Central Park Invitational

Monta Vista opened the 2012 Santa Clara Valley Athletic League cross country season with the first league ‘cluster’ meet, the Central Park Invitational hosted by Santa Clara High School.  And MVXC opened the season in spectacular fashion!

It is often difficult to tell what teams are going to have at the end of the season based upon early season meets.  Not every athlete attends every cluster meets and teams have different season plans.   This week was a ‘heavy’ week of training for MVXC and many of our athletes had run ‘Horse’ or ‘REI’ the day before—not the normal easy workout to prep for a race the next day!  But the prior day’s workout did not seem to matter to MVXC—whatever the coaches threw at them, the athletes seemed determined to rip through the 2.3 mile Central Park course.

Out of five races, with 14 schools, Monta Vista scored two team victories—the Varsity Girls and the Junior Varsity Boys both won their divisions.  The frosh-soph boys finished a strong 5^th in their race,  the varsity boys placed 8^th, and the JV girls scored a 3^rd place finish.

Individually, Monta Vista athletes won three of the five races—Jenny Xu won the varsity girls race, Isabel La Plain ran a brilliant race to win the JV girls race, and John Hsiao took home the crown in the JV boys race.

In the process, the Monta Vista all-time list for the Central Park course was completely re-written, as Jenny Xu broke her own all time record set last year, and Rohan Choudhury, Maddie Yip, Julia Chang, Bridget Gottlieb (for the second time), Anna Hsiao and Isabel La Plain all ran times which put them on the list of the MV best.

The personal record honor roll was headlined by Salvador Torres-Gonzalez, who continued a season marked by huge improvements with a time 2:37 better than 2011, and Rana Singh with a 2:29 drop in time.  Eight other athletes had improvements of more than 1 minute from the prior year:  Julia Chang, Sanjna Bharadwaj, Anand Rao, John Hsiao, Lydia Seo, Miranda Chen, Chloe Li and Hita Bhagat.   In all, 75% of the athletes who ran Central Park in both 2011 and 2012 inproved their times—and that is the name of the game, continuous improvement!  That’s the way for a cross-country team to continue to put pressure on the competition.  The improvements recorded this are a testament to the work that so many athletes have done over the summer and over the past year.

Congrats, everyone!

Monta Vista Individual Results

(Please note that there was a big problem in the chute during the JV boys race.  Meet management did a heroic job the night after the race trying to recreate the correct order, however the results may still not be perfect.  Some of those times may be wildly off…but that’s OK, you know what you did, and Hank and Julie did their best.)

Complete Meet Results at: http://www.prepcaltrack.com/ATHLETICS/XC/2012/scvalres.htm