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Wednesday, April 6,  Monta Vista Was at Cupertino for our fifth dual meet of the season (counting our tri-meet as two).  The Monta Vista varsity girls recorded their first league win of the season!  Our field events were particularly strong including sweeps in both the triple and long jump, with Giselle Kaneda and Jessica Ji recording wins with freshmen Cynthia Gong and Reema Apte filling out the scoring.  Jessica, Cynthia and Reema are all freshman that moved up to varsity for this meet and made a big difference.  Another big assist in the field events was senior Aarohi Palkar in the throws, she won the shot put with a personal record throw of 27’10”.  Aarohi is a hard and consistent worker and her shot throws have improved this year with a PR almost every week.  Monta Vista took first with three different young women in the distance races (800, 1600, 3200) including sweeps of both the 1600 and 3200m distance races.   The 3200 was particularly impressive with junior Kelly Bishop, senior Namrata Sunramanian and freshman Claire Chang all going under 12 minutes; you don’t see that often in a dual meet.  All three times are in the top 10 for the El Camino league so far this year and Monta Vista ladies now have 8 of the top 10 times in the league this year!  The varsity girls team is now 1-4 in the year.
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Current Top 10 3200m Times in El Camino League
Monta Vista’s junior varsity girls are now 5-0; but Cupertino does not have a JV team so that win is not something we should be too excited about.  What we should be excited about is the Wilcox meet in two weeks as our young ladies go for a perfect 6-0 league record!

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The varsity boys went down in defeat but represented themselves well.  Cupertino is strong in sprints, hurdles and field events and Monta Vista found points hard to come by but we still had bright spots with senior James Migdal clearing 6′ again to win the high jump and senior Namir Hassan winning the shot.  James is another hard worker who has made a nice breakthrough and is now jumping 6’0″ consistently; its great to see him make this nice bump his senior year to consistently jump higher than he is tall!  MV’s other wins came from Brent Mogensen in the 800, leading our only varsity boys event sweep of the day, and Bennett Zhang in the 3200.  Another notable runner is senior Vamsee Vemulapalli; he took 3rd in both the 400 and 800 and has had steadily improving times all year.  Until this year Vamsee was a tennis player in the spring, this is his first year running track; there are probably other potential track stars out there waiting to be discovered.
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Our Frosh Soph boys had the closest match up of the day, and they had to work hard to pull out a narrow 66-57 win.  This really was a close contest with both teams showing strength in different events.  Frosh Derek Zhang was a triple winner (65 hurdles, long jump and triple jump) and soph Eliot Lubomirsky a double winner (200 and 400), and both were part of the winning 4×400 relay along with Derek and Akshay.   The teams were evenly matched and the win was determined by the winner-take-all 4x400m relay.  What a finish!  It’s too bad we didn’t have the scoring at the time to know that the winner of the 4×4 would win the meet, we would have gone nuts!  Other winners included double winner Andy fang (800 and 1600), Jeffrey Xu (3200; Jeffrey’s older sister is a freshman runner at MIT by the way), and Ryan Ma in the high jump.  Like the JV girls, the FS boys are now 5-0 with Wilcox waiting in two weeks.

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I hope everyone is working hard this week!  Wilcox is less than a week away!
(I miss you all…see you soon!)