A great day to race (and jump, and throw)

This past weekend, Monta Vista Track & Field sent 24 athletes to the Saint Francis Invitational in Mountain View. This is a really great track meet where we get some of our best competition all season – also, there’s a literal tree in the middle of the track, who does that?! Super cool! We’ll get into how our kids performed, and there certainly are some highlights, but first I want to talk a little bit about why we have invites. Invites are great for a lot of reasons; they typically have great competition and athletes from schools we won’t race very often, you can win medals (or t-shirts!), you get to spend your Saturdays with your lovely coaches, and you get to focus a bit more on yourself as an individual and try to progress in fewer specific events. A lot of coaches (at least for Monta Vista) see invites as the icing on cake – the extra sweetness that you don’t really need, but it makes the cake better overall. What we really, really find to be important is showing up to dual meets and winning those as a team, which means that many kids are full-up on their allotted number of events. This is all setting us up to go and win the league championship as a team. However, getting the opportunity to hone in on the one or two events that you really want to advance in is important as a track athlete, so the invites are those opportunities. It’s good that everyone understands that as we are about to embark on the second half of our season.

Oh look, cool pics (proof that the meet happened):

Girls Performances

The girls had 11 top ten finishes across Varsity and Frosh/Soph competitors! Leading the way was Clara Fan with 3 top ten finishes: 2nd in the triple jump behind an extremely talented Daniella Hughes from Los Altos, 3rd in the high jump, and 8th in the long jump. Our other top Varsity performers were Gillie Ross with a 4th place in the discus throw and 9th in the shot put, Dylan Hwang with 5th place in the long jump and 6th in the triple jump, and Anika Bhandarkar with 9th in the 1 mile run. For Frosh/Soph, Allie Rummelhoff led the way with a win (!!!) in the shot put and a 3rd place finish in the triple jump! Viha Gopalan also had a 10th place finish in the triple jump. Great job, ladies!

Boys Performances

The guys ended with 4 top ten finishes across both divisions! The biggest highlight was Ryan Shen‘s performance – he won the long jump with a new school record of 23’1″. This is a very serious jump, over 7 meters! He also took home third in the high jump, which tied the winning height but he happened to have more misses than the other boys. Our other top ten finishes were Eddie Fan and Adam Abdelrahman in the F/S discus throw, earning 9th and 10th places, respectively.

Our next meet is Wednesday, March 19th at 4:00pm at the Monta Vista track. It’s a home dual meet against Santa Clara high school! After that, we have the Firebird Relays Invite at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale on Saturday, March 21st (meet sheet coming soon).

9 PRs total!

6 Girls PRs

Anika Bhandarkar – 1 mile
Allie Rummelhoff – shot put
Clara Fan – shot put
Gillie Ross – discus throw
Allie Rummelhoff – triple jump
Viha Gopalan – triple jump

3 Boys PRs