Monta Vista opened it’s home dual meet season at Saratoga, and while the overall results were not exactly what we wanted, the team showed that by the end of the season Monta Vista would be a force in our league.
Monta Vista’s frosh-soph boys held off the Falcons for a team win, while our other three divisions fell to Saratoga, sometimes by as little as a single competitor. In the early season, our coaches are always a little conservative in how much we ask athletes to work through minor injuries or soreness or to compete in multiple events and this may have cost us here. There were plenty of strong efforts that are going to pay off later in the season and when we see Saratoga again at leagues.
There were several strong individual efforts during the afternoon. Alisha Gao took a first in the 100 and a second in the 200 as well as running strong relay legs, while Cynthia Gong won the triple jump for MV. In the varsity girls 800m, Kelly Bishop ran the second fastest time so far this season in CCS, 2:18.86, while leading Claire Chang and Salma Sheriff to a 1-2-3 MV sweep. In the varsity boys division, MV had an even more dominating 800m race as Bennett Zhang lead a 1-2-3-4-5 run of boys (Justin Lin, Eliot Lubomirsky, Kingsley Wang and Andy Ma–clearly we stacked that event a little more than necessary!). Richard Dowd took home wins in both hurdle races, and newcomer Owen Malone won honors in the 100m. Jeffrey Xu lead the 3200m wire-to-wire, pulling out a win after a stout challenge from Saratoga’s Amit Nag, while Steven Ataee and Anthony Cruz scored for MV in the throws; we think that over the course of the season adding some strong throwers will pay off for our team.
Monta Vista’s JV girls showed a lot of strong efforts, including a double win by newcomer Claire Ettinger in the 100 and 200, Victoria Tung’s 4-second victory in the 400, and Katherine Ma and Anjali Thontakudi winning the 800 and 1600, but a lack of depth and a few injuries ultimately cost us the team win. The frosh-soph boys did uphold the MV honor with their win, lead by sweeps of both relays, lead by wins in the 400 (Akshay Gopalkrishnan), 800 (Aravind Meyyappan), 1600 (Nitin Subramanian), 3200 (Kyle Tsujimoto), a 1-2 finish in the 65m hurdles by Conner Hsu and Sean Chen, and a sweep of the top spots in all field events by Nathaniel Reyes in shot and discus, Pranav Pata in the high jump and Sarang Deshpande in both horizontal jumps.
We are looking fine for the season. This is a great starting point, our athletes are looking strong, and we are going to be making noise all season long!
Complete results are up on the Lynbrook site, and there are photos of the meet posted also.
