Two opportunities to compete gave Monta Vista track athletes a lot of action during the first full week of May!
Wilcox Dual Meet
In the squad’s first away meet of the season, MVTF headed to Santa Clara to meet the Wilcox Chargers on their newly resurfaced track. While the weather had been warm to hot all week, the temperature had dropped a bit and in Santa Clara there was a very strong wind–very distasteful to any athlete that needed to circle the track in their event, and also actually cold by the end of the night.
The varsity girls 4×100 team of Melannie Ooi, Vivian Cheng, Sammi Dunn and Agnes Wang got the day off to a strong start by holding off a charging Charger team by a mere six one hundredth of a second–55.90 to 55.96! That competitive start seemed to set a nice tone for our team all day.
In the 1600, Nikhita Saldi and Jannah Sheriff took two of the top three spots while Rohun Agrawal ran off with a more than 20 second win in the 1600m; Rohun would report that the wind was brutal although he came back and set a new PR in the 800m. Zoe Wang and Sotirios Kougiouris chipped in high hurdle victories, while Sydney Stevens was waiting to pounce with a fast 800 to partner with Nikhita to give Monta Vista a 1-2 finish in the 800m. In the JV girls, Valerie Ayzenberg and Lillian Wang both ran the 800 for the first time ever in high school and both had strong sub-3 minute marks. Zoe backed up her 100m hurdle win with another triumph in the 300m hurdles, Sylvana Northrop and Ellie Hsu went 1-2 in the 3200m, and while Andrew Cole and Justin Yu could not track down the Wilcox winner in the boys 3200m, that spirited race was one of the best of the afternoon. Juniors Andrew and Justin ran good strategic and competitive strategies and almost pulled off the win!
In field events, Zoe leaped to wins in both the triple and long jumps, giving her 20 points on her own for the meet. Brandon Xu gave the boys a victory in the long and almost pulled off the triple, Eric Zheng, Sammy Banerjee and Henry Hodgkins combined to give MVTF four of the six possible scoring spots in the throws, while newcomer freshman Alice Ross continues to impress, not only by her throws but also with the purple hair dye.
In team scoring, MVTF came home with victories in the varsity girls, JV girls, and frosh-soph boys while absorbing a loss in the varsity boys division, making the team 4-4 for the season overall.
Personal records were made by: Jonathan, Parky, Adrian, Denny, Alex, Rohun, Andrew C, Ethan Lu, Max, Ari, Amogh, Rahul, Vincent Fu, Sammy, Yvonne, Anika, Agnes, Melannie, Ryland, Meena, Nerea, Megan, Insiah, Trisha, Diya, and Preetal. Well done, everyone! Continued improvement matters.
Complete results are posted on athletic.net.
RustBuster Relays
They thought that RustBuster 2021 was dead when MVTF was not allowed to bring in our usual dozen guest teams…we were limited to inviting one other squad. But as that great philosopher John Blutarsky once said, “it’s over when we say it’s over!” We had medals, we had a track, we had athletes. So Monta Vista got in touch with Los Altos, had a quick conversation, and decided to try a bunch of events we don’t always get to run.
On the track, we decided to hold four relay races: Two for the distance crowd (4x1600m) and two for the sprinters (800m sprint medley and a 4x200m). For the field event folks, we offered discus and shot (including a co-ed shot ‘relay’ with two girls and two boys throws being added together), and long and triple jump. Our timer Hank Lawson was able to get accurate splits for the distance legs too. For some extra spice, we had a co-ed throwers 4x100m with boy and girl throwers teaming up to get a baton around the track. And for the more versatile and open-minded athletes that were looking for a challenge, we offered a ‘pentathlon’–each athlete would compete in the 100m, shot, long jump, high jump and the 400m. This combination of events is the same as the first day of the men’s decathlon, and we used the USATF dec tables to score the Rustbuster pent.
Full results have been posted on athletic.net. Many athletes used this meet and format to set some new personal records, including Rohun (who pushed his 800m PR down to 2:02, another six seconds or so from the PR he had set just two days earlier), Justin Yu, Pranav Reddy and Sean Basu (all in the 800), Rohun and Pranav in the 1600m ALSO (that’s pretty cool to PR in the 8 and 16 on the same day), Nick Hsieh in the shot, Sylvana Northrop, Nikhita Saldi, Valerie Ayzenberg (improving on a mark set two days before!), Upasana Dilip, Megan Nieh, Insiah Kizilbash in the 800, and Zoe Wang in the long jump. Also, huge shout outs to our pentathletes Sammi Dunn, Henry Hodgkins, Anika Manjesh, Hayden Selvakumar and Max Ready for being brave enough to tackle a brand new challenge…we hope you enjoyed the challenge…though we do not think anyone was too excited about completing an official decathlon (a full dec would require the athletes to come back the next day for the 110 hurdles, discus, javelin, pole vault with a 1500m to finish off the two day event).
Well done, everyone, and thank you to all the officials, judges and volunteers that made the day possible!
