Before we are too far into summer, I thought I’d do one last post on some of the wonderful accomplishments of our 2014 season! So, not in an particular order…
Monta Vista Records: All-time Monta Vista records were set both in the girls shot put and the girls 3200m distance! Emma Seyer’s 36′ 9.50″ toss in the CCS Finals broke the old record by more than two feet! In the 3200m, Bridget Gottlieb (who was admitted to Johns Hopkins University, where she was recruited to run for the defending NCAA XC champions) broke the former record at the adidas Meet of Champions, Jenny Xu broke that record at the SCVAL championships, and Bridget took the record back again at the CCS meet to highlight an incredible year for the MV distance runners!
MV Distance: Speaking of MV distance…this year the team had five girls go under 12 minutes in the 3200m (Bridget, Jenny, Kelly Bishop, Maddie Yip and Julia Chang)–just three years ago in 2011, when our current seniors were frosh, the best time on the team was 12:21! What an amazing improvement during the time these girls have come to Monta Vista. This was not only a year for the girls…Rohan Choudhury’s 9:33 in the 3200 was the first time since 2010 that a Monta Vista boy other than Kevin Bishop went under 10 minutes!
All-Time CCS Marks: Both Bridget Gottlieb and Jenny Xu’s 3200 meter times are 2 of the top 100 times all-time in the Central Coast Section records! With more than 130 schools, over more than 50 years of records, with thousands of girls having raced that distance, two girls on the same team are on the top 100 list–wow!
Big Meets: The biggest group of MV sectional qualifiers in years went to CCS, including Bridget, Jenny, Kelly, Maddie and Rohan in the 3200, Donald Swen in the hurdles, James Midgal, Neehar Kondapeneni and Sanjna Bharadwaj in the high jump, Emma and Kiersten Chuc in the throws, and Rochish Ambati, John Hsiao, Anand Rao, Albert Han, Sai Ranganathan, and Chatty Adiga in the relays. What a big group, it was great to see them all competing out there at CCS! We also saw our first girls go to the Arcadia Invitational in years, with Bridget Gottlieb in the 3200 and Jenny, Maddie, Julia and Paru Meyyappan in the 4x1600m relay. And let’s not forget Rohan’s win at Serra in the 3200–it’s not every day that we have a championship in an invitational!
Let’s not forget: One of the great training partnerships in MV history has graduated, with Emma and Kiersten heading off to college. These two girls formed a friendship and partnership that took them farther than they ever imagined. Through many, many hours of training and competing, they found so much inspiration from each other that lead to a school record for Emma, many medals for both of them, lots of points for our team, co-authoring the first article written by high school kids and published in Track Coach Magazine, and ultimately developing a love for the sport that will carry on past high school (Kiersten was recruited by the coaches at Carnegie-Mellon University and Emma will continue to throw at De Anza College). We will rarely see a pair of student-athletes like these two, anywhere!
Great memories to take into the summer with us!
