St. John's runners win their third straight state cross-country title

The runners on the St. John's Lutheran School cross-country team have set a pretty high standard the last three years.

They just added to it.

The boys from the Wheaton school won their third consecutive Lutheran School Association state cross-country meet Oct. 13 in Decatur.

St. John's girls team took fourth place.

Five of the seven boys on the team -- eighth-graders Eric Benney, Cole Evans, Kit Bruzek, Sam Hoffman and Jake Morrison -- ran on all three state championship teams. They were joined this year by seventh-grader Nathan Hall and sixth-grader Aidan Hernandez.

"It was a good way for those guys to go out," St. John's coach Keith Evans said.

St. John's finished with 43 points at the 16-school state meet, beating out runner-up Zion of Marengo's 51. It was a much closer margin of victory than last year's 30-point spread.

"The boys were fairly confident because of the last couple years," Evans said, "but they had a lot of pressure on them. They were jittery. Last year was a really solid team."

The eighth-grade boys were on St. John's first cross-country team two years ago. In three years, they never lost a meet to a fellow Lutheran school.

In September, they easily won the 13-team meet at Walther Lutheran. St. John's also competed at a 30-team invitational in Arlington Heights against bigger public schools.

"That was a good, humbling meet for us," Evans said. "We knew we had a good shot at state by winning a couple invites locally, similar to the last couple years."

Several of the boys made marked improvements since their first state meet.

Hoffman finished second overall at state this year in a time of 11:56. He had a time of 13:46 two years ago and was fourth overall as a seventh-grader.

Hall was third overall this year, finishing in 12:07. Evans finished in 16:30 for 24th place, a time almost three minutes faster than his time as a sixth-grader.

Morrison (13:12) finished 14th, Bruzek (13:13) 15th, Hernandez (13:34) 20th and Benney (13:35) 21st.

"All this group took nearly two to three minutes off their time in the last few years," Evans said. "That's all you can ask."

Evans admitted the team will be "hurting next year" with the boys graduating.

"No doubt they are going to go down in our school's history, setting themselves apart," he said. "It's a very competitive class in everything they do."