Photos from Mr. Slade, Gabriella’s dad, here, and from our own Ryan Liu, here.

A clean sweep at Wilcox

Our Monta Vista track and field team traveled to Wilcox this past Thursday to go head-to-head in our first dual meet of the season and we brought home four team victories! Our JV girls won 60-58, JV boys won 90-25, Varsity girls won with an impressive 104-15, and the Varsity boys won 97-27. There were a lot of factors that played into all of our divisions winning this meet, but the main one was having an attitude to sacrifice for the team and ensure you’re doing all that you can to help put points on the board. More on that below…

Track is team sport…for real!

(a lesson from Coach Flatow)

People who do not understand high school track and field sometimes think it is an individual sport – but if you care about track, you know our sport is a true team sport.

The Monta Vista JV girls demonstrated this at the Wilcox meet. As you read above, the JV girls prevailed over the Charger girls by only two points. So the points scored by everyone were crucial. Look at our 2nd place finishers: Myra Mishra in the 800, Melinda Zhao in the 1600, Naomi Hsu and Medha Rustagi in the 3200, Elaine Chen in the 100 hurdles, Anna Bauer in the shot, Jasmine Zhao and Rafaela Maglaque in the disc, Viha Gopalan in the long jump and Jasmine in the triple jump. If any of these 9 girls had thought “Oh, I’m not going to win. It won’t matter if I even come to the meet or if I sneak out early”, then Wilcox would have won that team competition. Everyone on the team matters! Some weeks maybe you are supporting your teammates, sometimes you might score the crucial points. Sometimes whether you stay to the end or if you take off early is the difference in your teammates being able to run the 4×400 or not.

No matter what, being present matters – in track and throughout your life. Think about it – you want friends in your life that you can absolutely count on, that will be there for you in both your tough moments when you need help, and in the best moments when you want to celebrate. If you want reliable people in your life, start by being someone they can rely on too. The surest way to have dependable friends is to be one yourself. Start now in this track season – show up for others and they will show up for you!

Our Girls continue to impress

You don’t win a dual meet by 89 points without winning almost all of the events, and that was definitely the case for our Varsity girls! We earn top honors in every event except for the two hurdle races – but my hurdlers, I hope you that doesn’t make you feel bad. Let’s give Kayli Hrvatin from Wilcox our respect for sticking in there and giving her team two individual event wins! That is a really hard thing to do. Our individual event winners were: Gillie Ross in the shot put and discus throw, Lelani Laruelle in the high jump and 200m, Clara Fan in the long jump, Dylan Hwang in the triple jump, Anika Bhandarkar in the 1600m, Gabriella Slade in the 400m, Katie Lee in the 100m, Manasi Prasad in the 800m, Siran Gao in the 3200m, and our teams of Lee, Zoe Laruelle, Raji Kenyan, and L. Laruelle in the 4x100m relay and Lee, Kenyan, Slade, and Bhandarkar in the 4x400m relay! Talk about a run on sentence there…(get the pun? nice)

Our JV girls came out with 6 event wins to take top honors, and I have to give props to the field crew which is where 4 of those wins came from – nice job, ladies! On the track, it seemed like Monta Vista and Wilcox were stacked almost opposite – we have a bunch of distance girls and few sprinters, they have a bunch of sprinters and 1 distance runner. High school track is funny sometimes. Anyway, Meyra Olcay took top honors in the discus throw and the shot put, J. Zhao took the high jump, Gopalan won the triple jump, M. Zhao won the 800m, and Naomi Hsu crossed first in the 3200m – awesome job, girls!

Boys have themselves a day

With probably the most exciting end to a meet that we’ll see this year, the Varsity boys were also able to hold Wilcox to only two event wins. Before we get too far into the results, I have to shout out Tanay Parikh. He had a really interesting day, finishing 2 hundredths of a second behind the winner, Adithya Rao from Wilcox, in the 1600m only to come back later to anchor the 4x400m relay to a narrow-margined victory of 13 hundredths of a second. It’s extremely hard to get losses out of your head when it’s that close – some people never get over it! But to come back in the same meet, in a similar situation, and find the mental toughness to get to the line first when your brain is telling you “Look man, you already couldn’t get them at the line earlier, why is now any different?” is extremely impressive. Now onto all of our event winners: Ryan Shen won the high jump, triple jump, and long jump (now sitting at 5th in school history with his 22′ 2.5″ jump!), Adam Abdelrahman won the shot put, Ethan Zhu won the 110m hurdles, Ivan Shilakhov won the 400m (with a time of 56.00 seconds and followed that up with a 52.5 second split in the 4x400m relay!), Jayden Tang won the 200m and 100m (now tied with 5th in school history with 11.18 seconds!), Parikh won the 800, Manas Kottakota won the 300m hurdles, Ryan Liu won the 3200, and our boys swept the relays with teams of Andrew Cheng, Rishi Bhagatwala, Kottakota, and Tang in the 4x100m and Cheng, Shilakhov, Alex Frefel, and Parikh in the 4x400m relay!

The JV boys also held Wilcox to only 2 event wins – Kaito Imahara in the 200m and Dreyden Taleni Jackson in the high jump. Congrats to those Wilcox athletes! Our JV boys winners included Eddie Fan in the rare quadfecta of discus throw, shot put, long jump, and triple jump, Kento Murase in the 1600m, Constantine Chua in the 65m hurdles, Jonah Chang in the 400m, Aaryan Samanta in the 100m, Riu Yamada in the 800m, Tarun Gandhi in the 3200m, and a sweep in the relays from teams of Evan Chen, Samanta, Jake Tong, and Jeffrey Choy in the 4x100m relay and Choy, Chua, Chen, and Samanta.

33 PRs total!!

6 Girls PRs

Gabriella Slade – 400m
Myra Mishra – 1600m
Gillie Ross – Shot put
Aditi Chamarthy – Shot put
Viha Gopalan – Long jump
Viha Gopalan – Triple jump

27 Boys PRs

Jayden Tang – 100m
Jeffrey Choy – 100m
Kevin Liu – 100m
Aneesh Boddu – 100m
Navin Agrawal-Chung – 100m
Jayden Tang – 200m
Andrew Cheng – 200m
Kevin Liu – 200m
Aaron Hung – 200m
Ivan Shilakhov – 400m
Jonah Chang – 400m
Booker Volrath – 400m
Kevin Ko – 400m
Aaraadh Johal – 400m
Kento Murase – 1600m
Riu Yamada – 1600m
Ethan Yang – 3200m
Brandon Wang – 3200m
Andrew Cheng – 110m hurdles
Adam Abdelrahman – shot put (12lb)
Kingston Jourdan – shot put (12lb)
Jeffrey Song – shot put (12lb)
Emiliano Martinez – discus throw
Andrew Nguyen – discus throw
Ryan Shen – long jump
Ryan Shen – triple jump
Eddie Fan – triple jump