Derrick hits the road to claim first cross country win

In the unfamiliar setting of Chicago’s concrete canyons and lakefront streets, Neuqua Valley senior Mark Derrick employed the loosest of race plans.

“I just ran hard in the lead and it worked out, because I won,” Derrick said Wednesday, a few days after his first prep cross country victory. Leading the Wildcats to the team title, Derrick took individual honors at the Nike Northside/Southside Challenge on Sunday, an early-morning high school race covering the last 2.26 miles of the Chicago Marathon layout.

“I didn’t really know the course at all,” said Derrick, who ran the distance in 12 minutes, 38 seconds, just 14 seconds off the time run last year by Sandburg graduate Lukas Verzbikas, a phenom now at the University of Oregon.

Derrick said his strategy was “just to get out there and run hard till I saw the finish, basically.”

Neuqua’s Taylor Soltys, who finished 15th overall at last year’s Class 3A boys cross country meet, took third at the Challenge in 13:01. Teammates Drew Smith, Xander Jacobson, Steve Krauklis and Shelton Boclair all finished in the top 14 out of 150 male runners, sending coach Paul Vandersteen’s Wildcats atop the team standings ahead of Sandburg and Geneva.

“I feel like so far this year we haven’t really had a race where all the guys were running well. But I feel like this race, pretty much every guy ran what they should have, they ran well,” said Derrick, who has drawn college interest from Indiana, Wisconsin, Duke, North Carolina and Georgetown. His brother, Chris, is an All-American senior at Stanford.

Mark Derrick, sixth in the boys Class 3A 3,200-meter run in Charleston last May, considers himself more of a flat-track runner than one who excels on rugged cross country terrain. Thus, the Chicago pavement provided solid footing for him to find his rhythm.

In a wide-open Class 3A field Derrick will be among the individual favorites along with the likes of Oak Park’s Malachy Schrobilgen and Edwardsville’s Garrett Sweatt. Derrick enters these last four weeks of the Illinois cross country season with momentum gained from the Challenge victory.

“It was my first high school race that I actually won for cross country, so I’m really excited about that,” Derrick said.

Marathon Woman

Nicole Farr, the Wheaton Warrenville South grad we wrote about on Sept. 15, ran her second Chicago Marathon in 3 hours, 11 minutes, 35 seconds on Sunday. It was just off her goal of 3:10. Her mother, Rhonda, still holds the Farr female family record of 3:09:55.

Nicole, though, finished 177th among more than 15,000 women, and 15th in her 20-24 women’s age division. Overall Farr, a 23-year-old Bowling Green graduate student, placed 1,329th among 35,558 finishers.

Paint it pink

Alert reader and St. Francis dad Frank Pecora informed us that last Friday St. Francis “painted the stands pink” for the Spartans’ home football game against Marmion.

Because St. Francis’ cordial host for the “home” game, the College of DuPage, wouldn’t necessarily favor a pink stadium, the “painting” was done via pink and white clothing and decorations. Fans, cheerleaders and the dance squad — even the players — wore pink as part of their ensemble, an awareness effort for breast cancer.

Pecora graduated a son, Andrew, out of St. Francis’ Class of 2010, and has a sophomore daughter, Alayna, there now as a cheerleader. Frank Pecora, who lost his wife to breast cancer, said an anonymous donor was going to write a $500 check to the American Cancer Society on behalf of the St. Francis community.

The initial amount was $2 for each yard St. Francis gained running the football against Marmion. After rushing for 183 yards and winning 20-14, the donor’s generosity exceeded the ratio.

Blackburn owns the black

Neuqua Valley senior baseball pitcher Nick Blackburn is trying to earn a rotation slot on the Chicago Scouts Association fall team that will competing in the World Wood Bat Association Championship in Florida this month.

The 6-foot-2, 180-pound Blackburn, who has committed to play at Illinois if he doesn’t get drafted first, is among eight pitchers on a squad assembled by scouts from the White Sox and Texas Rangers.

The Chicago team had five workouts scheduled at Joliet’s Silver Cross Field in preparation for the championship in Jupiter, Fla., which will be held Oct. 20-24.

“Nick’s competing for a starting job, competing for a Game 4 starter or out of the bullpen,” said John Sarna, a Jacobs High School assistant coach working with this all-star mixture of prep and travel team players.

“One thing about Nick coming out of the bullpen, he’s going to come in and throw strikes,” Sarna said last week. “He’s not going to need an inning to warm up.”

Sarna called Blackburn a “very interesting prospect” who can spot his pitches on both the inside and outside of the plate.

“A lot of scouts have shown an interest in him on the pro side of things,” Sarna said. “He’s being heavily evaluated in the fall toward next year’s draft.”

doberhelman@dailyherald.com