Monta Vista went to Santa Clara to open our El Camino League season and got off to a smashing start!
Right off the first gun, MV started to surprise as the JV girls 4×100 relay team romped home in front of the Santa Clara varsity girls! That seemed to set a tone as freshman Anika Bhandarkar had a giant PR with her 5:49.22 in the 1600m while coming in first for the combined varsity-JV girls race. Anika lead a sweep by the JV girls of the 1600, along with Margaux Francouer and Madi Polidoro, while Jannah Sheriff and sophomore Denny Dong sat on top of the two varsity 1600m races.
MVTF’s new hurdle coach, Laura Ryner, had to be happy with her squad as the hurdlers took 25 out of 36 possible points in the high hurdles races. Yvonne Chen earned the top spot and 5 points for the varsity girls, Neal Jain jumped in the 65 hurdles to team with Ethan Lu and Parv Jain to give the frosh-soph boys a needed 9 point sweep, while Raje Kenyan and Varsha Iyengar were a mere 0.04 seconds apart for the JV girls squad.
Valerie Ayzenberg and Hayden Selvakumar took the top spots in both varsity 400m races; Valerie doubled back later to take third in the 800 before she anchored a winning 4×400 relay squad! Maya Mizrahi won the 100m race for MVTF, while Clara Fan’s third place was part of a 16 point day for the freshman! Clara also won the high jump with a 4’10” personal record to go with triple jump and long jump firsts (I believe her 30′-7″ and 16′-7″ leaps were PRs, also). Katie Lee’s 13.74 bettered her season best, also, while Ryan Samin won the 100m race for the frosh-soph boys (reminder to everyone–let’s get our fastest runners in the first heat of sprint races–in dual meets, all scoring athletes must come from heat one so let’s not leave potential points on the track waiting to be picked up!).
The 800 was another strong event for MV as Denny doubled back to win the varsity boys race, Avani Kalari scored a win for the varsity girls and Madi won her first high school race with her 3:00.57 for the JV girls (under 3 minutes next time, Madi!). Valerie, Margaux, Andrew Cole and new hurdler/distance combo runner 🙂 Neal Jain also scored. The 300m hurdles saw Sotirios Kougouris and Ethan Lu take first place for MV, and Katie backed up her first in the 100 with a win in the JVG 200m. Vivian Lau, Ari Rajaram, Megan Nieh and Tanay Parikh gave MV a sweep of the top spots in the 3200m before the 4×400 relays, which saw wins for all the MV relay teams.
Field events saw strong MV performances also! Austin Hwang, high jumping for the first time in competition, cleared 4’6″ to give the varsity boys 3 points, while Irene Tian, another basketball athlete turned jumper, cleared 3’8″ to give the JV girls 5 more points. Hemani Kamarshi got her first clearance in competition to add 3 more points. Austin added a second place leap in the long jump while Joey Suresh and yet another basketball/track athlete, Trevor Chan, won the JV and FS long jump events for MV. Darren Lin, Irene, Lourdes Diaz, Vincent Zhao, Sophia Chen, Clara, Nishika Gorla and Reese Myers also were in the top three in horizontal jumps and scored for MV. In the throws, a strong group of girl throwers showed a lot of depth. Alice Ross eclipsed her 2021 shot put PR in her first competition of 2022, tossing 29’1″ to beat last year’s mark by more than 2 feel, while her 90′-3″ discus toss was less than two feet shy of her freshman mark. Lavinia Lei did that one better, with PRs in both shot and discus while taking a second and a third for the varsity girls. New thrower Jacob Kunnankunni gave MV a third in the shot and a second in the discus, four points for the varsity squad.
Monta Vista won team victories for the varsity girls, junior varsity girls and frosh-soph boys, while the varsity boys took a narrow 69-57 loss. Complete results are posted. Agnes Wang also posted photos.
Monta Vista will have some athletes at St. Francis this Saturday, and the full squad will return to action on Thursday, March 24, as we host the Wilcox Chargers on our home track.
