With both the Monta Vista girls’ and boys’ varsity teams punching their tickets to the Central Coast Section championships, the SCVAL championships were a success—but the story was much more than only the varsity teams.
The day started with the junior varsity girls. In the prior year, the girls had seen their four-year streak of championships snapped but they were determined not to let that happen again. At the one-mile mark, Serena was sitting in fifth place while the heart of the team was running their usual smart pack-style start, with small groups working together over the next fifteen spots or so. At the finish, the MVXC girls had come together in a devastating pack with the scoring girls rolling in 4-6-7-8-9, in a spread of only 38 seconds, for a 34-41 victory over Homestead. Monta Vista’s top five were Sanjana Borle (4th), Anjali Thontakudi (6th), Serena Geis (7th), and two of our sprinter recruits, Reema Apte (8th) and Lauren Ling (9th). Every one of these girls were sophomores, but they all ran like professionals.
Following that showing, our frosh-soph boys took to the trails. This is a strong group of boys, with a really tough group of freshmen who work well together linked with a solid core of sophomore boys. While young, the boys also showed great strategic focus and ran in small packs that moved up though out the race. Ryan Niu was our first boy in, with a fine 17:13 that was good for 3rd place. Ryan was closely followed by freshman Kyle Tsujimoto who also medaled for Monta Vista. Freshman Pranesh Balasubramaniam, Sophomore Aravind Meyyappan, and freshman Nitin Subramanian completed our scoring with a 1-5 spread of only 37 seconds, as the boys took a second place finish 23-50 to Homestead. There is a lot of depth to these two classes, with Andy Fang running varsity and a big group within a minute of Nitin’s fifth position (Vishal Sodem, Jeff Flewelling, Kamyar Moradi, Darren Yang); it’s reasonable to look forward to a continued run of success from these boys.
Our varsity girls, lead by a proud and determined senior class, earned a sixth straight trip to the CCS championships with a second place finish in the De Anza League. Kelly Bishop lead our scoring with a strong 8th place finish, gaining all-league status every year at Monta Vista. Paru Meyyappan and Salma Sheriff came in 11th and 15th to earn all-league honors for the first time; both had big PRs, Salma besting her prior record by 34 seconds and Paru knocking off 27 seconds from her best mark. Super sophs Sarah Feng and Claire Chang completed the scoring. The Monta Vista top five was more than one minute per runner under the CCS at-large standard! The SCVAL is a tough league; the MV girl’s 1:39:19 team time would have placed first in the BVAL 21-team league championships the day before us.
Last but definitely not least, the varsity boys’ race gave us plenty of highlights. With 800 meters to go, Bennett Zhang had taken a 50m lead that he showed no signs of relinquishing as he finished strong for an individual league championship. Bennett becomes the first Monta Vista boy to win the De Anza League championship since Jason Yow in 2003—that’s a span of 13 years including some great runners, including Kevin Bishop, Rohan Choudhury, Brent Mogensen, Kranti Peddada, Matt Paquet and others. Jeffrey Xu also finished in the top five, and Andy Ma, Justin Lin and Andy Fang came in within ten seconds of each other to complete our scoring. Scott Gregory also had a breakthrough race in the second wave of varsity. Overall, the MV boys took third, a mere 12 points from first place—definitely within striking distance of both Homestead and Los Gatos at the upcoming rematch in the CCS championship race.
Monta Vista athletes recorded an astounding 53 Crystal Springs course personal records in this single afternoon! Some improvements to highlight (don’t have your feelings hurt if you are not mentioned, there were many great performances!):
- I always feel like a reasonable yet aggressive goal for improvement for a 5km race during a year is about 45 seconds +/- 15 seconds, or 10-20 seconds per mile race pace. This is a tough number, and it gets tougher as we improve, but if everyone improved 30 seconds every year, MVXC would be kind of a steamroller after a few years!
- I counted 15 boys that improved 30 seconds or more year-to-year in Leagues at Crystal: Forrest Yang, Ethan Chen, Justin Lin, Angelo Nguyen, Darren Yang, Victor Ho, Aidan Gottlieb, Kingsley Wang, Karthik Guruvayurappan, Matt Gong, Richard Dowd, Scott Gregory, Derek Lee, Jeffrey Xu, and lead by sophomore Aravind Meyyappan’s 1:44 improvement from his mark in last year’s SCVAL championship meet.
- Two girls had more than a one minute year-to-year improvement, Salma Sheriff’s 87 second improvement and Sanjana Borle’s impressive 67 second drop.
- Freshmen Tyler Liu, Yash Karandikar and Alicia Chen had the biggest PRs in the month since the Crystal Preview race, dropping more than a minute from their first time on the course.
While the season is over for many on MVXC, the varsity teams will continue to move on—and everyone is invited to continuing to practice with our varsity runners. The upcoming banquet will be on November 15 and we hope to see you all there (RSVP on-line).
Complete championship meet results are on XCStats.
Monta Vista All-League Honorees 2016
Varsity:
Kelly Bishop
Paru Meyyappan
Salma Sheriff
Bennett Zhang
Jeffrey Xu
Junior Varsity/Frosh Soph all-league:
Sanjana Borle
Anjali Thontakudi
Serena Geis
Reema Apte
Lauren Ling
Ryan Niu
Kyle Tsujimoto
