Second best is motivation for Glenbard West

Glenbard West wasn't at its best Saturday, and that's OK.

That's one way of looking at it for the Hilltoppers boys gymnastics team, which was talented enough to battle for the David Donaldson Invite title on Saturday at Wheaton Warrenville South but came up a bit short against Lyons Township, 158.15 to 156.77.

The hosts were a distant third with a 148.25, just better than Hinsdale Central's 148.15.

"One of the things we talked about is how hard it is to have your best meet, every meet, and we clearly didn't have that today," Hilltoppers coach Frank Novakowski said. "Hopefully they're motivated to rebound and come back stronger."

That doesn't mean the Hilltoppers didn't have individual success.

Timmy Le won the all-around with a 52.97 as well as the floor with a 9.55 while finishing second on vault and tying for first on high bar. Frankie Pham was second on still rings, Matthew Ideler was fourth on pommel horse and still rings and second in the all-around with a 51.6 and Alexander Demeris was fourth on parallel bars and high bar.

"We had guys up on the award stand, but to be honest, we don't focus on the individual accomplishments," Novakowski said. "We focus on what we do as a team and the guys buy into that. I think even with some of the individual success we had, the guys were disappointed as a team and will be motivated to work harder and make sure it doesn't happen again."

Austin Tate hit on all five of his routines to lead Wheaton Warrenville co-op.

"Today was a big day for us and we're doing the things we need to do and it's showing in our performance," he said. "We had some stumbles and falls, but overall it was good."

Chris Wiper added a second place effort on parallel bars for the hosts.

"My parallel bars went really good," he said. "It's usually nice and clean like that and I added a new move in there and it really couldn't have gone much better."

Wheaton Warrenville co-op still has some work to do if it hopes to get to state again. It won't host a sectional this year.

"I thought we did some really good things with routines, but our execution wasn't quite at the level we're capable of," Wheaton co-op coach Greg Gebhardt said. "We're still capable of making some solid jumps and we have a week until conference and a little more than that before sectional to get to where we need to."

West Chicago's Jacob Kurian took fourth in the all-around with a 49.45.

"It was probably my best meet of the season. I hit all six, which was nice," he said. "Hopefully I can keep going up for here heading into state."

Lake Park (131.25), Willowbrook (125.3) and Naperville Central (119.95) were other local teams to participate but none of them had a Top 10 finisher.