By Michael Newman

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I wanted to change things up this fall with the sixth addition of these awards. Knowing that the freshman class entering this year in both the Boys and Girls side would be talented, I thought of adding this. When thinking it over with the criteria of this award, I thought it would be wrong if I did not include newcomers to the sport. I was glad I decided that in September.

There were three freshmen that ran under 15:20 in their first year of cross country running. Micah Wilson of St. Charles East jumped to the varsity level after his win in the sophomore race at the Richard Spring Invitational. Wilson was his team’s third runner at state finishing 40^th running 14:59. Joey Furlong of Barrington ran his best race of the year running 15:17 to finish 88^th at state. Fiker Rosen of Quincy earlier in the year ran 15:15 at the Richard Spring Invitational. He did not have his best race at state running 15:31 to finish 124^th.

All in all, I did not choose any of these three runners.

I did select Nicolas Dovalovsky of Neuqua Valley. In the fall of his freshman year in 2017, Dovalovsky was part of his school’s soccer team and did not run during that period. He was convinced to go out for track in the spring. He showed potential running 9:55 for 3200 meters and 4:38 for 3200 meters.

With no cross-country experience, he ran for Neuqua Valley this fall. In the state meet, he was the team’s third runner placing 28^th overall and helping Neuqua Valley finish third overall.

He did have High School track experience that none of the other three runners mentioned above had. It sometimes tough to translate track performances over to the cross-country course. I have seen great track distance runners that could just not do it during the fall.

Dovalovsky passed that test.

Congratulations to Nicolas Dovalovsky of Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville as the 2018 ILXCTF.com 3A Boys XC Newcomer of the Year.

Photo Credit: ©2018 Laura Duffy