Yesterday, the Varsity squad raced in the Sectional 1 race at Parkway Central. Top30 individuals advance, along with the top 4 teams.Kevin Abernathy, Nick Martini, and Jacob Seiler all finished in the top 30, and received tokens to be cashed in at State. So for a few short, anticipation filled minutes, no one was 100% sure if De Smet would be running 3 runners, or 7.
Before the team even left for the cool down, T Bone was back with the news. For the 16th year in a row, De Smet had qualified as a team for State. The team finished third, beating several teams that had beaten us earlier in the year.
Senior Kevin Abernathy followed up his great districts race with a second place finish. Second of the team in 18th place was Junior Nick Martini. Nick ran an amazing race. Nick knew he would be moving on by the end of the race, but that was not good enough. He wanted to make sure the whole team moved on.
"During the last mile, I kept saying 'I need to move up or there's no chance of State.' So I put those words into action when Alex told me that I had to move up right away. I passed a few guys which helped our team a lot."
Senior Jacob Seiler, running in his first career sectionals meet, finished 29. He knows Nick came up huge.
"Nick stepped up big and accomplished our team goal of 'leading the pack.' I held on to him for as long as I could keeping us in position for a great State qualifying finish."
Rounding out the top 5 and scoring for the Spartans were John Madey and Matt O'Connor. All though they did not score, Brian Scherping and John Waller still contributed greatly to the team. They were able to get in front of the competition's scoring runners, pushing their score back.
"I knew that each guy I passed was one more point I was adding to other team's scores, and helping our team." John Waller
And now a play by play from Brian Scherping
"Ok so when we started off when we went around the first loop we were towards the back and I was a little scared. Because we were in the back but I knew from the wise coaches that people went out hard and we would pass them when they died and sure enough we started passing people left and right! It was quite hilarious mentally. So we get to the woods and I remember me saying that I'm tired right before we went up the big hill (Brian laughs out loud). Then when we went down the hill. I caught up back with the pack and was like I'm still tired and then we went up another hill and I was REALLY tired. I can remember having to throw up and we had not even gone 1 mile and half yet (Brian laughs out loud). But from what I learned from castle park, I put it aside and kept running. And then eventually people yelled at me to run faster or to catch someone and my mind would agree but my legs would think otherwise (Brian laughs out loud) until we got to the down hill (at the end of the race) where everything came together. I remember telling myself FOR STATE!!!! run run run!!!! And then I passed some people and at the end with 200 to go Potter and Rob told me to pass this loser west kid and I did (Brian laughs out loud) AWESOME!!!!
Thanks Brian. Senior John Madey is looking forward to the week to come.
"I'm looking forward to a good week of practice with a focused group. We qualified for the "Big Dance". Now it's just time to perform."
This year, it was not a sure thing that De Smet would be going to State as a team. Coach Traughber knew what he was doing. He never lost confidence, and made sure no one on the team lost confidence.
"It shows he knows what he is doing and he has prepared us extremely well. We knew it was not going to be easy. But we bought in, followed the plan, and now we are going to State. Coach will tell you we did the work, but we wouldn't be heading to Jeff City next weekend without him and all the other coaches." Kevin Abernathy
One more week of hard work, and we will all be in Jeff City. Coach Traughber will be a guest on the Big River Running State Preview Show on Tuesday.
Great job to all the runners and coaches. One more week!
State for 16 Straight!!
ReplyDeleteAWESOME!