The Falcons hosted a dual meet with the Milpitas Trojans on March 21. Overall, according to boys’ long distance coach Dan Ambrico, the meet exhibited significant improvement by the team.
“We’ve improved every dual meet this year so far,” Ambrico said. “At our Mountain View meet [on March 14] , we ran stronger than against Palo Alto [on March 7] and at our Milpitas meet, we ran stronger than against Mountain View.”
The Falcon 4×400 meter relay team won comfortably against their Trojan counterparts. The team consisted of juniors Will Guy and Travis Stokes and seniors Aasim Naqvi and David Zarrin. Sophomore Steven Sum also won the two-mile run.
Though the coach was pleased with the improvement of the team, athletes agreed that the races against Milpitas were tough.
“It was pretty hard [since] they have a massive team, around 200 people,” distance runner senior Sujay Khandekar said. “They basically loaded up every single event so it was really hard for us.”
It was a definite improvement from the previous meet with Palo Alto. The only notable wins in the meet with the Vikings were senior Aasim Naqvi’s comfortable victory in the 800 meter and Steven Sum’s in the 3200 meter.
“Compared to Paly, where we lost almost every single event, I think we did a lot better [against Mountain View],” he said.
The team is approximately halfway through the season, and Coach Ambrico has already chosen some positive highlights so far. The most significant wins during the season to him included juniors Drew Bryan’s and Daniel Johnston’s two-mile races at the St. Francis meet on March 14th, in which they ran personal records by 20 seconds in the low 10:30’s.
Ambrico named specific talent that would help the team significantly in the second half of the season.
“We’re strong in the 800 meter event with Aasim Naqvi, our senior,” he said. “He’s been excellent this year.”
He also commended Sum’s efforts thus far.
“In most of our meets, Steven is one of the top runners in CCS in both the mile and the two-mile,” Ambrico said. “He consistently scores points for the team every meet.”
He has also set important goals for the upcoming meets and CCS.
“We should continue to perform well in the dual meets and continue to get as many people qualified for the top eight meet later this year, [as well as] for CCS at the end of the year,” he said.
The teams met Los Altos on April 4, and will compete away from home against both Gunn on April 11 and Lynbrook on April 17 to round out the rest of the season.