The Crystal Preview meet is an important milestone every year for Monta Vista Cross Country. The meet falls about half way through the season, so we are starting to get really fit. The Crystal Springs course is one of the best cross country courses in the USA, yet the course is also a challenge, testing both the fitness and the racing mentality of competitors. And, because the league championships will be back at Crystal in four weeks, the Crystal Preview meet provides important preparation for the team. In 2016, MVXC passed it’s mid-term exam at Crystal with flying colors!
The varsity teams lead off, and both boys’ and girls’ teams showed well, with the boys taking second and the girls fourth place out of the fourteen teams in the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League. The junior varsity boys followed up with another fourth place finish. The junior varsity girls and the frosh-soph boys races were both split in divisions due to the size of the races, and both girls and boys teams finished first in the seven team De Anza division. Using the SCVAL Cup results as a metric, MVXC overall had the second most successful results of any another full team, behind only Palo Alto.
For goal-oriented kids like the athletes on MVXC, the times at Crystal Preview are hard to evaluate. For one thing, most athletes are comparing their times to last year at the SCVAL or CCS Championship, at the end of the season when we are at peak condition. Also, we are using the Crystal Preview as a way to experiment on strategy and coach encouraged everyone to try different approaches to race pacing. Yet while evaluation at an individual level might be hard, from a general perspective, the results look good. This year, MVXC had 11 boys finish under 18 minutes; in 2015, there were 10 boys achieving that standard. In 2016, there were 6 girls under 21 minutes, while in 2015 there were only three under the same mark–and remember that the 2015 girls team ended up finishing 2nd in the Central Coast Section and going to the State meet. So MVXC is in a good position to do well in the Championship portion of the season…it all depends on the work that our individuals do over the next four to five weeks of practice to build on our current position and fitness!
Complete results and analysis are available at XCStats.
Don’t forget to order your SCVAL championship t-shirt! These high quality technical running shirts are only sold in advance, the shirts are not sold at the meet itself. The complete MVXC roster will be printed on the back of these shirts; the shirts are a great keepsake for the season as well as being nice for running. The cost is $15–order your shirt here, today!
