Perfect 15

Thursday saw something that is very, very rare for cross country runners–a perfect 15 team score.

Fifteen is the lowest possible score for a cross country team using standard scoring–a 1-2-3-4-5 finish.  And the Monta Vista girls made a statement and made history when Sarah Feng, Jannah Sheriff, Triya Roy, Sylvana Northrop and Sanjana Borle took the first five spots at the Lynbrook Invitational/FUHSD Championship meet.  According to CCS historian extraordinaire Hank Lawson, this is the first time in the history of the meet that any team scored 15, and as far as I can determine this was the first time Monta Vista scored 15 in any invitational meet, all time!  Whoa.  Savor that achievement, team–this achievement reflects on everyone on MVXC, not just these five, not just the girls, this reflects on everyone!  An achievement like that is not just luck, this means that the entire team has been working hard, has good training methods and team spirit, this says a lot about all of us.  Well done!  (Side note–I got in touch with a friend, the head coach at Johns Hopkins, and told him what the team did.  He was impressed, and then he said, ‘Hopkins has never scored a 15 at conferences before, maybe this is the year, it’s a tough ask’.  And later that day–the Hopkins girls scored 15 to win their conference championship!  There are two Monta Vista alumni now running on the Johns Hopkins cross country team.  Go figure out what that all means and then tell me!)

That 15 was not the only impressive performance on Thursday.  Monta Vista’s JV girls also finished first with Ananya Rajagopal running a very smart race to take first place.  That race had the look of a dual meet as the first 18 places were either MV or Lynbrook, with Vibha Iyengar, Anoushka Laskshmi, Vivian Cheng and Upasana Dilip joined Ananya in the top ten as MVXC held off Lynbrook 26-29.  The varsity boys took a nice third place with a faster team time than last year at the same meet, as Rohun Agrawal and Andrew Richardson had the convenient finish of 7-11.  Alex Richardson and Conner Hsu were both in the top 10 as the Varsity 2 boys sailed to a second place finish, and the FS boys took third place with Jason Yip, Pranav Reddy and Andrew Cole raced in 18-19-20 within two seconds of each other (Pranav also came back and ran a very, very strong workout on Saturday!).

All in all, our teams look well primed for a good day at Leagues next Tuesday!

In addition we had a monster list of personal records on the 2.1 mile Lynbrook course–46 PRs in total!  Check out the tables below.

Mr. Ma took some great photos.  Complete results can be found at XCStats.

Boys’ Personal Records at Lynbrook

Girls’ Personal Records at Lynbrook