Monta Vista Cross-Country invaded SoCal in force and returned from Mt. SAC 2011 with hardware!
The Mt. SAC Invitational is the biggest and most prestigious high school cross-country meet anywhere, 64 years old with 22,000 runners over two days! There is more information on their web-site:
http://events.mtsac.edu/ccinvite/
Monta Vista made their first trip as a large team to Mt SAC in 2011, bringing 26 runners to race on the historic 3 mile course. First up was the Varsity girls’ team, featuring Bridget Gottleib, Kirsten Do, Pearl Law, Risako Tanida, Nandini Chitale, Neha Jammu and Sameera Vemulapalli. The girls had a rough start as a neighboring runner tripped Pearl, who went down on top of Kirsten. Both Pearl and Kirsten bounced up and finished the race–with bloodied knees and hands. They were immediately taken to the medical tent where it took a half hour to get them cleaned up. Both girls displayed incredible courage and team spirit, running the entire race without hesitation and with maximum effort. Despite having two of our top 3 runners taken out before the start, the team still finished 10th in their race and set a tone for effort for the rest of the day.
Next up were our Varsity boys, who were entered in the Individual Sweepstakes race. This turned out to be a very fast race. While this proved to be a challenge, Kevin Bishop still ran the 9th fastest time of any CCS boy at Mt. SAC last weekend, and Michael Lu, Ajay Rajamani, Vikrant Marathe, Ben Chang and Stephen Ting all gained some incredible elite race experience which should pay off at the upcoming league and CCS meets.
Our sophomore boys’ team (Takuto Doshiro, Ryan Bishop, Steven Lim, Ismaeel Sheriff, Zach Patti and Anand Rao) acquitted themselves well, finishing 6th as a team in their race. Takuto took home a medal for his 7th place finish. The frosh boys did not run a complete team (only three runners, Emilio Torres-Gonzalez, Rohan Choudhury, and Shanmukh Challa) but also brought back hardware–Emilio finished 2nd in his race and posted the 3rd fastest time of any CCS freshman. And finally our freshman girls (Jenny Xu, Chloe Li, Sarah Weinberg and Sanjna Bharadwaj), who also did not have a complete team, brought back a medal with Jenny’s first place (and the fastest time of any CCS freshman at Mt SAC this year). Sanjna, who has been fighting injuries for a while, did notably well with a finish in the top half of the race despite very little training recently.
Of the 26 runners that Monta Vista took to LA, 16 of these runners were freshmen and sophomores. The experience gained by our young runners will be valuable to the team over the next few years.
We think there is consensus to keep Mt SAC on the schedule for 2012…and to try to go back bigger, better and more experienced!
Thank you very much to the parents who drove down to LA, and the support of our parents for sending all the athletes down to compete!
Complete results are at:
http://events.mtsac.edu/ccinvite/results.htm
and there are lots of photos in the Gallery area under the team tab.