Monta Vista cross-country opened it’s 2016 campaign with stirring performances at a meet and course previously unknown to us, the Ed Sias Invitational at the Hidden Valley Course, hosted by Campolindo High School. MVXC had a solid opening day that we hope to build on over the coming months–if we continue to build upon this start, MVXC is going to have a season to remember!
The honor of the first race of 2016 fell to our freshman boys, and they set a nice tone right from the start. Our first finisher of the year, Pranesh Balasubramaniam did not look like a first time runner as he ran a 12:41 on the 2.0 mile course for 26th place. Pranesh was the first of a nice freshman pack as Jeff Flewelling, Kamyar (Kam-Kam) Moradi and Christian Dulay gave MV a front four finishing within 32 seconds of each other. A tight pack pays off in cross country, and this showed as the team finished in 6th place out of 17 teams. Sixth is a great finish in a stacked field that included Northern California powers Bellarmine, De La Salle, St. Francis (Mt. View) and Maria Carillo.
Pranesh Balasubramaniam heading for Finale Hill
Our two junior varsity JV teams followed up with fourth place (lead by Jason Tsujimoto in 12:41) and ninth out of 36 teams (lead by Scott Gregory with a 12:04). The JV team which included Jason, Forest Yang, Rohan Iyer, Victor Ho, Heewon Chung, Aditya Kalari, Trent Yu and others demonstrated some exceptional sportsmanship at the end of the chute by lining up after they finished to shake the hand of every single finisher after them. This is a truly outstanding demonstration of respect for their sport and their competitors, that was noticed by other coaches and parents–and I’m sure was appreciated by the competition. I can’t say enough about how proud I am of this group of boys.
Monta Vista JV Boys High-Five line for finishers after their race.
The Monta Vista freshman and sophomore boys are a scary-good group, very talented with the potential to form one or two very high scoring packs. Andy Fang lead this group with an 11:19 that was good for an individual 12th place, and then two pairs of runners–Kyle Tsujimoto 11:44/Ryan Niu 11:45 and Vish Lella 12:06/Nitin Subramanian 12:13–came flying in. The strength of having runners close to each other is not only the scoring potential in a meet, but also the opportunity for these groups of runners to work with each other for mutual improvement during practice. Having a strong teammate encourage you during practice on your bad days is a big help; and on race day, knowing that you have been training together for weeks is a confidence builder when your training partner takes off. Hey, if he is strong enough to make that move, I should be strong enough to cover the move–we have been running the same workouts for weeks! At Ed Sias, the boys finished 7th out of 37 teams in another stacked field, and have the potential for much, much more.
About 1/2 mile in to the race.
Kicking to the finish.
As we approached midday, the varsity teams took the field for the featured races. Our top boys finished seventh in a really fast race with National and State ranked teams Bellarmine, St. Francis, Monte Vista and De La Salle in the group ahead of us. Again, Monta Vista had a relatively tight pack, with Bennett Zhang running an 11:02 for 12th place and our fifth runner, Justin Lin, only 34 seconds back, with Andy Ma, Jeffrey Xu and Kingsley Wang packed in between. Again, this tight pack will benefit us not just at meets but in practice also.
At midday, as it started getting really hot, the women took center stage (what happened to ladies first?). The Monta Vista women were hit by a perfect storm of ACT testing, weddings, rangapravesams, illness and freak pasta party accidents but persevered nonetheless. Monta Vista’s depth gave opportunities for veterans like Megan Wang and newcomers like Kelly Wang to step up and contribute and no one disappointed–we had really strong performances from vets and rookies alike.
The Varsity girls (recognized as a ‘perennial CCS power’ prior to the gun) started only three runners returning from last year’s State team, yet still pulled off a 14th place finish. Sarah Feng (12th) and Claire Chang ran good races up front, and Kelly Wang, pressed in to Varsity service in her very first cross country race (a lesser athlete could have really freaked out, Kelly was great about accepting the challenge–so proud) came in as our fifth runner to bring home our 14th place finish. Akshara Majjiga, Sanjana Borle and Megan Wang also had the honor of opening the season in varsity and all battled and did well–truly, a brave start to the season.
Monta Vista’s junior varsity girls were almost completely first time runners, with only junior Bhavna Sud having a prior season’s experience to lead the team. Cindy Wang (twin sister of Kelly) and Anjana Purasuram together with Bhavna lead the group to a credible 18th place finish. This group has a lot of spirit and future potential, and I think we will see lots of improvement over this season (and, I believe, next season too!).
Monta Vista’s frosh-soph girls also included several athletes running their first high school cross country race, including freshman Triya Roy and sophomores Lauren Ling and Alisha Gao–both freshmen 400m standouts who joined cross country to improve their times on the track but look like real-deal cross country runners, too. Led by Triya’s eighth place finish and completed by Serena Geis, Melinda Ximen, rookie Athena Fung and Anushka Tandon, the girls’s frosh-soph team took seventh (oddly, this is the same team finish as our frosh-soph boys).
We usually open the season at Earlybird (cancelled this year due to the Soberanes fire), and when we open at Earlybird we have lots of easy metrics to measure against. Running Ed Sias for the first time, we don’t have a lot of objective metrics. The good news is–everyone ran a personal record! No one gets to complain on a PR day, and everyone should celebrate. Yay!
The other side of the coin is that the opening race is a rust-buster. At a rust-buster, more important than the result is that every athlete gains strength and knowledge as we get started with a new season. We need to ask ourselves how we felt during the race, how we might have done things differently, what we might use mentally/physically/tactically to help us in future races. A rust-buster is also a good time to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish during the season, and rededicate ourselves to our goals and objectives–whether that means more focus, more sleep, better nutrition, more commitment to exercises for injury prevention and core strength, or simply a promise to ourselves to work harder in practice or to try to stay with a teammate consistently during training and racing. Take a little time to think about your race, it’s a good investment.
This process–looking back and what you did, and thinking about what you learned and how you might improve–is a nice routine to have regarding anything that is important to you!
Your coaches are really positive about this first day! The team had a lot of good finishes in tough races. Individually, we saw a lot of toughness and fighting for positions and effort in the tough parts of races. We saw athletes all over the course cheering on their teammates. We saw a fine display of sportsmanship as the JV boys lined up to congratulate everyone else in their race. We heard the Monta Vista girls acknowledged as a ‘perennial CCS power’ prior to the start of their race, and also noted that they would be hit hard by the ACT (how cool is it that our team is known for being fast, competitive–AND smart? That is a reputation we hope that you are proud of!).
Lots of support for teammates, not just at the finish, we saw MVXC everywhere for everyone!
Good job, team! Congratulations on Race One of 2016!
Complete results and analysis at XCStats.
Photos: Both Andy’s father (Mr. Ma) and myself take photos at the meets. In the past we would upload all our photos to Picasa so that you could download anything you wanted. Unfortunately, since Google acquired Picasa the support level has gone downhill, and Google has kind of gutted what was a good service and has not provided a replacement that either Mr. Ma or I really like to use. We are trying to come up with an alternate solution we like to get you photos.
