The Naperville North boys water polo sectional hits the final four as Waubonsie Valley takes on Naperville Central. These two teams split in their respective matchups this season, but this one is for a trip to the sectional final. This highlight is sponsored by BMO.

The Redhawks start the game strong as James Behrend fires in a shot to put his squad up 2-0 early on.

Ben Meier puts on an early show on his birthday

The Warriors regroup with Ben Meier, who hits the right corner to even the game at 2-2.

Meier is not done yet because he wants another goal. Adam Matusiak finds him, and he connects on the long-distance shot, giving the Warriors a 3-2 lead.

The Meier show is on full display during the first. This penalty shot caps off a 6-0 run as Waubonsie opens up a 6-2 advantage.

Central stops the run in the second quarter when Behrend gets his name called once again with a catch-and-shoot goal.

The Warriors adjust on defense, and goalie Lukas Adeli jumps into position to make the save. Waubonsie holds an 8-5 lead at the break.

Waubonsie picks it back up in the second half with Youseff El Touny showing the skipper for a 9-5 lead.

Dawid Kowalewicz, step right up. Daniel Niv lobs the ball over, and Kowalewicz shoots a laser-like shot for the goal.

Redhawks cut into the deficit

Redhawks are down but won’t give up. Weston Schmitt finds the open target to keep his birds within striking distance.

Moments later, Elliot Skly tallies another goal, but Naperville Central still has work to do, trailing 13-7.

Waubonsie Valley boys water polo moves on to first ever sectional final

However, this game belongs to the Warriors as El Touny throws in the dagger goal, and for the first time in program history, Waubonsie Valley is moving to the boys water polo sectional final, where they’ll face top-seeded Naperville North. The Redhawks end the final season of legendary head coach Bill Salentine’s career with a 21-9 record.

For more prep sports highlights, visit the Naperville Sports Weekly page.

The Hope College women’s track and field team bettered school outdoor records in the 4×100 and 4×400 relays at the Midwest Twilight Qualifier hosted by Augustana College (Illinois).

In the 4×400 relay, junior Catherine Leahy (Elk Rapids, Michigan / Elk Rapids HS), junior Frances Cozzens (Lyman, New Hampshire / Saint Johnsbury Academy), senior Jasmine Zimmerman (Byron Center, Michigan / Home School) and junior Sara Schermerhorn (Traverse City, Michigan / Traverse City West) recorded a sixth-place run of 3 minutes, 46.68 seconds.

The time eclipsed their previous record of 3:47.18 and ranked 21st fastest in NCAA Division III this season.

In the 4×100 relay, junior Ava Schmidt (Saline, Michigan / Saline), Leahy, freshman Sofia Fisher (Lombard, Illinois / Montini Catholic) and Schermerhorn clocked a fourth-place time of 47.00. 

The time surpassed their previous record of 47.16 and ranks 36th in the nation this season.

In the 400 meters, Leahy placed sixth with a season-best run of 55.79, placing 38th in the nation.

 

JONESBORO, Ark. (5/17/25) – Several Arkansas State track and field athletes will compete Sunday at the South Alabama Last Chance, jockeying for qualifying position in the upcoming NCAA West Preliminary Rounds.

Competition begins at 3:30 p.m. with the men’s shot put while the first event on the track for the Red Wolves will be the 100-meter hurdles at 4:30 p.m.

TEAMS REPRESENTED: Arkansas State, Louisiana, South Alabama (host), Southern Miss, Troy, ULM

THREE THINGS TO NOTE:

1.     REGIONAL QUALIFYING: Sunday’s meet – appropriately titled “Last Chance” – represents the final chance for athletes to cement qualifying position in the upcoming NCAA Preliminary Rounds. Entering Sunday, A-State currently has eight athletes within the top 48 in at least one of their respective events in the West Region.  



MEN

5000 meters: Jacob Pyeatt – 13:35.90 (#33)

110m Hurdles: Colby Eddowes – 13.45 (#9)

Pole Vault: Bradley Jelmert – 5.55m/18-2.5 (#4); John Carswell – 5.28m/17-3.75 (#32)

Long Jump: Colby Eddowes – 7.67m/25-2 (#25)

Shot Put: Menachem Chen – 18.11m/59-5 (#44)

Discus: Menachem Chen – 55.75m/182-11 (#46)

Hammer: Noa Isaia – 62.54m/205-2 (#20)



WOMEN

Pole Vault: Carly Pujol – 4.31m/14-1.75 (#20)

Shot Put: Michelle Ogbemudia – 16.40m/53-9.75 (#22)

 

2.     PYEATT’S PROWESS: Arkansas State standout distance runner Jacob Pyeatt scored 20 points at the Sun Belt Conference Outdoor Championships, one of two men’s athletes to do so. He was also named the league’s Track Performer of the Year for not only his efforts at the championships but throughout the season.

 

3.     ELEVEN RED WOLVES ON THE ALL-SUN BELT SQUADS: A total of 11 Red Wolves notched all-conference finishes at the outdoor championships, including six on the first team: Menachem Chen, Colby Eddowes, Noa Isaia, Bradley Jelmert, Jacob Pyeatt and Carly Pujol. Brandon Williams, Miranda Burgett and Michelle Ogbemudia were second-team finishers, while Kamil Przybyla and Tyra Nabors were on the third team.

NEXT UP

After competing in Mobile, A-State will next send multiple athletes to the NCAA West Preliminary Rounds, scheduled for May 28-31 in College Station, Texas.

SOCIAL MEDIA

For the latest on the A-State track and field and cross country programs, follow @AStateTrack on Twitter and @astatetfxc on Instagram, while also liking the team’s Facebook page at Facebook.com/AStateTrackAndField.

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The idea of adolescence as a horror story is not new, but it’s given a splashy workout in Charlie Polinger‘s queasily stylish debut feature, in which the swimming pools, lockers rooms and bunk-bed dormitories of a boys’ water polo camp are a puberty petrie dish livid with sinister bacteria. Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, “The Plague” has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in. 

Sensitive, 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck) comes to the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp in the summer of 2003 as an outsider twice over. He’s not only joining after the second session has started, he’s also a new arrival to the area. And, as we understand from an early conversation with his affable but ineffectual coach (Joel Edgerton, who also produces) a reluctant one: there’s hurt in the studied neutrality of his tone when he describes how his mother uprooted their lives to be with her new lover. Perhaps the wrenching change-up of father figure fuels Ben’s anxiety to fit in, but also maybe that’s just the way he is. When one of the kids’ endless games of would-you-rather makes him choose between “not fucking a dog but having everyone think you did, or fucking a dog and no one knows,” Ben opts for, well, screwing the pooch. 

In any wolf pack, the Alpha is obvious and even among these cubs, Jake (a superb Kayo Martin) is easily identifiable as the ringleader. Deceptively cherubic beneath a shock of tousled strawberry blonde hair, and wearing a surprisingly adult expression of skeptical watchfulness, Jake is initially friendly enough to the newcomer — at least once Ben begins answering to the nickname “Soppy,” devised after Jake picks up on his very minor speech impediment. 

There’s an easier target for Jake’s lazy but keen-eyed ridicule. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) was presumably already an oddball — into magic tricks and solo flailing dance moves and lurching non-sequitur conversation — even before he developed a disfiguring skin complaint. The angry-looking rash that covers his arms and torso is probably some sort of eczema or contact dermatitis, but the boys are still of an age to be fascinated by lepers and curses and so Jake declares it “the plague.” Eli is ostracized, to the point that all the kids dive for another cafeteria table if he so much as pulls up a chair. 

Good-natured Ben, in the throes of a panicky uncertainty that from the outside is sweetly poignant, if only because it will be gone in a year or a month or a minute, feels for Eli’s predicament— possibly more than the quite contentedly peculiar Eli does for himself. But as he barely has enough social capital to guarantee his own acceptance into Jake’s circle, Ben befriends the outcast cautiously, away from prying eyes. It’s fine to make taboo transgressions if nobody knows about it.

DP Steven Breckon punctuates “The Plague” with interludes of woozy underwater photography, in which the boys’ bodies dagger into the pool and then tread water, resembling so many headless sea horses. Sometimes, while Johan Lenox’s excellent, ’70s horror-inflected, nightmare-choir score reaches a bombastic crescendo, the girls of the synchronized swimming class who share the pool and fire the boys’ crude erotic imaginings, are shown inverted, so they appear to be dancing floatily across the water’s underside surface. These subaquatic symphonies give a touch of the phantasmagoric to a milieu that’s otherwise cleverly recreated from the banal remembered details of an early noughties childhood: the Capri-Suns, the pop tunes, that brief phase where kids believe that smoking kitchen-cupboard nutmeg will get them high.

Perhaps too the subjective nature of Polinger’s memory of a time when the peer-group dynamic was so much more influential than any peripheral authority figure, accounts for why these kids are so often unconstrained by adult supervision. Jake naturally takes advantage of that freedom to continue his offhand reign of terror, one he can maintain without ever really lifting a finger. Almost all of the violence in “The Plague” is self-inflicted and therefore easily disavowed by this tweenaged tyrant – a character so vivid that it’s tempting to imagine a more provocative movie told from the bully’s perspective. But as “The Plague” ramps up to an impressively eerie, body-horror-styled finale, it takes a rather more expected turn toward a significant, if hardly triumphal moment of personal growth for unhappy camper Ben. Teetering on the brink of adult society with its own bewilderingly insidious notions about masculinity and conformity, you can dive in or you can be pushed, and it’s only then you can know if you’ll sink or swim.

During much of the last three sets, if you closed your eyes for a moment, you could almost forget you were in Lexington.

Against an upper-tier Minutemen group riding a 10-game win streak at the end of April, the Milford boys volleyball team transformed the small gym into a home away from home. The junior varsity squad’s booming cheers from the bleachers ignited the bench, who echoed every holler in a regular season matchup with a state quarterfinal feel. And on the court, super-charged junior outside hitter Gus Da Silva traded hits with Lexington’s Ale Luciani in a five-set thriller Milford lost by just two points.

Lexington ranks at No. 5 in the latest Div. 1 power rankings, with the state tournament almost a week away. It’s drawn praise as the leading candidate to break up the Bay State Conference’s grip on the Final Four.

The Scarlet Hawks, with Da Silva as their only returning starter from a trip to the state semifinals last year, rank No. 22.

“That game really showed us how good we are defensively and how good we can be,” Da Silva said. “The hype-ness, especially from our JV team and freshman team, if it wasn’t for them, I think we would’ve struggled a lot. They really boosted us as a team and our energy just skyrocketed. I think that’s what really pushed us that game. It was a good game. It felt like a home game, I can’t lie.”

Milford has a history of tenacity in numbers, wearing hearts on sleeves and producing a storm of energy that’s hard for opponents to bottle up. Last year’s senior-laden group, led by stars Alex Guerra and Arthur Gomes, showed a strong, team-wide friendship at the heart of it every day with Da Silva – a culture the junior focuses on maintaining this year.

To Scarlet Hawks head coach Andrew Mainini, that’s Da Silva’s superpower, outside of his talents as one of the state’s better outside hitters. And when Milford competes with Lexington, or beats a Cambridge (ranked No. 6) in five sets, or leads sets against Div. 1 and Div. 2 powerhouses Newton North and Agawam, that unity shines bright.

“I think off of the court, he is someone that the entire team likes, and he makes them laugh, and he brings the team together socially,” Mainini said. “The way he interacts with his teammates is really positive, and that has really brought the team – a pretty inexperienced team that was very new to each other – he has really brought the team together. And when we play defense, we often look like a well-oiled machine with a lot of chemistry. And I think that is partially because Gus has kind of united everyone as friends.”

“I want to be like a team that has a lot of chemistry and enjoys playing with each other, no hatred,” Da Silva added. “You know, that’s my focus. … We’re always hanging out. We’re always eating lunch (together). After practices or games, we’re always like together, you know, bonding as a team. So, that’s our primary goal, is just being together. When we’re at our low, we stay together, and when we’re achieving, everyone’s supporting each other.”

There’s a lot to Da Silva’s game that makes him a player to watch. Newton North and Lexington struggled at times to disrupt his hitting, which Mainini says comes from a dynamic swing that produces at the toughest of angles. The team is strong with its serve-receive, of which Da Silva is one of its best at. He’s been a standout passer.

When asked of those contributions when Milford is at its best, Da Silva points to the team. But when the Scarlet Hawks struggle, which has come in waves in an 11-8 record, the junior feels responsible for it.

“I have to take, like, the blame for it,” Da Silva said. “Everyone looks up to me, so I have to be a great role model to everyone. And sometimes I don’t do that. But I’m trying to keep myself at a very high standard for the most part.”

Milford, which has high expectations for what it can do in the state tournament despite its ranking, has shown more positives than negatives.

An upset loss to Taunton to share the new Hockomock League title with it was something Mainini felt Da Silva took pretty harshly. A 3-0 loss to Acton-Boxboro earlier in the week was frustrating, too. But in the first two sets, Milford was seemingly full control.

Against Newton North, which eventually lost top outside hitter Simon Vardeh to injury late in the third set, Milford led or competed well into at least the middle of all four sets in a 3-1 loss. Agawam is Div. 2’s leading title favorite, and Milford led in sets against it as well. The five-set win over Cambridge was a match Da Silva especially thrived in.

“I think when we play our best,” Mainini said. “it’s because (Da Silva) is, you know, bringing the team together and pushing them forward.”

Consistency is the key, and Da Silva has worked hard on his leadership to limit the low moments. Da Silva admits the pressure he feels with jumping from a role player last year to a central leader this year, a pressure that’s been both enjoyable and difficult. But he’s taking it in stride, and is focused on guiding the Scarlet Hawks as they look to improve their close-outs to sets.

“We’re really playing well until that closing moment (in the losses),” he said. “We just need to sense a little bit of blood, and athletes close the game every time. … Really it’s just working harder every day.”

Passion for the sport comes almost naturally for Da Silva, who dropped other sports to focus on volleyball and work as a barber. He plays for Smash volleyball in the offseason, and has made friendships and improved there, too.

“(Volleyball) means a lot (to me),” Da Silva said. “It’s like, my safe space, in a way. It brings me closer to my friends. It’s like, really calming and it’s just peaceful, you know?”

With those friends, he’s looking forward to making some noise in the state tournament. The whole team – bolstered by junior Diego Inacio-Santos, sophomore Sam Abreu and a well-balanced defense – is too.

“We’re ready, and we’re excited to potentially be the underdog who gets a couple upsets in the tournament,” Mainini said. “We know that we are more talented than a (22) seed.”

Originally Published: May 17, 2025 at 3:04 PM EDT