On Tuesday, March 12, the Monta Vista track and field team unloaded at Fremont High School for a dual meet with a wind howling down the home stretch of the track. Every sprinter started salivating and headed over to Coach John McKeeman: “Coach, I’m running the 100 today, right?????”
This was a day for speed!
The Monta Vista varsity girls’ 4x100m relay team set a tone when the first gun was fired, recording a 50.92 in the first event of the day. Not only was this our quickest mark of the season and 5 points for our squad, 50.92 is the 6th best 4×100 time run in the Central Coast Section this year! More quick marks would follow.
The Monta Vista varsity girls took control early, following the 4×100 win with 1-2-3 events sweeps in the 1600, 100, 800 and 200m distances. In the 1600m, Sylvana Northrop and Triya Roy got separation from the pack early and lead wire-to-wire and came in within a quarter second of each other at 5:31.13 and 5:31.38. Evelyn How and Bianca Young’s (wind-aided) 12.54 and 12.65 marks in the 100m put them 2nd and 4th in the 2019 CCS season rankings, while in the 200m Bianca and Brooke Young took advantage of a 6.9 hurricane to notch the 1st and 4th best times in CCS this year. In the 800m, Monta Vista hogged the first five spots with Triya, freshman Vivian Lau, Lauren Ling, Anjali Thontakudi and Vivian Cheng rolling through that race. Field eventers were lead by Jessica Ji’s 13 points from the three jumps as the varsity girls rolled to a 90-37 victory.
The varsity boys found themselves locked in a tougher battle. After a 9-0 sweep of the 1600m featuring Nitin Subramanian doing a spot-on Matt Centrowitz impression with his kick to the finish, the boys started trading a lot of split decisions (Conner Hsu and Sean Chen battling for 2nd and 3rd to give MV four points in the 110 and 300 hurdles, Nitin and Alex Richardson taking 1-3 in the 800 for six points, Arnav Raut and Pranav Pata’s 2-3 in the 200m for another four). While any track victory is a team effort, it could be argued that our field eventers were decisive, as Arnav and Pranav along with Brandon Xu engineered 1-2 finishes in the long and triple jumps along with Martin Xiao’s victories in shot and discus along with Ashwyn Asthana’s discus second to give 30 of MV’s 65 points in a tight 65-62 win.
The frosh-soph boys’ meet came down to the final event. After a back and forth competition, where the only event sweep for either side was the shot put with Eric ‘EZ’ Zheng, Henry Hodgkins and Sammy Banerjee give Monta Vista a clean nine points, the teams entered the final event with MV leading Fremont 56-53 (though we did not actually know this at the time!). With five points on the line in the 4x400m relay, the winning relay team would bring home the team victory. A group of distance boys put together a relay team at the last moment, including Andrew Cole who had moments before finished third in the 3200m. With their 4:20.78 clocking the boys saved the victory for Monta Vista, 61-53! The JV girls fell to Fremont, but don’t neglect highlights that included Andie Liu’s 200 victory and 30.44 PR along with one-two finishes in the 1600 (Rachel Jiang and Upasana Dilip) and 800 (Ananya Rajagopal and Upasana).
Like last week, one of the most notable things about the Fremont meet was the willingness of Monta Vista athletes to try new events and seek ways to help the team. Vivian Cheng and Ananya Rajagopal ran the 800m for the first time, taking a fifth and a first with nice times in the 2:40s. Sylvia Li hurdled for the first time, taking a second place in the 300m and adding three points for MV, and Nicole Raphael threw a shot and and a discus for the first time and took a couple of third place points. And remember the frosh-soph 4×4 boys putting together a team right at the last moment to help out that squad. This team spirit is so important, and infectious!
A partial list of personal records from the Fremont meet include: Manu Kondapaneni, Khang Pham, Ethan Crofut, Tim Chen, Sarang Despande, Kevin Kim, Ricky Schoeber, Daiwik Swaminathan, Jet Chow, Sammi Dunn, Yana Padke, Hinato Sato, Natsumi Arita, Arushi and Avishi Agastwar (all in the hurricane 100), Arnav, Peter Heydinger, Pranav, Ethan, Akshay Gopalkrishnan, Guna Vengalsetti, Tim, Ricky, Kevin, Melannie Ooi, Andie Liu, Vibha, Yana (all in the tornado 200), Melannie (400), Sahil Goel, Rohun Agrawal, Eric Wang, Rachel Jiang (in the 800–what a day to get a PR in this race), Sylvana Northrop, Upasana Dilip (1600), Tyler Liu, Christian Dulay, Sri Ananta, Elisabeth Hsu (3200), Conner Hsu, Sotirios Kougiouris (300h), Eric Zheng, Sammy Bannerjee, Nick Hsieh, Aravind Subramanian, Anoushka Laksmi (Shot), Eric, Henry Hodgekins, Ash, Aravind (discus), Arnav, Pranav, Guna, Natsumi Arita (long jump). That’s a great list on a very windy day!
I hope that many of you said something nice to the coaches and volunteers from Fremont, especially head coach Mark Shields; they ran a great meet, less than three hours long. And all my thanks to every Monta Vista athlete who moved a hurdle–you guys did such a good job, and your efforts were noticed by everyone! You make coaches proud.
Complete results are posted on Lynbrook sports. Updated and unofficial league standings are here.
Next up is an invitational event this Saturday at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, and on Thursday, March 21, Monta Vista will host both Saratoga and Cupertino for a triangle meet.
