El Camino League Finals Recap

It’s hard to pick out highlights out of many strong performances.  One highlight was watching Andy Ma win the varsity boys’ 800 meter race, prevailing in a strong battle by less than half a second.  Andy’s 800 time was an amazing 10 second improvement over the prior year!   I often see Andy stay after practice by himself to do extra core work, something that is tedious and not too fun and yet critical for long term improvement in distance running.  Andy’s work definitely paid off.

Sarah Feng, one of only two freshmen that were bumped up to varsity for this meet, executed her race plan perfectly to win the varsity girls’ 3200m race.  Sarah was right in the range of our plan on almost every lap.    Sarah, Namrata and Paru all medaled in the 3200m and qualified for the SCVAL championship meet.

Several other athletes had standout meets.  Freshman Evelyn How was part of four event wins in the junior varsity division, as she was part of winning 4×100 and 4×400 relay teams and taking individual championships in both the 100m and 200m races.  Freshman Derek Zheng matched her 40 point total with frosh-soph division  individual wins in the long jump and triple jump and the 65m hurdles and well as running a very strong opening leg of the record-setting 4x400m relay team.  Claire Chang was right with them, winning the JV girls 3200m and 1600m and coming back to run a leg in the winning 4×400 team, and Alisha Gao who ran 4×100 and 4×400 legs, won the 400m and took second with Evelyn in the 200m also.