The 2021 Santa Clara Valley Athletic League cross country championships will be memorable. We will remember the mud. We will remember having a real championship meet after missing a year due to the pandemic. We will remember more than half the team recording Crystal Springs PRs! And we will remember how an impressive streak of Central Coast Championship appearances was extended due to the valiant races by our athletes!
The SCVAL is one of the most competitive leagues in the Central Coast Section. For example, the CCS D1 girls champion team has been a SCVAL team for the last seven straight years! So achieving all-league status, or winning a league championship, is an difficult feat. So (spoiler alert!) the collection of hardware accumulated by Monta Vista is impressive.
The junior varsity girls’ raced first. Monta Vista was still stinging from a one point loss the week before to Lynbrook, and was looking for payback. At the one mile point, there were several Los Gatos and Lynbrook runners up the hill first, yet close behind there were a large pack of MVXC athletes. During the next two miles, MVXC runners executed their strategies and overhauled many of the leaders and broke up the Gatos and Lynbrook packs. While the leading team was unclear at the one mile point, by the finish Monta Vista had control. MVXC had five runners in before Lynbrook’s fourth and all seven finished before the Vikings’ number five, as the girls claimed a junior varsity league championship! Nerea Northrop, Valerie Ayzenberg, Anika Bhandarkar and Megan Nieh all claimed all-league honors while Jasmine Varma, Karena Lai and Sandhya Fastnacht completed the scoring for Monta Vista. In all, 13 junior varsity girls recorded new personal records on Tuesday!–Anika, Megan, Jasmine, Karena, and Sandhya were joined by Meena Kolli, Joey Suresh, Aditi Dantuluri, Sudipti Dantuluri, Siran Gao, Hemani Kamarshi, Manasi Prasad, and Vera Bondar in the JVG PR-fest!
The varsity boys plucked two athletes from the frosh-soph ranks, yet the MVXC boys put up a show next. Ruhaan Shah threw down a 59-second PR to claim a 9th place medal and all-league status! Ethan Lu and Neal Jain were the next two runners in for the frosh-soph boys as they rolled in with a strong 4th place finish. Jayden Lim had a 2:28 second PR, the biggest improvement of any boy all day, and Parmarth Joshi and Darren Lin scored PRs also.
The MVXC girls turned the league championship into a dual meet as 11 of the first 13 finishers in the varsity race came from Monta Vista or Los Gatos! Nikhita Saldi continued her strong season with another sub-19 effort at Crystal, running an 18:36 that earned her a third place finish on the podium. Jannah Sheriff went 19:19 to earn varsity all-league honors for the third time. Vivian Lau and Sydney Stevens gave Monta Vista four all-league athletes and two more medals, and Ellie Hsu completed the scoring as Monta Vista took a strong second place finish and punched their ticket to the CCS championships for the tenth straight year!
Monta Vista’s varsity boys knew that they would have to improve upon their races at Crystal four weeks before if they wanted to extend their season further. That kind of pressure is a bit of a test–and the Monta Vista boys rose to the challenge and passed their exam! Senior Justin Yu’s long summer of running paid off for him and his team as he put up a 16:45 to lead the team. Justin finished in 6th place for his first time in the varsity top-10 at league finals, after two top-20 finishes. Sophomore Denny Dong also earned all-league honors with his 9th place finish. Alex Nguyen, Ari Rajaram, Andrew Cole and freshman Tanay Parikh all had PRs, and senior Matt Sun had a season best, as the boys moved on and will join the varsity girl at the CCS championships on November 13.
The varsity boys and varsity girls will compete together at the CCS championships for the 10th straight year. When a difficult goal starts to become an expectation, we can start to take the achievement for granted–but don’t! Don’t take CCS for granted. Many teams at Monta Vista struggle to make the CCS playoffs. There are good athletes in other sports at Monta Vista who toil for four years and never participate in the CCS playoffs. A ten year streak is an amazing testament to the runners in our program–and not only the seven boys and seven girls who go and actually compete. These victories are shared by every runner on the team who is out every day, in the heat (and sometimes in the rain), in the early morning, on the days when things seem easy and the days that are stressful. Everyone on the team helps teammates push a little harder, to be a little more consistent, reach for one more rep or one more mile. We are all a part of MVXC success for the last decade!
Complete results are posted on XCStats and Lynbrook. (There is also a cool compilation of all the league finals held at Crystal this season as-if they were all run as one meet.) Monta Vista’s own Robert Ma (parent of two former MVXC/TF athletes) took some great photos, and so did Malcolm Slaney. I think you can find some photos that will make you smile and remember what a satisfying day this was for all of us!
