Girls cross country: WW South runs away with Wauconda invite
There were some new girls cross-country teams flocking to the front of the pack at the new-look Wauconda Invitational Saturday morning in Island Lake.
With race-time temperatures at 60 degrees, it was Wheaton Warrenville South and individual champion Mia Rucoba that stole the show, as the Tigers won the championship by a comfortable 29-70 margin over Geneva.
Unlike previous seasons when the Wauconda Invite was run at Lakewood Forest Preserve, runners took to the 2.95-mile, rolling-hills course at Matthews Middle School under sunny skies.
With less room available for the meet on the new course, many Lake County teams ran at the new Waukegan Invite on Saturday. But the host Bulldogs still had a solid seventh-place showing followed by rival squads Grayslake North in eighth, Warren in ninth and Mundelein in 10th.
Rucoba took the lead from the outset of the race and she never looked back in posting a winning time of 17:39.5 to easily outdistance her next closest competitor by 32 seconds.
"It was a really great course, and I'm surprised that I was separated from everyone else," said Rucoba, who was the Tigers' No. 4 runner at state last season as a freshman. "The team did great today, this is only our second meet, but we've never had our pack finish that tight before."
The Tigers' young pack was fantastic behind Beca Hauenstein in third, Kaitlyn Nenninger in sixth, Amanda Obrist in ninth, Laurel Moneysmith in 10th and Haley Ansiel in 15th.
"We probably had our hardest training week of the year, but after running against all of the top teams at Hinsdale Central last week we had a reality check and they will get a lot of confidence out of this," said Wheaton Warrenville South coach Rob Harvey, whose team placed 14th in Class 3A last year. " (Rucoba) was a varsity runner last year, she had a spectacular girls track season, and now she is just figuring out how good she is."
Saturday marked the first time Wheaton Warrenville South had run at the Wauconda Invite since 2004.
Geneva had only five varsity runners available for the meet, but the Vikings still shined in taking runner-up honors.
Junior Sophia McDonnell was Geneva's top runner in fifth place followed by teammates Adrine Larsen (seventh), Taryn Christy (eighth), and Holly Nusser (17th).
"We're a small program this year, and we had two girls who missed the meet today because they were sick," said Geneva coach Bob Thomson. "The top three are all working well together, and we have another girl (Grace Brolly) who would have been right there with them but she was sick."
Grayslake North was led by Gabriella Conceicao in 14th place, while junior Ashley Kachurik was Warren's top runner in 16th. Mundelein was paced by junior Andrea Cordova in 19th.
Kelli Tosic added a 22nd-place run for the Knights while Jessica DePalma placed 25th for the Blue Devils.
"Ashley (Kachurik) ran pretty well, she put in a monster summer of training so it's paying off now," said Warren coach Brett Heimstead, whose team will host an invite next Saturday on a newly aligned course. "Jessica (DePalma) is coming back from a major foot surgery and we're taking it slow with her right now."
The host Bulldogs were led by the trio of Abby McHugh (28th), Morgan Thompson (30th) and Dakota Thompson (34th).
"I thought that they did well, it's our first time running this course and we were missing our fourth runner (Kayla Wisniewski) because she was taking the ACT today," said Wauconda coach Jeff Helberg. "We've been working on them trying to run together more, to push forward, and I'm happy to see how they did."