As the boys cross country team was on their warm up jog for the State Sectional meet, disaster struck as junior Brody Toriello, a consistent 3rd place scorer for the Blue Devils, decided that he was unable to race. Earlier in the week Toriello had been on and off about whether he was going to race and when he felt the infamous knee pains that he had been feeling all week, he had no choice but to watch from the sidelines.
This combined with the fact that Westfields number one runner, senior Ryan Daly, was resting due to more injury concerns. For any ordinary team, losing your first and third best runners would usually mean a disappointing fourth or even fifth place finish. But as head coach Chris Tafelski said, “We are not an ordinary team.”
Despite being down to 6 guys as opposed to the regular 7 and having to call up sophomore Nikos Davlouros up from JV, they still dominated the field scoring 52 points and jamming 3 runners in the top 10.
Senior Cole Varner described the feeling of winning a meet as important as Sectionals as, “pretty good, with it being my first year on varsity and being able to win back to back meets in Counties and Sectionals.”
Leading the charge was senior Kaleb Stoeckmann who claimed fourth place in the section with a 16:18 followed closely by Varner and sophomore Alex Davloruros in seventh and ninth place. And finishing out the scoring was junior Christian Buonopane and senior Jack Hill.
Steockmann who wasn’t used to finishing first for the Blue Devils said, “Even though there wasn’t that added layer of security that Ryan usually gives me, I knew it would be like any other race, I knew that there would be guys that I could key off of like Max Bonilla from Elizabeth so I just figured that if I stuck with the top pack good things would happen.”
And Stoeckmann was able to stick with the top pack for the majority of the race. There were four of them with about 1k to go and Steockmann described it as, “very anxious, it just felt like everyone was waiting for someone else to make a move.” And nobody made the move until Bonilla, the eventual winner of the race, started going hard with about 500 meters left in the race.
Varner and Davoloros who were part of the chase pack for the later stages of the race did a fantastic job of leading that pack and getting key points.
With this victory the Blue Devils punched their ticket to the Group 4 State Championship Meet on Nov. 9 where Varner and Tafelski both echoed the fact that, “Winning sectionals was nice but winning the group meet is what we have focused on all season.”
