A championship is forever!
The Monta Vista Varsity girls’ track and field team wrapped up a perfect 6-0 league season with a 76-45 victory over the host Santa Clara team on Thursday, April 3. The win was paced by some of the season-long strengths of the team, as Monta Vista swept the 200m (Brooke Young, Bianca Young and Evelyn How), the 800m and 1600m (Sylvana Northrop, Triya Roy and Jannah Sheriff in both events), and the triple jump (Zoe Wang, Reema Apte and Jessica Ji). With the regular season championship in hand, the girls will be aiming for a strong performance in the league championships after Spring Break, with league trials on Wednesday, April 24 and finals on Friday, April 26.
For the graduating senior girls, this season is a fitting bookend to 2016. In their freshman year, the class of 2019 also had an undefeated junior varsity season!
While the varsity girls wear a championship crown, this is truly a victory for the entire team–girls of all levels and the boys also. The Monta Vista track and field team trains and competes as a group, boys and girls. Strong effort and dedication by each member of the helps develop team spirit that pushes everyone to high levels of achievement. You can be the slowest athlete on a team, but if you are working as hard as you can you push and inspire everyone around you to work harder. Whether you are a varsity girl or not, whether you scored a single point all season or not, if you worked hard this season and tried to be the best athlete and the best teammate you can be, you earned a piece of this championship–all 103 members of the Monta Vista team played a part in this achievement.
While the girls stole the headlines on Wednesday, the boys showed that they could be shining soon. Two freshman middle distance runners (Sahil Goel and Justin Yu) had the fastest 1600m times at any level on Wednesday, junior Martin Xiao won varsity discus and shot while MVTF boys swept the top three frosh-soph spots for both shot and discus, Sotirios Kougiouris took both frosh-soph hurdle races to go along with sophomore Andrew Richardson’s win in the varsity 800 as junior Nitin Subramanian did the same in the 3200. The boys are looking solid for this post season and 2020, too!
Across the team, athletes demonstrated that MVTF19 is rounding into post-season form. A series of PRs were achieved by: a healthy Derek Zheng in the 100, Manu Kondapaneni, Akshay Gopalkrishnan, Andrew Richardson (with an assist from Arnav Raut), Tyler Liu, Justin Yu, Eric Wang, Nicholas Hsieh, Sammy Banerjee, Ryan Guo, Eric Zheng, Sarang Deshpande, Samantha Dunn, Andie Liu, Sylvana Northrop, Triya Roy, Claire Lin, Ellie Hsu, Upasana Dilip, Zoe Wang, and Vibha Iyengar.
Complete results are posted.
Next up for MVTF is a short drive to Leland High School for the Quicksilver Invitational on Saturday, April 6; we have a big group competing. Top 8 will be the following Saturday, April 13 at the start of Spring Break, followed by the start of our post-season competition.
