed like good news for the Wolfpack.

As the runners completed their first swing around the lake and headed toward the two mile mark north of the lake again, the race had taken even clearer shape.  Santino and Swenson were on the lead, with Sal Flight of Fenwick running with them.  Ignatius senior co-captain Chris Korabik was chasing in fourth.  Then three more Ignatius runners—senior co-captain Taylor Dugas, junior Andy Weber, and junior Kallin Khan–had taken positions in a chase pack with two Loyola runners, junior Spencer Kelly and senior Teddy Brombach.  Trailing that pack were Loyola’s senior Matt Randolph and junior Jack Carroll, along with Sismelich, Rill, and Durkin.  Ignatius senior Patrick Manglano and O’Keefe, trailed that group.

Turtlehead Lake course map for the 2013 Chicago Catholic League Championships.

The race leaders went into a narrower path that goes around a small pond on higher ground north of Turtlehead Lake itself, then it finished the hill, going across a ridge—the highest point of the course.  It was on that hill, about a half mile from the finish, it seems, that the race began to change.

First Khan, who was running faster than he had ever run, and then Weber, who had missed school and practice during the week with flu-like symptoms, dropped from the first chase pack.  Meanwhile Randolph and Carroll, Loyola’s fourth and fifth runners, began to move up.  Behind them Manglano was closing hard for Ignatius, as well—but he was chasing from farther behind.

With about a half-mile left in the race, Swenson took the lead at the front of the race in front of Santino.  Flight was in third, but Korabik was close in fourth.  Dugas was matched up with Brombach and Kelly—with Durkin and Sismelich racing them as outsiders to the team drama, but still a factor in determining the important place points.  It was a pretty even race, three on three for Ignatius and Loyola.

Behind that group, Loyola’s Randolph and Carroll were racing Khan, Weber, and Manglano from Ignatius to decide the team race—three on two.  It seemed to be advantage Ignatius.

And then with about a half-mile to go, Weber waved Khan and then Manglano ahead of him.

Junior Andy Weber was running with the chase pack as an important scoring runner until he began to fade with a half mile left in the race.  He would collapse in sight of the finish line and crawl across the line–but the race outcome was already decided in Loyola’s favor.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Over the final half-mile of the race, Weber would slow dramatically, then begin to wobble, and then, with 100 meters to go, collapse.  He would get up and try to run, and then crumble again—twice—before crawling over the finish line.  Our second runner in September when he ran a personal best of 15:20 at Detweiller, Weber would finish the race a minute slower and was a non-factor in the team scoring in 19^th place.  He was probably dehydrated from his week of using Sudafed to handle his flu symptoms—and he had run himself into exhaustion.  As a precaution his parents took him to Northwestern’s emergency room, where an IV helped revive his physical body—although he would then face disappointment about the race outcome when his father finally gave him the news.

At the front of the race things had gone well for Ignatius.  Santino was behind Swenson by a few meters with just 300 meters left in the race—but then he surged and ran past him for a four-second win in 15:04.  Korabik, running his best race of the year, outkicked Flight for third in 15:20.  Korabik would later be awarded the CCL’s Lawless Award as the top senior finisher.

But then Kelly and Brombach finished fifth and sixth, both outkicking Dugas in seventh—although at that point the score was still Ignatius 11 and Loyola 13.  The race was decided by the chasers at numbers four and five for both teams.  After Brother Rice’s Durkin in eighth, Loyola’s Carroll finished ninth, putting Sismelich from Providence and Rill from Fenwick behind him–and in front of his Ignatius chasers.   Loyola’s Randolph then finished 12^th in 15:43, just a second in front of Khan in 13^th and Manglano 14^th.

There were definitely some elements of déjà vu all over again from 2010—with some key changes in Loyola’s favor this time—as Loyola pulled out a close 31-35 win.

The teams will meet again at the Illinois High School Association’s 3A Lake Park sectional this coming Saturday.  In 2010, after Ignatius won the CCL meet, Loyola placed fourth to defeat fifth-place Ignatius at the Niles West Sectional, but both teams qualified for the state meet.  There Loyola finished 13^th and Ignatius 20^th.

Let’s hope that the cosmic tumblers repeat themselves this year—and Ignatius can turn the tables at the end of season races at Lake Park and Peoria.

The first step, of course, will be for both teams to qualify for the state meet again this coming Saturday.  It will be a battle.  York would seem to be a lock for the first spot as the state’s number one ranked team.  But Mike Newman’s final Dyestatil.com season rankings put sectional competitors Lane Tech 8^th, New Trier 9^th, Ignatius 11^th, Maine South 12^th, and Loyola 13^th.  Five pretty equal teams will race for four spots.

It is a lot like 2010, actually…

Dinner, a movie, and a cross country race

Winners of the 2013 Seeded Varsity race at the Goergetown Prep Classic, the Saint Ignatius Wolfpack, with benefactor Ray Mayer of the class of 1951.

“Whoa, Coach Ernst, what’s up with the blog post?” said senior co-captain Taylor Dugas, more or less right after he had stepped off the elevator into the lobby of the Residence Inn in Bethesda, MD.

Seniors Taylor Dugas, Patrick Manglano, Chris Korabik, and Cara Zadeik make plans for a team outing to the movies.

An hour earlier Dugas had asked if he and some of his teammates could go to a nearby movie theater to watch “Captain Phillips,” the new Tom Hanks movie about the ship captured by Somali pirates off the East African coast. It was a 9:30 showing, and it was a long movie. The boys would be out late, and there were boys who wanted to attend church in the morning. We also had a team run on the National Mall scheduled–and a plane to catch in the afternoon.

We figured out a plan for the morning that would work–even with the late night. The movie-goers would get a little bit shorter night’s sleep than they might like.

But then when Dugas and his teammates arrived in the hotel lobby to head out, there was a new twist. The girls varsity team was with them.

I am used to seeing these girls in running clothes–or in Ignatius dress code. They looked, well, dressed up–or at least they had done new things with their hair. “Is that Olivia,” I asked Olivia Meyer.

It was.

After my “Boys and Girls” post yesterday, which suggested that the two teams were enjoying separate guys-only and girls-only weekends, the honor of the two teams was at stake, it seems.

The varsity boys and girls had organized what amounted to a team date. The sign out sheet listed nine boys and six girls.

The evening had started with dinner in the breakfast area of the Residence Inn. Girls assistant coach Rose Paluch had planned the menu with a nearby Italian restaurant, Mamma Lucia’s: penne pasta with white and red sauce, cheese pizza, chicken cacciatore, two different green salads, cake with vanilla frosting, and cannoli.

Our only disappointment of the day had been that our benefactor, Ray Meyer–the generous former city-mile champion from the class of 1951 who had paid for the meal and brought the teams to Washington, DC to run–had tired at the end of the long day at Georgetown Prep and was not able to join us for dinner.

For the record, the boys and girls did sit separately at dinner.

The trip to DC had, in fact, basically amounted to a weekend retreat for each team. After dinner the girls had what sounded like–and the coaches agreed later–one of their best team meetings of the year. The girls and their coaches had reflected on the day’s performance at the Georgetown Prep Classic cross country race that afternoon.

The girls varsity team had finished second in the “seeded varsity” race, beaten only by Centennial High School of Ellicott City, MD.  Junior Meyer had been the team’s  top finisher in sixth, running 19 minutes and 28 seconds for 5 kilometers.   Alexis Jakubowski was eighth in 19:30, Jill Poretta tenth in 19:52,  Anastasia Bouchelion 21st in 20:23, and Kirstyn Ruiz  25th in 20:33.

The girls junior varsity team had won easily. The freshmen team also won. Twenty of 24 runners won medals for finishing in the top 25 of their races.

Times were not fast, which we had expected when we had looked at results from previous years. But there had been another twist, as well: On Friday night, soon after we checked into our hotel rooms, we received an email from race director Greg Dunston with the news that three days of rain in DC had made the golf course where the race is usually run un-runnable. He was not going to cancel the race. Instead most of the race would be run on the roads of Georgetown Prep’s campus, but with two swings through a muddy stretch of field.

Girls head coach Matt Haffner, Paluch, and assistant coach Erin Luby had been thrilled with the way their girls had handled the double adversity–a road course, something new for the girls and something which required them to remove spikes from their race shoes, and then sloppy and muddy paths up a number of hilly bumps, something the girls had not encountered before. The road course presented a hill as challenging as any that a city runner finds in Chicago, as well.

Dan Santino follows race leader Chase Weaverling from Poolesville.

The boys did not win as many medals as the girls–a haul of 19 for 24 boys. The varsity boys ran especially well, however, placing four in the top ten–winning four pewter mugs, as well as top-25 medals. Sophomore Dan Santino was third, senior co-captain Chris Korabik eighth, Dugas ninth, junior Andy Weber tenth, senior Patrick Manglano 14th, junior Kallin Khan 16th, and junior Brian Santino 44th. Even with much of the course on the road, the times were a little bit slow because of the terrain and the muddy sections.  Santino ran 16 minutes and 14 seconds for 5k. Korabik was 16:29, Dugas 16:31, Weber 16:38, Manglano 16:43, Khan 16:48, and Santino 17:40. The most important news for the team was a 34-second split from our number one to our number six runner.

Two freshman runners won medals: Lyndon Vickrey (14th, 19:23) and Paul Tonner (17th, 19:29). We entered the maximum ten runners in one of two junior varsity races, our juniors and seniors. The team placed second overall to win a plaque. The surprise number one for the team was junior Niko Polite, who ran the best race of his career to finish seventh in 18:11. Junior John Lennon was ninth (18:15), junior Sean Freeman tenth (18:15), senior Andrew Salinas 13th (18:20), senior Paddy McCabe 22nd (18:29) and junior Dante Domenella 25th (18:31).

In a second junior varsity race, with teams assigned randomly, we ran our sophomores. Jack Morgan led the team with his fifth-place finish in 18:43 Andrius Blekys was seventh (18:48), Tony Imburgia 20th (19:45), Seamus Brennan 23rd(19:49), and Colin Hogan 25th (19:55). As a team their score of 69 points won them a third-place plaque.

On the announcer’s stage , Wolfpack winners do the post-race interview. Photo/video by Mary Weber.

The meet itself is as much a cross country running festival as it is a race. One of the meet sponsors is the Pacers Running Stores of the DC-area, in combination with New Balance shoe company. Chris Farley from Pacers and Johnny Cakes Auville from the local Sports Junkies radio program manned an announcing booth near the finish line, where they did some race play by play, as well as post-race interviews with the winners. When they heard that our team had come to the race from Chicago–and that we had won the boys seeded team race–they invited us on stage. We told them that we had scouted the original golf-course venue watching Youtube videos of previous years’ races. The boys proudly told them that we had expected to perform well at the meet, even against unknown teams on a mystery course, because we are one of the top-ranked teams in Illinois–and Illinois is a great cross country state. In their interview the boys reiterated their team goals to place high at the Illinois state meet and the Nike NXN event in November. You can hear a podcast of the interview here.  And here is a Youtube video version.

Sitting in front of the stage during the interview, our benefactor Ray Mayer accepted public thank you-s from the Pacers Stores master of ceremonies–and from the boys.

Meanwhile the girls gave Mayer lots of attention and thanks.

The Pacers guys weren’t done yet. They announced a dance contest at 4:30 in the New Balance cross country store tent. When one of Haffner’s girls approached him to enter, he simply shook his head. She was warming up for the next race, and she would not be allowed to compete.

Senior co-captain Taylor Dugas won the dance contest.

Taylor Dugas did compete, and aided by a cheering section from Chicago, he won a pair of New Balance shoes and a new athletic bag.  Chicago wins again.

As Ray Mayer joked to different groups of kids, “You won so many prizes. I hope they let you come back next year.”

Whenever he said that, the boys and girls just looked at each other and smiled.

A little bit of drama for the Wolfpack at the Palatine Invite—and a new hero

The Saint Ignatius Wolfpack boys varsity cross country team finishes fifth at the Palatine Invite to win team medals–and a new hat for the coach.  Left to right:  Assistant coach Steven Bugarin, Patrick Manglano, Brian Santino, Taylor Dugas, Kallin Khan, Dan Santino, Chris Korabik, Andy Weber, Coach Ed Ernst.

Last year at the 2012 Palatine Invite cross country meet our Saint Ignatius boys team finished in a tie for sixth out of 28 teams with 230 points—and just one point out of fifth place.  When they went to the tie-breaker sixth man, Palatine was given sixth place, and we were relegated to seventh officially.  But it was a good performance for us.  We had defeated several of the state’s top ranked teams, including Niles North, Maine South, and Lake Zurich.

We did a little bit of congratulatory back slapping and celebrating.  We watched the awards ceremony with more interest since we had been close to a top five podium position.  It was there that someone noticed that along with individual medals that go to  all seven runners of the top five teams, the coach of each top-five team got a special Palatine Invite baseball cap.

I always wear a hat—several different hats, actually, at different times and places and for different occasions.  It was one of my few really selfish moments that I can remember as a coach.  I really wanted one of those hats last year.

The Palatine Invite, which also goes by a second name, “Meet of Champions,” brings together many of the state’s top teams each year to run on a historic Illinois cross country course in Palatine’s Deer Grove East Forest Preserve.  It is a fixture on York High School’s schedule, and the perennial Illinois 3A state champions absorbed one of their few losses of the last year at Palatine, where they were beaten by another nationally-ranked team, St. Xavier from Louisville, KY.  This year York showed up prepared for a rematch.  Along with York and St. Xavier, other top-ranked Illinois teams at this year’s meet included Hersey, New Trier, Loyola, and Maine South—along with one of the top ranked teams in Missouri, St. Louis University High School.  In addition to York, the defending 3A state champions, the defending 2A state champions from Jones College Prep would also compete.

Our Ignatius team got some mentions in the pre-race discussion as a possible contending team, as well.  Two weeks ago at the First to the Finish Invitational in Peoria we were fourth out of 40 teams, which moved us up close to the top ten in the rankings by Illinois coaches, at Dyestat Illinois, and at Illinois Milesplit.

It was pretty clear almost from the start of the race that York would dominate.  Four York “horsemen,” as Dyestat’s Mike Newman dubbed them last week, took up positions early in the race at the back of a front pack of 20 runners—and Nathan Mroz, Alex Bashqawi, Kyle Mattes, and Matt Plowman proceeded after the first mile to move up to the front of the race behind the early leader Jesse Reiser of McHenry.   Bashqawi would eventually outkick Reiser in the last 200 meters to win the race in a time of 14 minutes and 43.1 seconds.  Mroz was third, Mattes was 6^th,  Plowman was 14^th, and fifth man John May was 25^th, for a total of just 49 points.

The St. Xavier team was also clearly running well from the start of the race, finishing with two in the top ten and four in the top 30 to score 107 points for second place.  Likewise, Hersey, wearing a neon orange top with a simple H on the chest, had their runners at the front of the race, with five finishing in the top 30 for 112 points and third place.

Meanwhile, our Wolfpack runners did not seem to get a good start–and instead of running in a pack, as they had done successfully at the First to the Finish, they were spread out on their own.  Sophomore Dan Santino, who has been our number one all season, was an exception.  He settled into the front pack with the leaders.  Last spring he had battled Palatine’s then sophomore star Graham Brown in at least two races, beating him over 3200 meters at the Palatine Relays and finishing right behind him at the Midwest Distance Festival .  With Brown up among the leaders early in the race, Santino would stay with him, I knew.

Senior Chris Korabik  held a good position as our number two runner, settling in at around 35^th place by my quick count after the mile mark.  Behind him senior Taylor Dugas was about ten spots back, and then it was around ten more spots back to junior Andy Weber.  Our important number five runner, senior Patrick Manglano, was back at round 70^th place.  But that was a good spot for him.  Manglano, who has been the surprise of the team this year, has already had several races where he moved up in position as the race progressed.

In the second mile, Santino was clearly settled in at number 10 or 11.  But it also became  became clear that Dugas, Weber, and Manglano were moving up; Korabik, on the other hand, was fading a little.  With about a half mile to go, Dugas had moved up to around 30^th, with Weber not too far behind and giving chase.  Korabik was right there with them, too, although he was going in the opposite direction.  And Manglano was once again moving by runners at the end of the race.

For the first time this year, I brought a bike to help me move around the course.  For the last two years at Palatine I had spent the race at the nexus point where the runners pass by at about 800 meters, at one mile, at two miles, and then at 2.5 miles.  But I missed the finish 800 meters away.

This year, with a bike, I waited to see Manglano pass by with about 800 meters to go, and then I set off on my bicycle toward the finish.  With so many people on the course and in the road, though, I still couldn’t get there.  I got held up about 200 meters from the finish by the crowds, and I watched Manglano disappear over the final small hill, running away from me.

When I did finally get close to the finish, I got the first news of the drama.

Taylor Dugas, I was told, had collapsed before the finish line.  While worried about Taylor and the heat and humidity, my first question had been, “Did he finish?”

Yes, I was told, but he had fallen twice.  First he fell about fifty meters from the finish.  Then he got up and fell again just in front of the chip-timing finish mats.

There Dugas had literally crawled his way across the finish line.

Taylor Dugas was struggling with 400 meters to the finish–and then he collapsed 50 meters from the line. He got up, collapsed again, and then crawled across the finish line in 71st place. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

I found Dugas with his teammates at the end of the finish chute.  Dugas had been placed in the trainer’s golf cart, where his mother was holding a bag of ice on his head, then moving it behind his neck, and then back on top of his head.  His heartbeat was elevated, and he was breathing quickly.  Reports had already come in that he was not the only runner to struggle with the heat.  Several other runners had been pulled off the course when they began to demonstrate what might best be described as a heat exhaustion “wobble.”

The next day a video of the finish would circulate showing Dugas’s remarkable resolve to finish the race.  He did indeed crawl over the finish line.

I had thought I had a good handle on our results even from my spot 800 meters from the finish.  From that point, you figure the team will gain some and lose some—but the race had been pretty much settled.  Dugas’s struggles, though, had thrown our results into some doubt.  How many places had he lost?

Santino had been 11^th, Weber up close to 30^th, Korabik around 40^th, and Manglano around 60^th.  But Dugas, in the end, had finished behind Manglano.  We would be somewhere around 200 points.  Would that be good enough for a top five finish?

It wasn’t long before I bumped into Mike Newman, who had paper copies of the results—and who had already tweeted them out.  A quick look confirmed we had had finished fifth.  A closer look at Newman’s twitter photo of the results on my Iphone gave us the details:  Santino 11^th  (15:11), Weber 32^nd (15:39), Korabik 45^th(15:48), Manglano 53^rd (15:56)–and Dugas 71^st  (16:12).   With 212 points, we finished behind York (49), St. Xavier (107), Hersey (112), and New Trier (165).

It was good news.  Even if Dugas had stayed on his feet, it was clear, we would still have been fifth.  But if he hadn’t finished, we would have been seventh again.  He really was a hero to have finished at all.

Later, in analysis of the meet results on Tracktalk.net, it was observed the four of the top five Illinois teams at Palatine would be competing in the same Lake Park sectional.  Maine South, with 244 points, had finished close behind us.  Loyola, another Lake Park sectional team, did not run well at Palatine, finishing 11^th with 339 points, but one has to assume that it was just an off day and they will run better.  There will be seven or eight solid teams there competing for five spots at the state meet.

For now, though, the good news is that our Ignatius team had been close to New Trier, and we had beaten Maine South and Loyola.  In addition, we had beaten Jones College Prep for the first time in two years, avenging a loss last week in our home meet, the Connelly Polka Invitational, where a Jones team missing some of their key seniors had defeated our Ignatius team, missing ACT-takers Dugas and Korabik, 41-43.

The boys varsity awards were the last to be handed out at the end of the meet.  The girls’ teams got up and left after the girls’ varsity awards, and that allowed the boys to move forward closer to the microphone and the awards pavilion.  Santino got his 11^th place individual medal, and then our fifth place team—all seven boys, including juniors Junior Kallin Khan (119^th, 16:43.6) and Brian Santino (115^th, 17:13.2)—got their team medals.  It is the only race that I know of that gives each of the boys a medal for their team finish.

I took a photo or two of the boys with my own Iphone, so that I could tweet out a photo myself.  Then assistant coach Steven Bugarin and I joined the boys in line as a couple parents took over the photo duties.

It was at that point that Korabik handed me the Palatine Invite hat.  I had completely forgotten about it.

Later I had placed the new Palatine hat on top of my big wide-brimmed sun hat.  When I bumped into Chris Quick, the Palatine boys head coach, he offered his congratulations and then  asked about Dugas, who was doing fine.  Then he gave a double-take look at my hat on top of a hat.

“Nice look,” he joked.

You gotta believe: On the podium for three hours, Wolfpack boys finish 4th at state track meet

After 16 of 18 events, the Saint Ignatius Wolfpack boys track team sits third–with an IHSA state trophy heartbreakingly close.  But it wasn’t to be.

As we prepared for the prelims at the state meet on Friday, I got a report of someone who had read my blog post about our state meet prospects and got the impression that I thought we could win the state meet.  Well, I don’t think I said quite that.

But the reader was right.  We went into the meet with the hope we could win a trophy.

Since last winter, in fact, our Saint Ignatius team members have been telling ourselves that we had a chance at a trophy at the IHSA 3A state meet.  We felt our top runner Jack Keelan could win both the 1600- and 3200-meter runs, which would start us off with 20 points.  If we could find ten to fifteen more points, we reasoned, we might have a shot at the podium. It turned out that we would have needed 11 more—and we got only eight.

On Friday night at the Race at State meet, the Wolfpack boys shake it out. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

For more than three hours on Saturday at the state meet, including hours after the meet had finished on the track, we were on the podium—after 4 events, then after 13 events, and then even after 17 events with one to go.  But we finally finished in a tie for fourth with 28 points, the best performance ever by our Saint Ignatius boys track team—and heartbreakingly close to a trophy.

The final results show Lake Park in first place with 63 points, our Chicago Catholic League rival Providence Catholic second with 33, Pekin third with 31—and Saint Ignatius College Prep and Grant-Fox Lake tied for fourth with 28.

With storms threatening the Charleston area, the IHSA meet organizers made an early decision to run the meet on an accelerated schedule.  Rather than stick to a stately schedule that would begin at 11:00 AM and then conclude at 5:00 with team awards, events would run quickly one after another.  As a result, the track events were over at 2:30 in the afternoon—more than two hours early.

There was, indeed, some rain—but never any storm serious enough to threaten a delay.  The slick conditions did require the high jump for 2A and 3A and the 3A pole vault to be moved indoors to the field house.  The speedy track meet and the delay in getting those events underway meant that they continued for two hours after the conclusion of the track events.

It also meant tears for some competitors.  Boys do cry when officials won’t let them run because they get to the tent too late.  The meet moved alarmingly quickly—30 minutes ahead of schedule by the third event, the 3200-meter run.  Coaches and athletes who were not paying careful attention missed their check-ins at the tent, perhaps because they were following the original schedule—and perhaps because the meet just moved more quickly than anyone could imagine it could.

The Wolfpack 4×800 team Elliot Gibson, Andrew Reardon, Sean Kampe, and Chris Korabik after qualifying on Friday. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

It  is possible to miss an event on the normal schedule.   The scheduled time for the 4×800 meter relay, the first event of the day at 11:00 AM, never changed.  I was sitting with our 4×800 team in the field house at 10:30 AM and then watched them all disappear into the locker room where the toilets are located.  Time passed, and they seemed to be a long time.  Loudspeaker calls– “All 4×800 teams to the tent”– began to get serious.  You can’t hear the calls in the locker room.  More time passed.   Had the boys somehow gone from the locker room directly to the tent?  I jogged the quarter mile or so over to the tent.  I heard the check-in official tell another official, “We’re still missing Arlington Heights Hersey and Chicago Saint Ignatius.” Another coach there was talking about how the technical rule for the day was that 3A competitors were required to be in the tent when the 1A competitors were running onto the track for the same event.

I sprinted back to the field house, running right past my wife Peggy who had arrived to watch the meet.

Three members of our team were waiting for the fourth to come out of the locker rooms.  “Get to the tent!” I yelled at them.  They grabbed their things and ran out of the field house.  The fourth member of the team re-emerged—and after he collected his spikes and bag, I chased him to the tent.  I’m not sure that we met the technical rule, but the door official let him into the tent with his teammates.

This was for the first event of the day, at a time on the posted schedule.  As the day progressed and the meet sped up, many other athletes were not as fortunate.

We had rearranged the order for our 4×800 from the prelims.  We had set a school record of 7 minutes 54.50 seconds the day before, finishing as the seventh qualifier.  But with 300 meters to go we had been winning our heat.  Earlier in the spring against an elite field at the Prospect High School Wanner Invite we had been winning with 200 meters to go until York and Lane Tech ran us down.  Similarly, indoors at the Downers Grove South Mustang Relays held at North Central College, we led for as many as 15 of 16 laps until Aurora West and Carl Sandburg caught us. Our team had four good runners, but unlike many other teams, we had no closer who could throw down a fast anchor leg 800.

In the prelims, Elliot Gibson had run 1:59.4 to lead off, which left us at the back of the pack.  But Andrew Reardon’s 1:58.5 leg and then Chris Korabik’s 1:57.8 leg put us in the lead.  Sean Kampe ran his first 400 in 54 seconds, too fast; he ran like he knew he was being chased, and he was.  With 200 meters to go he was still a close third in about 7:20—but he struggled home in 34 seconds.  His final leg was still a pretty good one, all things considered, 1:58.5. There had been many predictions that it would take 7:53 or better to make the final, and we were initially worried we had still run to slow.  Then the time held up well for the next two heats.  We were only five seconds off the top qualifying time, in the end, by Minooka, 7:49.49. If each of our guys could run just a second faster, we reasoned, we could be in the mix even to win the race.

Chris Korabik held onto the ninth place medal position on the final straightaway as York chased. It was an important single point for the Wolfpack. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

But it wasn’t to be.  Kampe, moved to the first leg so that he could sit behind the pack for the first lap and then try to move as he likes to do with 300 meters to go, did just that—but again he struggled on the last 100 meters.  At 2:00.5 we were behind the pack at the first exchange.  Gibson caught up quickly to the back of pack and then relaxed.  His 400 split was reasonable—about 56 seconds.  At the 300 mark he surged, moving into the middle of the pack.  Then he, too, struggled in the last 100 meters, finishing in 1:57.9.  It was a similar story for Reardon.  He caught up.  Then he moved, but then he struggled, having used his resources to get himelf back into the race.  Reardon passed the baton to Korabik in eighth place at 5:56.6 after a 1:58.4 leg.  Chasing the fast anchor leg runners, Korabik never really got back into the mix.  He was passed by one runner; he came through the first lap in 57 second seconds still in ninth.  He held onto the final medal position down the last straightaway with a 1:58.1 leg as the anchor from York tried to run him down.  Our final time was a tick slower than the day before:  7:54.85.

Barrington had won in 7:45.94, so we never had a chance to win.  But sixth place LaGrange Lyons Township finished in 7:52.23.  We scored one point in ninth place; sixth place would have been worth four—and we had been hoping for five.  But it would turn out to be an important point at the end of the day, nonethless.

We were on top of the moving schedule, and Jack Keelan was in the tent plenty early for the 3200.  Last year, when Keelan attempted the 3200/1600 double, we had come to the state meet with a simple strategy.  He would try to run the final two laps of all three of his races, 1600 prelims, 3200, and 1600 final in 2:05 or better.  If he could do that, we felt, he would have a chance in all three races. As it turned out, perhaps because of the hot weather which produced 100 degree temperatures on the track, he couldn’t.  Malachy Schrobilgen of Oak Park-River Forest, did manage that feat in the 3200 as he ran away from Keelan in the last two laps to win in 9:03.42 and Keelan finished second in 9:08.48.  But even Schrobilgen found himself in survival mode in the 1600 later in the day as he finished third behind New Trier’s Leland Later, who had run only the 1600; Keelan had gamely finished seventh.

Jack Keelan’s plan in the 3200 was to sit in the pack for five laps–and then take control of the race. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

As we prepared for this year’s meet, we looked at the forecast to see that the cool temperatures would help Keelan attempt the 3200/1600 double.  The announced strategy would be the same, and no surprise to anyone who had watched Keelan’s race at the Arcadia Invite in early April, where he had run the state leading time for 3200, 8:50.74.  Keelan had simply bided his time at the back of the big Arcadia pack of 25 runners for the entire first five laps; then he had moved halfway up the pack on lap six, and then further up on lap seven.  He had in fact taken the lead briefly as the race entered the final lap.  There he had let eight runners go by him, although he had passed three of them back before his fifth-place finish.  After a 4:36 first mile, his final mile had been 4:14—and a 2:03 final half mile.  Once again, we decided, he would need to run that 2:05 in the last half mile at the state meet to win—and this year the heat would not suck that finish out of him in the earlier laps.

But as we neared race day, Keelan also decided to amend the plan.

Text messages with his friend Alex Riba at O’Fallon confirmed that Riba and his teammate Patrick Perrier would be running the 3200/1600 double just like Keelan.  Riba had led Keelan for most of the IHSA state championship cross country race back in November, before Keelan made his move with 800 meters to go and left Riba behind.  A week later, at the NXN regional in Terra Haute, Keelan had attempted the same move—but he didn’t have the same engine.  Riba and three others held onto Keelan and then Riba won the race with a strong finishing kick.  Initially fierce rivals who had hardly even spoken, one from the north of Illinois and one from the south, Riba and Keelan had become friends in Portland as members of the Midwest team.   But in Charleston they would still be racing.

When Alex Riba took the lead of the 3200 after the halfway point, Keelan moved to follow. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Keelan’s new plan was really just a variation.  Although he had new confidence in his finishing kick, Keelan decided he would take the lead of the state 3200-meter with three laps to go and push the pace from there.  Assuming that Riba and Perrier did not try to pull out ahead of the pack on their own, in which case Keelan would likely follow them, Keelan would sit in the pack for five laps—and then he would push the pace.  It sounded good to me, I said.  In the Tour-de-France, I told him, they would call it a selection.  It was clear that it would be a deep field, with lots of boys who might think they could run close to 9:00 under good conditions.   It would be better if at the end the race came down to fewer competitors so Keelan could know who he was racing.  An earlier move would drop people before the end game.  He was thinking a 65 lap would be about right.

The race went pretty much according to Keelan’s plan.  The pace was a little bit slow—2:19 at 800, 3:39 at 1200, 4:39 for Keelan at 1600.  And still he sat in the pack in about tenth place.  Lurking behind him for all three laps were Riba and Perrier.  Just before the mile, Riba shot past on the outside.  Keelan quickly followed and jumped into the open space behind Riba in second.  Perrier soon followed Keelan.  Riba took the now strung out line of runners through a 65-second lap. As they entered the home straightaway at the end of lap five, Keelan stuck with his plan.  He moved past Riba into the lead.  He would try to control the race from the front.   Cue the Prefontaine music.

Keelan took control of the race on the sixth lap, according to his plan. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Lap six wasn’t a 65, but more like a 67.  It strung out the field, but it wasn’t really a selection.  When Keelan moved, though, Perrier and Riba jumped in behind him.  Tyler Yunk from Belevidere North, who in fact had the second best personal best coming into the race at 9:03, fought his way back to hook on behind the front three.  Game on.

Lap seven wasn’t a lot faster—a 66.  I had a moment of doubt.  Maybe Jack wasn’t feeling great.  The move hadn’t really been decisive enough.  Or maybe he was just really confident.  He was leaving it to the last lap.

Keelan, Perrier, and Riba pulled away from the line of runners around the turn going into the last 400. Then Perrier passed Keelan coming out of the turn.  Everyone knows that Perrier and Riba are faster 800 meter runners than Keelan.  Perhaps the pace had not been demanding enough to put that speed away.  Maybe it was Prefontaine music?

Alex Riba challenged on the last straight, but Keelan had the better finishing kick. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

But it was only a moment of doubt.  Keelan gave Perrier a few meters in the lead, and then he lowered his head and started to move around him on the outside.  Perrier fought for a moment, then gave in.  Keelan hit another gear and left him behind.  200 to go and Keelan was sailing in the lead—but it had only been a 31 second 200.  He should have plenty left. Riba, meanwhile, moved past Perrier and started after Keelan going into the last turn.

He gained a little bit, then a little bit more. And then Keelan hit the after-burners and left Riba behind. The last 200 was 27.5 seconds on my watch.

The official time was 8:57.61.  Riba also went under 9:00.  The last 1600 was 4:18.  The last 1200 was 3:13.  The last 800 was 2:06, so Keelan had left it a little bit late.  The last 400 was 59 seconds.

It had already been several trips back and forth to the field house.  I had watched both races in the stands, down front at the start of the home straightaway, with our team. Keelan’s plan, even with the original meet schedule, had been to return directly to his dorm room after the 3200—skipping the medal ceremony.

He had asked freshman Dan Santino to stand in for him, kind of a changing of the guard, perhaps.  Santino missed qualifying in the 3200  at the sectional meet by 4/10s of a second, running the fastest time for a freshman in Illinois this year, 9:29.65.  I walked Santino down to the track entrance and ushered him through.  There was no sign of Keelan anywhere.

Then I went to the field house.  I texted assistant coach Steven Bugarin in the stands:  “I’m in the field house.  Where is Conor?  Send him here.”  Earlier in the day we had texted and tweeted to everyone the news that the meet would accelerate.  How did coaches manage this kind of situation before cell phones and texting, I wondered?

I got a text from the press box, where our girls assistant coach Matt Haffner was helping do the computer work for the IHSA.  “Team is in second.”  It gave me a chuckle, as I figured it out.  They had given out the shot put awards.  There had been three events on the track.  So after four events, we were no doubt one of the only teams to score in two, and with Keelan’s ten and one from the 4×800, we had 11.

Dunham appeared—and I told him were in second place with 11 points.  He chuckled, too.

Conor Dunham was a surprise third place finisher in the 300-meter hurdles, putting the Wolfpack in contention for a trophy. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Then he was a little bit surprised that I told him he had only 20 minutes to warm up before they would want him in the tent for the 300 hurdles.  He got to work.  He seemed especially calm, focused, and confident.  I walked him all the way to the tent and watched him safely inside as the last of the 400 heats was finishing.

Back in the field house again, I got a text from the press box, where our girls head coach, Erin Luby, was visiting with Haffner.  I had tweeted earlier that Keelan was back in the dorm while Dunham warmed up.  “Is Keelan still in the dorm?”  Luby texted.  “The meet is 90 minutes ahead of schedule.”

Text to Keelan, text to his father who was with him back at the dorm.  Keelan was already on his way.  He appeared in the field house shortly as the 1A 300 heat began.  He had already warmed up.  I had given his father a clean, dry singlet for him to wear.  Did he have it?  Was his number on it?  Yes, he was all set.  He could get himself to the tent.  Someone had told me, I said, that he had been a little bit “spent” after the 3200.  He laughed a little bit and then set off to check in.

I was literally running through the track entrance on the east side grandstand as the gun went off for Dunham’s 300-meter hurdles race.   They were coming off the first straightaway when I caught sight of Dunham in lane 3 chasing Dave Kendziera of Prospect in lane 4.  He was a couple steps behind.

Dunham had been fifth in the prelims, running his fastest time of the year 39.11 seconds.  Only once had he ever run faster—38.98 last year in the sectionals.   The top three in the prelims were seniors—and very good ones:  Kendziera, Andrew Helmin of Providence, and Lino Mogorovic of Lyons.  They seemed untouchable.  As Dunham’s father, Dan, had noted the night before when I said that something might happen in front of Conor to help him out, “These are seasoned guys. “

But in the prelims Dunham had been beaten by Lake Park sophomore Antonio Shinault.  This was Shinault’s first trip to the state meet as a hurdler.  Dunham had qualified as a freshman and then as a sophomore last year, when he had just missed qualifying for the final.  Shinault, we thought, could be beaten.  We were hoping for fourth.

Dunham looked fast around the turn, not losing much ground to the leaders in the middle lanes.  At the last hurdle coming off the curve he hesitated, and then switched legs.  Either he was in trouble, or he was going so fast he had outrun his usual step pattern.  Dunham hesitated a little bit, not quite a stutter, coming to the first hurdle off the curve.  He was in fourth.

Three weeks ago at the Nalley Invite he had been behind coming into the straightaway.  He had lowered his head into a headwind and won the race.

Dunham started his charge again—and then Mogorovic hit a hurdle hard.  Dunham shot ahead of him into third.  He finished strong in a personal best and school record time of 38.26 seconds, scoring 7 points for the team.

I hurried to the main grandstand to watch the 1600 with our team, still sitting low in the stands at the start of the final straightaway.

Keelan’s1600 race came quickly; instead of three hours of rest as it was originally scheduled, he would have 90 minutes.

In the 1600, as in the 3200, Keelan took a spot back in the pack. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Once again, as he had in the 3200 and in the prelims the day before, he settled toward the back of the pack for the first lap, keeping out of trouble.  But Riba pushed to the front at around 200 meters, and taking precaution, Keelan moved quickly around the big pack on the home straightaway to get closer to the front.  The first lap was a 64.

Riba kept the lead for the second lap.  Coming down the home straight before the 800 meter mark, Jamison Dale of Jones College Prep, who had run the fastest time in the prelims the day before, 4:11.99, moved decisively into the lead.  He was just under 2:08 at the 800.  He moved out to around a fifteen meter lead on the rest of the runners.

Keelan accelerated to cover the move first, going by Riba;  then others followed.  Keelan let them pass, sticking to the inside curb.   Entering the home straight again, Billy Bund of Lake Forest and Garrett Lee of Belvidere North pulled the whole group back up behind Dale.  Keelan worked his way off his inside position on the curb as he went through the 1200 in fifth place, just a part of the chase group–but now on the outside of lane one with some room to move.  Dale’s 1200 time was 3:12.

When Jamison Dale of Jones took the lead, Keelan moved to the front to stay close. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Keelan still waited patiently.  It could have been a dangerous situation with as many as eight runners still in the race.  There had been no selection.  With 300 to go the pace had really quickened.  Dale fought off Bund to stay in the lead.

Keelan followed when Garrett Lee made his move with 200 meters to go. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Down the back stretch, there was a large bunch of runners pushing toward the front of the race.  Then from behind Keelan, Garrett Lee charged on the outside all the way to the lead past Dale and Bund.  Keelan followed him, settling into second.  Around the curve, they separated from the rest of the runners.  At the start of the straightaway, Keelan hit his high gear again to leave Lee behind.   Lee  beat the rest of the pack for second.  Keelan was 4:12.11, with a 59 second last 400, and a 28 second final 200.

Once again, Keelan had the better sprint finish. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

He had won the triple crown—cross country title in November, and then 1600 and 3200 in May.  Maddie Perez of Glenbard West had accomplished the feat the previoius week; Grant Nykaza of Beecher had done it, as well, at the 1A level, just minutes before Keelan.  But previously it had not happened since York’s Sean McNamara did it in 2004-5.

As a group the team decided to move to the award stand area, where both Dunham and Keelan would wait for a long time to get their medals.  The meet had moved so quickly there was a backlog of awards to be presented.

Then another text from Haffner:  “Your team is in second place.”

It did not last long.  We watched Pekin’s Cole Henderson win the 200, his third final of the day—and his third first place win, after the 100 meters and long jump.  With his ninth place finish in the 400, Henderson by himself totaled 31 points for Pekin—and he took over second place.

In the awards area, we watched the 4x400s.  Nothing happened with the points distribution in the 3A race to change the standings.  It had become apparent that many teams had split the points for the meet’s first 16 events. And after 16 events, Ignatius, improbably, was still in third place with 28 points.

We watched Dunham get his medal on the award stand.  Then Keelan got his medal, this time standing in for himself.

The announcement came that bigger storms were threatening the area, and the IHSA would not conduct a trophy ceremony at the end of the meet.

I had been in the field house with Keelan and Dunham when activity began to move the 3A pole vault competition indoors.  We knew that was where the meet would end, and the team began to head in that direction.

In the field house, the atmosphere was subdued at first, but it would become electric.  It was 2:30, the track events were over, but the pole vault had just barely begun.  The 2A high jump competition, also moved indoors, was just finishing.  The 3A high jump competition was waiting  to start.

Conor Dunham gets his third place medal on the awards stand. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Our Ignatius group began to assemble.  Large numbers from the Keelan family arrived.  Karamath Khan, Ignatius class of 1984, had come down to Charleston to watch with his son Kallin, a sophomore member of our team.   The Santino family was there.  And then there were also the boys from our team.

It would be a long vigil.  We sent the freshmen, who somehow had never checked out of their dorm room, back to the dorm to pack up.  Steven Bugarin, our assistant coach and team photographer, got the job to supervise. Then we watched the high jump and the pole vault progress.

Senior Ray Lewis, who had driven himself to Charleston and taken his own room in a spectator dormitory, began to calculate possible point totals for the teams who still had competitors jumping.  O’Fallon would be able to pass us because they had two pole vaulters in the competition.  There was an Edwardsville high jumper, as well.

But we all knew the bigger and more inevitable threat to our trophy hopes.  Providence Catholic, our Chicago Catholic League rival, entered the competition with the top high jumper, Mike Monroe, and top pole vaulter, Chad Weaver, according to the sectional seeds.  With Andrew Helmin’s 18 points from the two hurdles races, they could score as many as 38 points.  I had a short conversation with the Providence coaches, who were watching the high jump most intently.  There were still ten high jumpers in the competition, and ten pole vaulters.  They were confident, but also realistic.  “We could get twenty,” said one coach.  “But we could get zero.”

The field house had become meet central.  Mike Newman of Dyestat Illinois came through, sought out Jack Keelan, and joked that it was 2:30 and Jack should be warming up for the 1600.

Assistant Coach Ike Ofor showed me how to do a screen shot on my Iphone.  I took a shot of the IHSA results page with team scores after 16 events, which showed Ignatius still in third place.  Later I would take another one after 17 events; we were still in third. All told, we held onto the third place trophy from 1:30 until 4:30 or so.

As the Providence jumper and vaulter cleared heights, it became a little bit painful to watch.   Monroe needed to clear one height, with a number of jumpers still going, on a third attempt; I don’t remember exactly which one, or whether it would really have mattered.   But when he cleared on the third attempt, that was clearly the end of trophy hopes for us.   Essentially each time Monroe or Weaver cleared a height, it was another point or two for Providence.  Weaver was flying confidently over the pole vault crossbar each time, really leaving no doubt.

The Edwardsville high jumper went out at 6 foot and 5 inches for seventh place; that left Edwardsville behind us with 26 points.  The two O’Fallon vaulters were now a threat to our fourth place position.  Our pole vault coach Pat Boyle said that when they cleared 14-06 they were already jumping above their personal bests.  But they were fighting for their team, trying to get their team on the podium.  They were clearly disappointed when they both missed three times at 14-09.  They scored three points together as the eighth and ninth place finishers.  O’Fallon would finish behind us with 27 points.

In the end, Weaver would finish third and Monroe second in their events to score 15 points and earn Providence the second place trophy with 33 points, ahead of Pekin’s one man team Cole Henderson.  Jonathan Wells of Grant-Fox Lake would win the high jump at 6-11; those 10 points moved his team into a tie with us for fourth place at 28 points.

At whatever point it had become clear that Providence would pass us, we began conversations about leaving Charleston.  A big group of our boys who were still with us waiting for the trip home—several went home with their own parents—decided to make a postponed visit to the First to the Finish tent nearby where the boys always enjoy buying the leftover team jerseys on sale there each year. Pat Boyle wanted to wait to see if Luke Winder of Plainfield Central, winner of the pole vault at 16-03, would be able to clear 17-00.  We almost left him behind in the field house.

As we assembled in the parking lot outside the field house and stadium, a Jimmy John’s car drove up.  A woman driver jumped out and asked if we wanted some free sandwiches.  How many of us were there?  About 15.  “How about 30, then,” she said.  “They are pretty small.”

I had missed eating lunch.  The little ham sandwich was good.  We didn’t win a trophy, but we got free sandwiches.

We stage our trip home to Chicago each year, in what has become a team routine if not a tradition, with a stop in Champaign at the Steak and Shake on Neal Street north of I-74.   We arrived to find the Keelans and Santinos already there.

I checked my email on the Iphone.  Congratulations had come in from a number of people who had been following the meet online or by our twitter feeds.

Tim Mitchell, Keelan’s immersion service teacher, wrote me that I should tell Keelan he would deliver a vintage yellow St. Ignatius warm up jacket to me on Tuesday.  Mitchell, who will move to teach at Loyola Acadmey next year, is giving away some of his old Ignatius coaching gear.  He had promised Keelan the prized jacket if he won in Charleston.

Over the next day or so there were more congratulatory notes.  Best of all, perhaps, was a note from Ignatius alumnus and parent Pete Connelly, girls track and cross country coach at Montini High School—and son of Hall of Fame Ignatius coach Jim Connelly, who died late last summer.  We had made the Connelly family and Saint Ignatius track community proud, he said.  After looking at the IHSA results after the track events had ended, he had spent a day bragging to people about our third place finish.

After he figured out his mistake, he said, he continued to brag about our fourth place finish.

Jack Keelan on the awards stand gets his 1600 meter medal. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Ready to rumble at the Nalley Invite

Junior Conor Dunham prepares to lead off the Wolfpack 4×400 with the score tied 77-77 at the end of the Nalley Invite.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

At the Carlin Nalley Invitational on Saturday, after the first week of real spring weather, there were two occasions which reminded and admonished me about my delinquency as a blogger.

The first occasion came in conversation with Chris Quick, the Palatine High School boys cross country and distance coach.  Last year Quick published his book, One Way, Uphill Only, which told the year-long story of how the 2011 Palatine cross country team won the IHSA 3A state cross country championship.  Quick and I had begun an ongoing sporadic conversation on a number of topics involving coaching and our boys at the Palatine Relays the Saturday before, and we picked up the conversation several times as we hung around the 200 meter mark at the Nalley Invite for various events.   That included watching Quick’s boys win the 4×800 in a Palatine High School record time of 7:50.0—also the fastest time in the state this year.

At some point I asked him about his book—and what was the process for writing and publishing it.  He had a bit of news, in fact.  Originally self-published, the book will soon be released again in a new edition by Breakaway Books, which prints literary and thoughtful writing on sports.   Most of the material from the book, he told me, came from hundreds of pages of journal writing.  Quick, who teaches high school English, coaches two long seasons, and has a young family, disciplined himself to write for an hour each day over the year-long period covered by the book.  “The journal entries weren’t only about coaching,” he explained, “some of them were more philosophical.”

So Quick wrote a book—and for two months I can’t even write a blog post.

The second was an outright notice about my failure to post.  “Coach Ernst,” said junior Chris Korabik, after he had won the 1600-meter run in a personal best time of 4 minutes 23.75 seconds, “when are you going to update your blog.  I visit it every few days and every time it says, ‘Snow Day.’”

It has been that long.  Korabik and I agreed that our team’s performance at the Nalley Invite certainly merited a blog post.

We’ve been going to the Nalley Invite for ten years.  It follows on Saturday early in May each year after the Friday night Chicago Catholic League Frosh Soph championship meet—a big meet on our calendar.  For most years we have used the meet to give our varsity guys a sharpening race before the varsity Chicago Catholic League meet next Saturday.  Our team often depends pretty heavily on the freshman and sophomore runners who fill spots on our best relays—if not in individual events.  Those younger team members aren’t available to us at Nalley since they run the night before.  We’ve never been able to muster a competitive team effort at Nalley.

The meet is a special treat for the upperclassmen.  Most years it takes place at the Illinois Benedictine University facility in Lisle, with a nine-lane, national-class track, a large grandstand, and generally wonderful amenities.  The facility itself lifts performances.  The meet used FAT long before it became normal for meets to do so.  Ken Jakalski, a coach at Lisle High School and the long-time meet director, is also a Saint Ignatius graduate, as we discovered many years ago.  He runs the meet as much like a state and sectional meet as he can—good practice for the teams.  Jakalski himself mans the microphone for the PA system which introduces most of the athletes as they run, jump, throw, and race.  Many, many boys get a mention and a few moments of glory, often just for competing.

This year we brought a competitive team to Nalley, mainly because we finally have a team that depends mostly on our juniors and seniors.  We didn’t program the event to win.  We entered our top distance runners in just one event, not multiple events like we will likely do at the CCL championship meet next week.  We used most of the relays to get as many of our runners as possible into the meet., rather than program the relays to win by using our top runners in all the events.

But our team, as we discovered Saturday, is indeed a strong one.  As we have done in some other meets this year, we started slowly.  In the first four events, we scored only in the 110-meter high hurdles.  But we scored big, as juniors Conor Dunham (15.10 prelims, 15.17 finals) and Chris Hawkins (15.24, 15,23) finished second and third.

Then in the 3200 senior co-capatin Jack Keelan took the lead at the start and never looked back.  The plan was to make a good effort, but not to run too fast with big meets ahead at the conference, sectional, and state level in the next three weeks.  Keelan was the IHSA 3A cross country champion in the fall, and he set our school record for 3200-meters, 8:50.74, at the Arcadia Invitational in California back in early April.  Obviously, that was just one event of several that I failed to blog about this spring.

At Nalley Keelan  settled into a steady pace of 71- and 72-second laps for six laps, running easily.  Then in lap seven he accelerated to run 65 seconds—and in the final lap, a 64.  His final time of 9:19.55 was still among the top five times run this year in Illinois.

Junior Chris Hawkins jumps personal bests of 43-7 and 21-5 to win the triple jump and the long jump. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Hawkins, between his hurdling efforts, was also doing big things in the triple jump.  The night before a text message from Hawkins complained about a sore hip.  He is regularly our top points scorer as a hurdler and our number one jumper—and the injury was a concern.  When he climbed into the minibus in the morning in uniform, it was almost a surprise.  The assessment of our assistant coach and physical therapy student Ike Ofor was that Hawkins had an illiotibial band problem—manageable, if somewhat painful.

Hawkins had performed well in the hurdles.  In the triple jump, his first three jumps were the three best jumps of his life, with his best jump of 43 feet and 7 inches almost a foot better than his previous best.  That jump stood up as the best of the day, with Hawkins passing in each rotation of the final as the last jumper–and saving his energy and tolerance for a sore hip for the long jump.

A check of the scoring early in the meet put Ignatius in second place with 34 points, behind Lincoln-Way East, who had quickly totaled 54.

In the 800-meter run, announcer Jakalski’s attention and the attention of the crowd was focused on Marist’s Kyle Hauser, as he ran the state’s fastest time of the year, 1:53.8.  But the Ignatius attention was on senior Sean Kampe, who started back in the pack.  Near the 400 mark he accelerated toward the front of the race, passing the first lap in 56.6 seconds—very fast.  Then coming off the third turn he moved again into second place behind Hauser, putting a big gap between the third place place runner.  He was 1:26.5 at 600 meters.  Kampe slowed slightly on the final straightaway, but finished in 1:57.25, a personal best by over two seconds.

That personal best had, in fact, been a relay leg at the state track meet in May of 2011.  Kampe, a soccer player, took last year off to play on a demanding club team which wouldn’t allow him to accommodate both sports.  But even as he had taken leave last spring, he told us he would be back to run as a senior.  Kampe now has the number one time in the Chicago Catholic League for 800 meters, and he will be the favorite to win next week.

What’s more, he had scored important points for the team.

In the 400-meter dash senior Elliot Gibson ran a personal best of 51.17 seconds for fourth place.  Gibson had finished pole vaulting about an hour before.  At Nalley, the best pole vaulters go first on the pit in the morning, and then a second group of novice vaulters follow in the afternoon.  Gibson had bested the accomplished group, clearing 13 feet and 3 inches, a personal best, and taking the event lead on first clears and misses.  But the event would not be final until the novice vaulters finished.

In the 300-meter intermediate hurdles, junior Conor Dunham squared off against Austin Corydon of Lincoln-Way East, winner of the 110 hurdles.  Dunham looked to be in the lead over the first hurdles, then fell behind on the big sweeping curve of the Illinois Benedictine track.  With three hurdles to go, Dunham seemingly lowered his head into a headwind and accelerated ahead of the others, winning in 39.30 seconds.

Results of the long jump were announced, which we already knew.  Hawkins had taken the lead in the preliminaries with a jump of 21 feet and 5 inches.  He had again passed in each of the final rounds as the other jumpers failed to match him—although there was a challenge from Parker Westphal of Bolingbrook.  Hawkins beat him by an inch and a half in the triple jump—and by an inch in the long jump.

The 1600-meter run turned out to be a little bit of a surprise.  We expected junior Chris Korabik to run well and compete for the win.  He settled into third for the first couple laps, coming through the 400 in 65 seconds and the 800 in about 2:12.  Then he took the lead, with two runners holding on behind him as he ran a 68 second third 400.  A challenger closed on him with about 250 meters left, and Korabik accelerated.  With 100 meters to go, there was another challenge—and then Korabik hit a finishing gear, kicking strongly to finish in 4:23.75, a personal best by two seconds.

Junior Chris Korabik wins the 1600 in a personal best time of 4:23.75. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Meanwhile behind Korabik, the real surprise was junior Taylor Dugas.  After missing almost a month of running at the end of March and in early April with a sore foot that was finally diagnosed as a nerve problem, Dugas returned to sporadic running three weeks ago.  He’s doing his aerobic work on the bicycle and in the pool, and he is running only in our interval workouts on the track.  At Nalley the plan was for Dugas to run 70-second laps.  The real goal was for him to get in shape to help us with depth for our 4×800 relay in the season’s final weeks.  He came through the first 400 in about 68, running in 12^th place.  He was 2:17 at the 800—but he looked relaxed and strong.  He had wanted time splits during the race, hoping he could keep on pace and on plan.  Instead I yelled to him, “There are six medals, and six places score.  You are in tenth.”

Dugas proceeded over the next two laps to move past four runners to finish sixth, running a personal best of 4:35.69.

Jakalski made an announcement after the 1600 that Saint Ignatius was now winning the meet with 77 points.  I pulled out my new Iphone—and tweeted that news.  I haven’t been blogging, but in the months since my last blog post we bought an Iphone plan and started a team twitter account:  @ernsttracksicp.  I have been tweeting from our meets for about a month, including updates all day at Nalley.  I typed in the news:  “At Nalley Invite Wolfpack in first with 77 points before 4×4.”

But in my excitement after the 1600 success, I had forgotten about the 200-meter final.  We had a runner in that final heat, junior Francisco Meraz, but he didn’t score.  Lincoln-Way East, however, had two finalists—and they finished first and fourth.  My next tweet:  “But tied with Lincoln Way East.”

At the start of the 4×400, Elliot Gibson gathered on the line with our strong 4×400 team of senior Andrew Reardon, Dunham, and Kampe—and with the Lincoln-Way East team lining up beside him.  We had the top seed in the race after our good effort at the Palatine Relays last week where the same team ran 3:28.30.  The team was confident—but the pressure would seemingly be on them to win the meet for us.

Jakalski announced on the PA that the meet was tied, 77 points for Ignatius, 77 points for Lincoln-Way East.  The 4×400 would decide the meet, he said, adding, apparently as an aside, that the novice pole vaulters had just finished vaulting and the final pole vault results weren’t included yet in the total.

“How did your team do in the pole vault?” a Lincoln-Way East runner asked Gibson.

Gibson couldn’t help but smile when he told him, “Well, I won the pole vault.”

“That means we lost,” said the disappointed opponent.

Senior Elliot Gibson takes baton from senior Andrew Reardon for the anchor leg of the 4×400 relay at the Nalley Invite. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

The Wolfpack runners ran as if it did still matter.  Dunham lead off the 4×400 with a leg of 52.7, about a second faster than he had run the previous week at Palatine, and off the break Kampe stormed down the back straightaway into the lead.  His relay split was a personal best of 50.5.  Reardon held the lead with a 51.5 leg, and Gibson took the baton with Oswego East chasing him just a step behind—but with a big lead on the rest of the teams, including Lincoln-Way East.  Gibson was never really challenged as he ran 50.1 seconds to win.

We had won the meet running away, as well, scoring 97 points total, ahead of Lincoln-Way East’s 79.

My tweet:  “At Nalley Invite Wolfpack wins 4×4 3:24.88 and meet. “That’s a dirty time,” says Taylor Dugas. #clutch.”  Coach Ofor supplied the hashtag.

We have had great success as a team this year, and the boys knew the drill.  We took some team photos.  The Nalley meet is the only one all year that we designate as a “run and go” meet.  It comes as many of our upperclass boys are preparing for the start of AP exams next week, and the demands of other schoolwork are pressing as the year draws to a close.  It is also just a long day in the sun, with the first events starting at 9:15 and the 4×400 finishing at around 4:15.  We sent many of our boys home early, and we had only a crew of 11 boys for the team photo.

Jakalski then descended from the press box with his camera, after announcing that he needed photos of the winning teams from the meet’s 1A and 2A/3A divisions for the cover of next year’s program.  We took a photo with the winning team’s plaque.  Jakalski insisted we take it out of the box and plastic wrap for the photo.

I tweeted a team photo—and then a photo of the plaque—and then we packed up our tent and headed back to Chicago in our mini-bus.

We have high hopes for the Chicago Catholic League Championship meet next week.  At Nalley we posted our best times of the year in virtually every event that we targeted to do so.  We have three weeks left in a season of more than 20 weeks—and our team seems ready to run its best when it counts the most.

The caption on Twitter @ernsttracksicp: “At Nalley Invite Wolfpack win. pic.twitter.com/g39pK7qj7o”