It was cold at the end, but the boys saved some of their best for last.
The three-way meet between Monta Vista on March 10, Homestead and Fremont that opened El Camino League competition lasted into the night. At the end, the Monta Vista Varsity boys and frosh-soph boys had victories over Fremont, joined by the Junior Varsity girls. Many individual accomplishments are contained in the team results.
All the data has not been uploaded to athletic.net yet so I was not able to easily pick out all the PRs, but great efforts were everywhere. Early on, Paru Meyyappan ran a 5:38.72 in the 1600m, more than a ten second drop from last season. Rohan Choudhury came through with a thrilling finish to win his own 1600m race in 4:35.67. Matthew Ho broke 11 seconds for the first time in the 65m hurdles, and followed that up by getting under 47 seconds in the 300h for the first time also. Isabelle Ju’s 13:12 in the 3200m was a 30 second improvement over her prior PR!
A group of frosh-soph boys lowered their marks in the 400m, lead by Mike Sakellar’s 54.46. Andrew Ma (56.46), Justin Lin (57.54) and Vincent Kao (58.02) all improved their 400m marks by an impressive 1-2 seconds, while Eliot Lubomursky dropped an amazing 4 seconds from his shoot-out time with a 58.68, visiting the happy side of 60 seconds for the first time! And the boys were not the only ones showing off here. Also in the 400m, freshman Rachel Lee ran a very smooth and professional 69.86, her first time under 70 and an incredible 9 second improvement from Rachel’s time in the shoot-out less than a month ago! This group effort is fun to watch! For these and many other runners yesterday, getting outside our comfort zones had immediate payoffs — we don’t know until we try may be a motto we can live by. These athletes all jumped in and pushed and had very happy results, and these efforts will lead to nice surprises in the future too!
In the field events, James Migdal celebrated his return from the CCS wrestling tournament with a 6′ leap in the high jump, equaling his PR in his first try this season and winning by 8″–surely a good sign for this season! Aarohi Palkar had a 6″ PR in the discus, and was less than 2″ from breaking her shot PR also. Andy Ma started off with a long jump PR, which coach thinks is just a start.
And at the end of the night, for those of us staying under the lights as the fog rolled in, we watched both our boys’ 4x400m teams show a lot of heart and treat us to a thrilling finish. Matched against each other in a combined heat, the varsity and frosh-soph boys dueled to a photo finish, with the wily senior Rochish Ambati holding off our young gun Mikey Sakellar–the varsity recording a 3:47.67 mark with the freshmen and sophomores just a hair back with a 3:47.97 clocking! I love relays–being in a group of your teammates competing helps us all find something extra deep down inside, and knowing that your teammates are counting on you can help you get that one extra rep in every practice that is real money in the bank. We can see MVTF2015 really embracing the relays! The teams that find pride in their relays, also seem to have great individual results too. The African proverb–if you want to go far, go in a group–has meaning!
There are many others who could be mentioned–we had a lot of thrilling races and excellent efforts at all levels–so let’s summarize by saying that the coaches are very, very proud of our team’s efforts yesterday!
Thank you to Coach Mark Shields and the entire Fremont team for being such good hosts for our competition.
Complete results are in the .pdf download below, and will be on-line at LynbrookSports shortly.
Photos from Mr. Ma and Coach Flatow are viewable and downloadable on the team Picasa site.
The complete team is back in action next week at Santa Clara; check out the schedule here.
