Monta Vista cross country started the 2017 campaign with top-to-bottom strong performances at the Earlybird Invitational!
Earlybird has a compete-by-class format and the day started out with our freshmen. Our freshman girls lead off with a sparkling team effort lead by Sylvana Northrop’s 12th place/20:07 effort on the 3 mile Toro Park course. Other freshmen standout efforts included Rachel Jiang’s 22:38 (for reference, two years ago current varsity team members Anjali Thontakudi and Sanjana Borle started their MV careers with 22:28 and 22:41 marks; it’s possible to improve a LOT when we are willing to put in the work over a sustained amount of time). The freshman girls’ team ended up placing as the seventh team overall. The freshman boys recorded an identical seventh place team finish, with a strong pack of four runners working together for most of the race. Andrew Richards, Rohun Agrawal, Jason Yip and Siddhant Patel finished within 40 seconds of each other. A strong group working together not only builds confidence during a race but also helps the teammates work hard in practice, leading to more improvement over time (as well as simply being more fun!).
Since we had not run at Toro Park in 2016, the sophomores were also seeing the course for the first time. Kyle Tsujimoto and Nitin Subramanian seemed to figure out the course quickly with 17:18 and 17:27 times that are 5th and 6th for MV sophomores all-time at Toro (2015 graduate Rohan Choudhury, now competing in college for the CalTech cross-country team, also ran a 17:18 in CCS as a sophomore). Jeff Flewelling was not far behind. Triya Roy also solved Toro, notching a 20:04 that was the best mark by any MV girl on Saturday, with Claire Lin and Ananya Rajagopal running their first cross-country races ever to be our second and third sophomores in.
Our deep junior girls’ showed the power of team running with a dominating team victory, a 49 point total that was 61 points clear of second place Evergreen Valley. Six girls came in less than a minute apart, scoring 6-7-11-12-13-16! That formidable pack was lead by Sanjana and Sarah Feng, and I’d predict that one of the strengths of this year’s team will be the ability of whomever is feeling good on a particular day being able to pull the entire team to a higher level. Unfortunately, a pile up in the finish of the junior boys’ race has for now confused all the results after the first 95 runners; as of now we have no team results, but we know that Andy Fang, Aravind Meyyappan and Ryan Nui all ran strong races but we hope to have more official results later.
Lead by Jeffrey Xu’s 12th place individual effort, the senior boys ran a stellar team race that was good for 4th team overall. This was a strong team effort that was actually faster than the 2008 MV boys’ overall varsity CCS team result (it’s hard to beat a team result with a senior-only team)! The boys were just edged for the podium by a strong Carlmont team. The senior girls were lead by team captain Akshara Majjiga with a strong 41st place finish.
Overall, the Monta Vista boys finished 10th overall while the girls finished 5th out of 50 teams, which included 78% of the teams ranked in the Central Coast Section top 25 based on pre-season voting!
Improvements and Effort
Because we had not run Toro in 2017, we don’t have the same big list of PRs that we usually score at Earlybird–but the ones we had were worth savoring. Setting a new PR can be a challenge at Earlybird because every year you return, you run later–so the weather at your race time probably is warmer. Both Aravind Meyyappan and Sanjana Borle dropped more than two minutes from their previous best at Toro Park–and those of us that have been paying attention to the dedication and hard work that both these athletes have demonstrated are not surprised that they dropped the most time from their previous best marks. There is a complete list of new Toro Park PRs below.
Sophomores who did not run at Toro in 2016 can still look to see improvement. For example, Kyle Tsujimoto ran Earlybird in a 5:46 pace while last year on other long/hard courses Kyle averaged 6:11 at Mt. SAC and 5:54 on the Crystal Springs course. Alicia Chen had an 8:35 pace at Earlybird yesterday compared to a 9:04 pace last year at Crystal. Clearly there is some solid effort behind these faster race paces.
Another sign of effort is participation in our Saturday optional practices. Eleven Monta Vista athletes, representing a wide range of backgrounds, participated in 80 percent or more of our optional practices: Claire Chang, Lauren Ling, Sylvana Northrop, Triya Roy, Aravind Meyyappan, Jason Tsujimoto, Jason Yip, Jeffrey Xu, Kyle Tsujimoto, Rohun Agrawal and Siddhant Patel. All of these athletes had really nice results on Saturday. Anyone could come to Saturday practice, coming to practice on Saturday mornings is a choice that each person made and then managed their schedule and planned their sleep (and set their alarm clocks and didn’t hit snooze!). These are choices that these athletes made, gritty choices, to improve themselves.
Well done, everyone!
Other Notes
- Complete results are posted and there is also Monta Vista specific results and analysis at XCStats (wander around XCStats there is a lot of nice information here).
- One gratifying comment that your coaches heard was, ‘all our group warmed up together in the white team shirts…it really felt good like we all were looking good and uniform and together like a team.’ Exactly, thought your coaches! You guys look good in MV gear together!
- Monta Vista alumni were having a great day this weekend, too! Rohan Choudhury (MVXC15) was competing for CalTech while Kelly Bishop (MVXC17) was representing the University of California at Santa Barbara at the Riverside Invitational, while back at the Iona Meet of Champions both Bridget Gottlieb and Julia Chang were running for Johns Hopkins cross country. Further North, Paru Meyyappan was the key scorer for Carnegie-Mellon’s cross country team as they defeated conference rival Case Western at the Allegheny Classic. Well done, MVXC alumni!
- Don’t forget to order your SCVAL championship meet t-shirt!
- And…Monday September 18 is photo day, so wear your uniform shorts and singlet to practice!
Rohan Choudhury and Kelly Bishop, MVXC Alumni, at the Riverside Invitational representing their colleges.
Personal Records Set at Earlybird Invitational 2017
Aravind Meyyappan 2:12 improvement
Sanjana Borle 2:04
Ethan Lin 1:57
Matthew Gong 1:34
Serena Geis 1:29
Anjali Thontakudi 1:24
Victor Ho 1:24
Bhavna Sud 1:19
Jeffrey Xu 1:06
Jason Tsujimoto 1:11
Kingsley Wang 1:05
Derek Lee 1:05
Andy Fang :59
Atharva Dixit :56
Justin Lin :52
Ryan Nui :50
Spencer Zou :47
Claire Chang :21
Sarah Feng :12
Richard Dowd :11
