PALATINE - Edwardsville runners Ben Perulfi and Hugh Davis led the way for the Tigers as all seven runners ran in the 16 to 17-minute range as Edwardsville finished 23rd in the Palatine Invitational Meet of Champions Saturday morning at Deer Grove East Park in Palatine.
The Tigers will run in the Peoria Invitational next Saturday at Detweiler Park, the traditional site for the IHSA state finals meet in early November, and Patrylak continues to see improvement and progress among the runners and remains positive about them.
Get The Latest News!
Don't miss our top stories and need-to-know news everyday in your inbox.
"There are a lot of positives I'm seeing," Patrylak said, "and I still believe that no one should count us out at the end of the season. We'll get one more go at Peoria next week and then, it's on to the postseason."
Plainfield South won the team title with 35 points, with Park Ridge Maine South a very distant second with 163 points, Barrington and Oak Park-River Forest tied for third with 175 points each and Winnetka New Trier rounded out the top five with 184 points. The Tigers came in 23rd with 550 points in a loaded 31-team field, which had many of the states best teams, along with St. Louis U. High and St. Xavier Catholic from Louisville.
"The Palatine meet had quite the interesting start," said Edwardsville coach George Patrylak, "in that they have 31 teams and several individuals, with a starting line that is less than 30 meters wide. Within the first 200 meters, the course narrows down to a 10 to 12 meter wide opening. On the start, a couple of our guys went out a bit too aggressively and paid for it in the second half of the race."
Despite all of that, the Tigers came away with a lot of positives from the race and Patrylak was very pleased with how things turned out against a loaded field.
"There were a lot of positives," Patrylak said, "in that we competed against 15 ranked Class 3A teams, one of the top teams from Missouri in SLUH, plus St. Xavier and several ranked Class 2A teams. This was, for sure, the best meet in Illinois this weekend."
The individual winner was Camyn Viger of Plainfield South, with a time of 14:44.74, with Sami Hattab of St. Xavier second at 14:45.40, third place went to Liam Newhart of OPRF at 14:48.17, in fourth place was Parker Nold of Oswego East at 14:51.20 and rounding out the top five was Dylan Maloney of Plainfield South at 14:56.18.
Perulfi led the Tigers with a time of 16:09.08, with Davis coming in at 16:13.38, Jackson Amick was in at 16:26.41, Colin Thomas had a time of 16:29.97, Scott Baxter's time was 16:49.43, Sam Wittek had a time of 17:04.99 and Ben Ziobro was clocked in 17:12.11.
More like this:
