Hello, Earlybird! MVXC15 is here!

This team is awesome!

MVXC15 ran it’s traditional opening race at the Earlybird Invitational in Salinas on Saturday, September 12. We saw 79 purple-clad runners show their stuff on the trails and the hill on the three-mile Toro Park course—and we looked great!

The freshmen girls were the first MVXC15 group out on the trails, and this group was intent on making a splash! Sarah Feng and Claire Chang both finished in the top 15 of 131 freshman girls, leading our team to a second place finish! Impressively, our top five freshman girls (including Anjali Thontakudi, Sanjana Borle and Serena Geis) had the best Monta Vista time EVER for any single class of girls at Toro Park! Including Melinda Ximen and Anuska Tandon, the MVXC top seven all finished in the top third of the race, and announced themselves as a group that can make waves for the next four years (while challenging the pronunciation of the awards presenters far and wide).

The freshman and sophomore boys also made strong statements to open their 2015 campaigns! The two teams finished fifth and seventh, however your coach thinks that this understates the potential of this two-year group of boys. The first four sophomore boys—Jeffrey Xu, Kingsley Wang, Justin Lin and Eliot Lubomirsky—held their own while running in their first cross country races against boys who had been running for a full year. The top four freshmen boys—individual medalist Andy Fang, Vishal Sodem, Ryan Niu and Aravind Meyyappan—also ran fine races, finishing in under 20 minutes and all in the top third of the 255 athletes racing. These young runners have a lot of upside, and if they all stick together and work together they can make an impact this year—and even more, over all the future years at Monta Vista! This can be a special group of young men.

The sophomore girls recorded a fifth place team finish, lead by the returning trio of Akshara Majjiga, Mizuki Kadowaki and Megan Wang. Mizuki and fellow sophomore Sabrina Hung recorded two of the biggest PRs of the day—this is a hard working group. The upperclass girls made sure they were noticed, too, as Kelly Bishop, Maddy Yip, Anna Hsiao and Isabelle Ju all finished in the top 20 of their races, with Salma Sheriff missing by only seconds while finishing 21^st out of 174 runners! The senior girls’ team also finished on the podium, taking home third place team medals.

The junior and senior boys races were highlighted by Brent Mogensen, Bennett Zhang and Andy Ma who all finished in the top 25 of their races—Bennett also ended up on the podium for his efforts! Along with Vamsee Vemulapalli, some other hungry seniors and juniors and an up and coming group of sophomores and freshmen, this group certainly feels like they will be back at CCS and make some noise when they get there! This group of seniors and juniors provided great leadership to the younger runners in their first race, too—your coaches did notice!

Overall, our team traveled home with 15 medals (I think). Both Kelly and Brent ran times that are added to Monta Vista’s all-time list at Toro Park. And we had an impressive group of personal records and improvements, too!

Individual Improvements over Earlybird 2014

(One minute or more)

And parents…thank you SO MUCH for driving us down to Salinas!  As well as feeding us, getting us shoes, putting up with our crazy food requests, supporting our running obsession…we can’t thank you enough!

Monta Vista results and analysis can be found on the team’s XCStats page, and complete results can be found on Lynbrook Sports.

Great job, everyone!