Pre-Dawn at St Francis: Monta Vista is ready to roll!
While the weather was mostly wet and cold, the marks were hot at the St. Francis Invitational on March 17.
St. Francis is traditionally one of Monta Vista’s favorite invitational meets. It’s a short trip, the track facility is unique, they run some different relays, and the day becomes a lot of fun and usually leads to some very nice marks. The 2018 edition was no exception!
The highlight of the day was a meet championship for the varsity girls’ Sprint Medley Relay team of Evelyn How, Reema Apte, Brooke Young and Bianca Young. Evelyn and Reema made up the stagger and handed a lead that the twins built up and then successfully defended! I’d like to do some research and see how the 1:55.86 clocking stands up against prior Monta Vista efforts; we don’t run this event all that often, could this be a school record? Evelyn, Brooke and Bianca teamed up with Alisha Gao for a 4x100m relay with some beautiful hand offs. Their 50.83 mark was a season best and is the sixth fastest time in all of the Central Coast Section in this young season–and was less than a half second from the Arcadia benchmark for entry!
Joining the SMR team on the podium, Triya Roy turned in a 5:29 mile that was good for a second place finish in the Varsity race, and junior Sarah Feng ran a brisk 11:06 in the 3000 to give Monta Vista a third place finish in the very first race of the day.
There were other sparkling performances throughout the day. Eliot Lubomirsky turned in a season best 52.39 for the 400m, showing that he is rounding into form, while freshman Vishal Koppuru ran a really nice high school PR of 56.36. Bianca also had an open 400m PR of 60.97 and has a sub-60 mark in her sights, while Ananya Rajagopal’s 70.08 PR put her agonizingly close to a sub-70; that mark will fall! Evelyn How and Morris Chiang both had season bests in their 100m races. Freshman Benjamin Tang had season bests and PRs in both 65m and 300m hurdle races. In the frosh-soph girls’ mile, Sylvana Northrop opened her season with a 12 second PR and a fourth place in her race. Over in the field events, sophomore Douglas Huang had an 8′ PR in the discus with a 94’4″ toss–and this is a massive 20′ improvement over his sophomore year! Well done. In the triple jump, Soph Sarang Deshpande and freshmen Arnav Raut and Pranav Pata scored three PRs in the triple jump–39′, 38’2″ and 37’6″. Those are three strong jumps! The coaches are hoping to see these three get together in the team jump event next week at Firebird–stay tuned.
There are complete meet results posted on the Lynbrook Sports site. Mr Ma was again around to take some photos, too.
Next up, Monta Vista track and field travels to Saratoga High School for a dual meet on Thursday, March 22 at 3:30pm.
