Monta Vista is sending more athletes to State than ever before, after a historic race in the Central Coast Section Championships at Toro Park on November 15th!
In the girls’ D-I championship race, fans saw one of the great races in CCS history. Our girls set a new all-time Monta Vista team record at Toro Park, with a 96:36 clocking, improving on the 96:54 record set last month at Monterey Bay. This time was fourth on the all-time list at Toro Park for all schools, so in almost any other race in the last 25 years, our girls’ performance would have been a victory! However, this was a historic day, as two other teams also ran all-time top 10 times while setting school records of their own! At the end of the race, Monta Vista, Homestead and Gunn took 17 of the top 25 places in CCS, all set school records–and Monta Vista and Homestead go on to State, while Gunn stays home. The ability of our team to perform under pressure was tested, as even 20 seconds slower would have kept us home. This was a proud group of warrior women who should be remembered for years! Congratulations to Madeleine Yip, Anna Hsiao, Namrata Subramanian, Kelly Bishop, and particularly our seniors, Jenny Xu, Julia Chang and Christina Jennings.
The boys also recorded a great effort, with six of our seven runners recording personal records! Lead by Rohan Choudhury’s 16:02 mark, good for a 6th place medal and the second best time ever run at Toro by an MV athlete, our boys finished in 6th place for D-I and overall, were ranked 14th in all of CCS! The boys were only 41 points from qualifying for the State meet, so we are definitely on the upswing, where one more strong performance can get us to State! Rohan will be moving on as an individual this year, and our boys will be a team to watch for years to come. Congratulations on a great performance from Rohan, Akshay Thontakudi, Brent Mogensen, Vamsee Vemulapalli, Jake Bronstein, Andy Ma and Bennett Zhang.
Also by the way–a theoretical Co-Ed team from Monta Vista would have finished 3rd or 4th in CCS overall, depending on whether the girls and boys were scored 3-2 or 2-3. That’s a pretty good representation of the strength of both our boys and girls teams as a program! Maybe we should host a competition for Co-Ed teams!
What a great team, and we are not done yet. On to State on November 29!
Check out the photos and the results.
