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Page 6 Section 4 Daily HeralD FriDay, June 11, 2010 C1D7F12M12
Each school year brings enough freshness to life that when it comes to a close we can’t help but reflect.
As has become an annual ritual, today we present the top stories of the year in Fox Valley high school sports. Please remember the annual disclaimer as well — this is not a scientific process. It’s one guy’s opinion.
Here we go:
10: Individual competition in the IHSA’s 3-point showdown at the end of the basketball sea-son has become almost excit-ing as the games themselves.
It’s a test of a teenager’s patience to be shoot-ing against other players for advancement in a contest that has now ended up on statewide TV at the state final level. Hampshire junior Jessie VanDorin earned herself some airtime this past season when she ripped through the regional and sectional levels and then won the Class 3A championship, giving her an oppor-tunity to shoot for Queen of the Hill. She didn’t win, but the excitement she brought to Whip-Pur fans will long be remembered.
9: There were some mighty lean years when Mike Rolando took over the St. Edward football program in 2006. But the Green Wave quickly turned the corner and last fall reached the playoffs for the first time since 2003 and only the third time in program history. Never mind the Wave lost in the first round of the playoffs, this team set the bar for the future. And expect to hear more about St. Edward in the future. This year’s sophomore team was 9-0. The best part of this story? The Green Wave won the Subur-ban Christian Conference sportsmanship award. That means more than any win or playoff berth. And not to be outdone by a lo-cal school, South Elgin made a great run to its first-ever playoff berth. Storm coach Dale Schabert is to be commended for leaving a comfortable situation at Larkin and build-ing a new program from scratch, then turn-ing it into what will now be a perennial play-off contender.
8: We’ve got some mighty fine wrestling around these parts but when it comes to state medals, the area has had somewhat limited success over the years. But last winter, Eric Moreno of Bartlett took the fifth-place medal at state, Dundee-Crown’s Miko Villanueva came home with third place and Burlington Central’s Taylor Schuck wrestled for a Class 2A state championship at 171 pounds and came home the state runner-up.
7: The Bartlett girls basketball program was reeling after the 2008-09 season ended with the IHSA ruling the Hawks had to forfeit all their wins over a residency/guardianship issue. Instead of licking their wounds, the Hawks came back strong as ever and made a magical run to the sectional finals before los-ing a tough battle with perennial power Fen-wick. A 21-10 season ended with great hope for the future, and with all 5 starters returning the Hawks could be a force in 2010-11. The re-bound this season is a testament to coach De-
nise Sarna and what she stands for.
6: One can say it’s only Class 1A but the run the Elgin Academy girl basketball team made to a supersectional was memorable. The Hill-toppers only finished 14-10 but they carried the school’s basketball flag further than any other boys or girls sports team in the school’s history.
5: There are some state banners hanging around the new Purple Palace at Hampshire, and now they need another one. The Whip-Purs’ girls track quartet of Paige Membrano, Tiffany Phu, Holly Plichta and Cassie Kruse nipped Yorkville at the wire this spring to win the state’s Class 2A 3,200-meter relay cham-pionship at Eastern Illinois University. And three of those four will be back next year as only Plichta graduates.
4: Not every story in this list can be positive. It was a tough year for Elgin Area School District U-46 in some regards, most notably the suspensions of uncertified basketball coaches at Larkin, subsequent forfeits, and the school being placed on probation by the IHSA. The hope here is new athletic direc-tor Chris Neibch is the answer. Couple the Larkin situation with the massive teacher layoffs in U-46 that has cost several coaches their jobs and, well, let’s just say we hope better days are ahead for the state’s second
largest school district.
3: They had knocked on the door in 2007 when they made a trip to the Class A Elite Eight, but this year’s run to the Class 1A state baseball championship was simply something magical for the Westminster Christian Warriors. Not many high school baseball teams have two pitchers like Kevin Elder and Ryan Perez, and they’re back for two more years. Might need a new trophy case on Highland Avenue. Do we now get one of those nice green signs that people can see when they come into town? I’ve always wanted one of those in Elgin.
2: He had a goal, he set his mind to it, and he achieved it. With a heave of 189 feet, 3 inches, Huntley senior Marcus Popenfoose won the Class 3A state discus championship recently at Eastern Illinois University. He also finished second in the shot put, giving him a plethora of hardware to hang from his dorm room wall at Auburn University.
1: No-brainer. All 10 of these stories could have been about Cary-Grove, so we decided to lump them into one and anoint the Trojans’ 2009-10 athletic year as the No. 1 story of the year. Try this on for size — and trust me, there’s never been a list like this put together by one school in one year in this area. Football — confer-ence champs, state champs. Girls volleyball — conference champs, state champs. Girls golf — conference champs. Boys cross country — conference champs, state qualifiers. Girls bas-ketball — Conference and regional champs. Boys basketball — conference champs. Cheer-leading — conference champs. Boys swim-ming — conference champs and individual state qualifier. Wrestling — Individual state qualifier. Boys golf — Conference champs and individual state qualifier. Softball — Con-ference champs and berth in Wednesday’s supersectional. Baseball — Conference and regional champs. Girls track — Conference, sectional champs, state qualifiers.
And even the school’s chess team took sec-ond place in IHSA state competition.
“I am very happy for our kids,” said Bruce Kay, the school’s longtime athletic director and head football coach. “They’ve worked hard.”
So have we, so have all the coaches and ath-letes in the area, and so have you, the read-ers, in keeping us on our toes and being a good and supportive audience. And a special thanks to a special group of people that make my job so much easier, and that’s the area’s athletic secretaries.
I hear a softball field calling my name. Have a good summer everyone. It’s only about 80 days until the opening of football season!
Top story: Cary-Grove’s magical year
By Mike MiazgaDaily Herald Correspondent
Huntley junior forward Aimee Wronski worked on keeping her head held high this season.
“If I miss a shot, I know my team has my back,” said Wronski. “Instead of keeping my head down, I know I can make the next one.”
Wronski made the next one quite often this season.
The all-state selection barreled home a career-high 29 goals to go with 11 assists in helping Huntley go 21-4-1 (9-1 in Fox Valley Conference Valley Division play). Her outstand-ing season also brings with it the honor of being named the Honorary Co-Captain of the Daily Herald’s All-Area girls soccer team.
“She is definitely a game-changer, for sure,” said Crystal Lake South coach Brian Allen, whose team butted heads with Huntley twice dur-ing conference play this season.
“She is a completely different player from her sophomore sea-son. She had more of a killer instinct and if you gave her any space at all, whatsoever, she would make you pay. She single-handedly willed her team to certain victories and hit a 35-yard bomb against us the first time because we gave her 2 feet of space instead of 1 foot. She made us pay even from that distance.”
Wronski, who has already verbally committed to play at Illinois State, has seen her offensive output rise in each of her 3 years on Harmony Road. She had 17 goals and 4 assists as a freshman and bumped that number up to 20 goals and 14 assists last year. She’ll enter her senior sea-son with career numbers of 66 goals and 29 assists. She’s averaged 1 goal a game over her first 3 seasons.
“I do a lot of shooting in practice,” said Wronski, also an all-FVC, all-Pepsi Showdown and all-sectional selection this season. “I make sure that if I’m close to the net, I don’t pound it in. I just shoot it. Think-ing before shooting helps me a lot. Seeing where people are going and knowing when to shoot and when to
pass is important.”It also doesn’t hurt being one of the
fastest players on the field.“I’m fast,” admitted Wronski. “My
speed is probably one of my stron-gest things. When I get a shot off, I hit it pretty hard, but my speed is my best strength.”
Wronski uses that speed intelligently.
“I’m not only quick, but I make sure I keep the ball under con-trol while I’m running with it,” said Wronski. “There is a lot to it.”
Huntley coach Kris Grabner, who Wronski praised for his work with the team, recalls a particular goal his star player scored this season.
“She received the ball on the side-line and carried it 15 yards up and then probably went 45-50 yards across the field before releasing the shot from 28 or 29 yards out,” recalled Grabner. “She had at least 3 defenders on her. She picked two off and had one to beat. She buried it. That’s what she does.”
Wronski downplayed the particu-lar goal.
“If I have a chance to take the ball across the 18 and get a shot off, I’ll do it,” said Wronski, who was also fond of a postseason goal she scored against Barrington in similar fash-ion. “If not, I’m going to pass. It just worked out that way.”
While some prolific offensive scor-ers in sports prefer to keep racking up the numbers, Wronski is fine with giving up the ball to her teammates.
“Assists are really good,” said Wronski, who plays for the Crystal Lake Force club team. “I love helping the team by passing. Scoring goals is my job. If I have the opportunity to do that, I’m going to take it. But I also like helping my teammates get involved in that.”
Grabner was effusive in his praise of what Wronski meant to the Red Raiders this season.
“She was huge,” said Grabner. “There were games when we needed energy or we needed some type of motivation and she would raise us up and she brought us up. That first game against Crys-tal Lake South at their place, late in that
game she was everywhere. She put the whole team on her back and basically said we are going to win this game. She was like that all year.
“The number-one thing with her is her attitude. She doesn’t stop. She has great strength and great feet.”
Grabner added that the physical skills Wronski possesses are some-what uncommon in the girls game.
“She can strike a ball with either foot from around 35 yards out and score, no problem,” said Grabner. “Her ability to cut a ball back and accelerate out of it is rare in the girls game. You don’t see girls cut and accelerate the way she does. She makes it easy to win games. With-out her we lose that absolute threat that at any point of the game she could breakaway at midfield. She’s a player that changes the game at any instance.”
Wronski’s older sister, Corinne, who recently graduated from Hunt-ley and will play at Upper Iowa next season (she’s currently recovering from ACL surgery), feels her sister’s true talents run beyond on her physi-cal strength.
“She has a lot of strengths, not just with the size of her muscles,” said Corinne. “She has a lot of drive and determination to score and win as much as possible.”
Corinne is impressed with how her sister excels, despite the opposition keying on her on a constant basis.
“It’s the fact they know how fast she is and they try and stop her and still can’t,” she said. “She knows the game so well and can see what is ahead of her. She knows how to get the ball to people or she knows what to do with it.”
But to Aimee Wronski, it’s all part of the game.
“I play my game and I play hard no mater how good the team we are playing is or how much they are after me,” said Wronski, who would like to study nursing in college.
And if they are after her, she’ll either put one in the net or gladly find an open teammate.
“We have such a good group of girls,” said Wronski. “We all get along
very well and Grabner is a very good coach. It’s been such a good experi-ence. Everybody brings a very strong energy to the game and to the team.”
Wronski, who has been part of three Huntley teams that have gone a combined 66-8-2 (28-2 in league games), noted she’s come a long way
since the days of playing as a child.“I played for the little kiddie kick-
ers with pigtails,” she laughed. “I love the game. I love the aggressiveness. I want to play soccer my whole life. I like where I’ve gotten with it.”
And she still has plenty of places where the game can take her.
Huntley’s Aimee Wronski got it right
P H O T O I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y P A T R I C K K U N Z E R / pkunzer@
girls soccer all-area team captain
John Radtke
J O H N S T A R K S / [email protected]
M A R K W E L S H / [email protected]
Above: Cary-Grove football coach Bruce Kay is surrounded by his players as they celebrate their state championship. Left: Trojans volleyball coach Patty Langanis presents the state title hardware to the school the day after their victory.
