Monta Vista Cross Country’s 2019 season officially kicked off with the Lagoon Valley Classic.
With both early season Toro Park invitationals discontinued, MVXC chose to journey North for the season opener. The Lagoon Valley Classic looked like a good challenge. The course has two significant hills–Big Mama and Little Sister–to test runners. Hills are a traditional strength for Monta Vista, due to our training in Fremont Older Open Space and Stevens Canyon Park. Also, developing the “mental callousing” from racing on hills will be important when we race on the hilly Crystal Springs course for the SCVAL and CCS championships in November.
Arriving in Vacaville, the weather was surprisingly cold after a hot week in San Jose, and the park and course were unexpectedly scenic. The team felt positive about the day, we set up camp and were ready to go.
First up were the frosh-soph girls. Sadly the meet organizers were keeping a controlled starting area, so we could not get a full-team opening cheer, but the girls decided to announce our presence loudly on the track. Freshman Avani Kalari began her high school running career with a top-10 finish, with fellow freshmen Sydney Stevens and Nerea Northrop also scoring medals. Sophomore Anoushka Laskshmi and freshman Nikhita Saldi completed the scoring for MVXC as the girls recorded a fourth place finish, only 30 points behind North Coast powerhouse Davis Senior for the final spot on the team podium. With fellow freshmen Agnes Wang, who was held out due to illness, and Vidya Bharadwaj, Vani Putheti, Meena Kolli and Insiah Kizilbash this is a deep and talented group of freshmen that have the potential to really make a mark together over the next four years!
The boys’ frosh-soph team was up next. Several of the sophomore veterans were pulled up into the varsity race this week, and newcomer freshman Alexander Nguyen let MVXC with a 13:32 clocking (6:46 mile pace) clocking over the hilly two mile course. Alex has only been training with the team a couple of weeks so he could have a rapid performance increase this season (fun fact–Coach Flatow also joined XC for the first time to train for the wrestling season, but he never went back to wrestling!). Another freshman, Thomas Philip, was the second MVXC runner before three sophomores (Cash Bowman, Sotirios Kougiouris and Nitin Kukreja) completed the scoring as the team finished in 27th place.
Both varsity races were run on a longer, three mile course. The girls team started off with the three returners from the CCS championship title team in good early season form; junior Sylvana Northrop, senior Triya Roy and sophomore Jannah Sheriff all took home medals in our first Lagoon Valley varsity race. Vivian Lau, fresh off a resplendent track season that saw her run sub-12 in the 3200, and junior Rachel Jiang completed the scoring as MV took home fifth place less than 20 points off the podium. In another stacked field with Northern powers Davis, Jesuit and Amador Valley along with defending CCS champion St. Francis, the boys started off the season with a very solid 12th place finish. MV has a young team this year with three sophomores and two juniors joining only two seniors in the top seven; the squad will have a lot of upside. Junior Andrew Richardson has a medal from Lagoon Valley to add to his collection, and Sahil Goel, Kyle Tsujimoto, Nitin Subramanian and Justin Yu gave the boys a gap of only 1 minute, 11 seconds from 1-5. When they move that pack up, scores change fast; and Rohun Agrawal, Andrew Cole, Pranav Reddy and Matthew Sun are all waiting in the wings and working had to contribute to the team. The varsity boys are going to be scary at many meets this season.
For the JV girls, Vibha Iyengar had an outstanding run of 15:06 on the hilly two-mile course to medal for MV. Seniors Tyler Liu, Christian Dulay and Jeff Flewelling lead the JV boys as they recorded a very good 13th place finish out of 33 teams.
These results were excellent for the first meet of the year–truly excellent. There is always more work to do–as Angela Duckworth says, the gritty person becomes satisfied with being unsatisfied. We have many opportunities to build on this start and achieve a lot, as a team and as individuals, this season. Yet coming home from a big meet with eight medals and two team finishes in the top-five is a great place to start! We should all have happy hearts and a positive attitude as we roll into practice this next Monday.
Complete results for the Lagoon Valley Classic are posted at XCStats. Mr. Ma came North with us to take photos (much better than the few iPhone shots you see here); look for his photos to be posted soon here.
Next up, MVXC will travel to the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California for the Pacific Tiger Invitational on September 21.
Pasta Night the evening before! Thank you, Saldis, for hosting!
