I’m going to start out with an admission–I am not going to mention all the athletes that recorded personal records (PRs) in the competition against Santa Clara and Fremont. Not because I don’t want to! This is because Monta Vista track & field athletes recorded 96–ninety-six!–PRs in one meet. Holy smokes! That is great work by a bunch of fit athletes that have been working hard…however that also makes it hard for your faithful track blogger to mention every one! 🙂
Santa Clara and Fremont came to Monta Vista on Thursday, April 5 for a double-dual meet. Both SC and Fremont were matched against Monta Vista, and while three teams competed, the teams were scored against each other separately.
The meet started off on a speedy trend with the varsity girls’ 4x100m relay, with Nanda Nayak, Alisha Gao, and Brooke and Bianca Young laying down a sparkling 50.25 mark, the team’s season best and good for 8th in CCS and the best in ECAL! This is another step forward for our talented relay teams.
The 1600m races showed track fans that this would be a competitive meet, as Kingsley Wang, Aravind Meyyappan (with a 4:48PR), and Jason Tsujimoto finished 2-3-4 for the Varsity boys; Rohun Agrawal and Andrew Richardson went 1-2 for the Frosh-Soph boys while both scoring PRs (5:04 and 5:06); Sarah Feng, Sanjana Borle (5:30PR) and Claire Chang took 2nd, 4th and 5th; while freshman Sylvana Northrop won the JV girls race. Monta Vista was outscoring our visitors overall, but Santa Clara and Fremont were not going away.
The middle of the meet saw another slew of PRs set. In the hurdles, Ben Tang (PR), Sean Chen and Conner Hsu swept the 65m for the FS boys, while Zoe Wang had a 17.71 PR while taking second for the varsity girls. Grace Luo, Matt Gong and Jeremy Tien also set hurdle PRs on Thursday. Bianca Young is knocking on the door of the magic 60 mark in the 400m, pushing her PR to 60.25 while giving MV a win, and Vivian Cheng and Ananya Rajagopal also recorded PRs in the 400m. Freshman Vishal Koppuru also had a 55.21 PR while winning the FS 400. The Frosh-Soph boy sprinters continued this speedy streak as Pranav Pata had a 12.01 PR while winning the 100, with Henry Lassa and Albert Xu also having PR days will finishing 5-6. Triya Roy got under 2:30 in the 800m for the first time while winning the 800m for MV, and Peter Heydinger also PRed with a second place finish.
Over in the field events, more battles were going on. In the Frosh-Soph boys’ shot, Micheal Pavlik and Henry Hodgkins lead a PR-fest with 39’1.5″ and 37’11.25″ throws for a 1-2 finish. The frosh-soph boy long jumpers swept the first five places (!!!) with Albert, Sarang Deshpande, Brandon Xu, Arnav Raut and Khang Pham all over 16′. Cynthia Gong also had a PR in the long jump while giving Monta Vista a 4th in varsity. Jasmine Lee won the JV girls triple jump and the FS boys (Sarang, Arnav and Brandon) had another 1-2-3 sweep of all the points in the FS division. Back in the throws, Michael, Mutharavind Subramanian and Henry all set PRs while finishing 1-2-3 in the FS discus.
The back end of the track events included another series of PRs, including: Eliot Lubomirsky, Morris Chiang, Henry Lassa, Manu Kondapaneni, Bianca, Nanda, Kelli Kosakura, Jackie Chang, Melannie Ooi, Sneha Maiti and Ananya in the 200m; Zoe, Grace, Ben and Conner in the 300m hurdles; and in the 3200m, Derek Lee, Brian Huang, Piyush Masurkar, Sri Ananta Rachel Jiang, Claire Lin and Lauren Ling’s monster PR of 12:25–a 45 second improvement over her previous best mark!
We wrapped up a pair of solid season bests from our 4x400m teams, a 3:35.83 from our boys and a 4:15.52 from the varsity girls. The varsity girls are now ranked 11th in CCS as I finish up this post! Both teams are positioning themselves well for a deep post-season run.
The team performance was solid, and an agonizing few points from being great. The varsity boys split on the day with a win over Fremont and a loss to Santa Clara, the frosh-soph boys remained undefeated with a 4-0 league record after sweeping both teams, the JV girls had a split after routing Santa Clara but enduring a narrow loss to Fremont, and the varsity girls had an agonizing tie–a tie!–with Fremont and a narrow loss to Santa Clara. Sometimes it is true what coaches say–every point can count. While we finished a nice day 4-3-1, couple more second place finishes and we could have been 6-2! Team, we are really getting to a high point as a group.
I count 96 individual personal records set in that one track meet! That is an incredible number. I have no idea if this is an all-time school record but I have to imagine that this meet is high up on any list. The performances by all of you are a tribute to all your hard work this season, both as a group and individually. Congratulations–your coaches are proud of you, and you are doing fine work!
Complete results are posted for the scoring with Fremont and Santa Clara dual meets.
Mr. Ma has posted photographs on Flickr.
50th Pacific Grove Invitational
Looking for a chance to capture some of that great XC magic in the middle of track season, nine distance runners headed to the Coast to compete in the 50th Annual Pacific Grove Invitational. The Pac Grove Invite is a full track invitational, however the MVTF plan was to compete only in the 3200m. So we met at Monta Vista at 11am, drove down to PGHS, checked in, watched the 800s, warmed up and started racing around 2:00.
The girls went first and put in a dominating performance…Claire, Sarah, Triya, Sanjana and Sylvana went out and put on a XC-pack running clinic, with multiple girls taking turns pushing the pace. Half way through the race, the competition was pretty disheartened, and the MVTF ladies ended up finishing 1-2-3-4-5; conveniently, five medals were awarded! Meanwhile, Upasana Dilip was back winning the frosh-soph division in her first try at this distance. Following that powerful demonstration, Jason, Sid and Rohun continued the parade with three PRs and three more medals.
The final total–nine athletes, nine medals, seven PRs and a re-written league leader board; five of the top ten times in the El Camino League as of April 8 have been put up by Monta Vista girls.
Complete meet results have been posted on athletic.net.
Next up is a dual meet at Cupertino High School at 3:30 on Thursday, April 12; followed by the Serra Top 7 Invitational at Serra High School on Saturday, April 14.
