The Rust is Busted!

See lots of great photos here!

The Monta Vista Track & Field team kicked off the 2025 competition season by hosting the 9th annual RustBuster Invitational. 16 schools from around the area traveled to Cupertino on what turned out to be an uncommonly beautiful first Saturday of March – not a single drop of rain fell during the whole meet! This was a truly great jumping off point for our entire team and we are excited to see what is in store over the next few months.

Varsity Boys Lead Efforts with 3rd Place Finish

Our varsity boy’s team took home the team 3rd place spot! We were only 1 point behind previous league champions, Milpitas – that’s a big deal! Our Frosh-Soph boys ended up with a respectable 5th place finish in team competition. Medal-winning (top 6 individual, top 3 relay) performances included:

Varsity
- Ryan Shen – 1st place long jump (MEET AND STADIUM RECORD!!!), 1st place high jump
- Tanay Parikh – 2nd place 3200m, 4th place 800m
- Darren Lin – 2nd place triple jump
- Manas Kottakota, Andrew Cheng, Alex Frefel, and Parik – 2nd place 4x400m relay
Frosh-Soph
- Adam Abdelrahman – 1st place shot put (F/S MEET AND STADIUM RECORD!!), 1st place discus throw
- Eddie Fan – 2nd place shot put, 6th place discus throw
- Evan Chen, Jake Tong, Aaryan Samanta, Jeffrey Choy – 3rd place 4x400m relay

Girl’s Teams Open Well

Our varsity girl’s team had a very solid season opener with a 5th place team finish! A few athletes are battling injury while others haven’t fully transitioned from their winter sports – look for the tide to shift very soon for these girls. Our frosh-soph girl’s team actually ended up score only 0.5 point less than what the varsity team scored in their competition, so there’s some major respect earned there in their 8th place finish! Here are the medal-winners from the girl’s side:

Varsity
- Lelani Laruelle – 1st place high jump
- Gillie Ross – 2nd place shot put, 4th place discus throw
- Anika Bhandarkar – 4th place 3200m
- Katie Lee – 6th place 100m
- Zoe Laruelle – 6th place 100m hurdles
Frosh-Soph
- Rafaela Maglaque – 1st place discus throw
- Viha Gopalan – 3rd place triple jump, 4th place long jump
- Evan Greene – 5th place shot put
- Mel Zhao – 5th place 3200m
- Elaine Chen – 6th place 100m hurdles
- Jasmine Zhao – 6th place high jump

Full results

Great job, everyone on your season opening marks! Medals are great and all (and they really are), but self-improvement is what we are all about on this team. We want to be getting better each day, so when we set new person records (PRs), it needs to be celebrated! Keep in mind that setting your first high school mark is absolutely a PR, however, I’m not going to be keeping track of those in my post-meet lists – sorry about that.

27 PRs total!!

6 Girls PRs

Anika Bhandarkar – 3200m
Zoe Laruelle – 100m hurdles
Gillie Ross – shot put
Gillie Ross – discus throw
Rafaela Maglaque – discus throw
Sofia Schilling – discus throw

21 Boys PRs