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The Mt. SAC Invitational is a peek at CIF. Remember that the Mt. SAC course is the site of the two CIF Southern Section contests. And this Invitational attracts most of the teams that will be in the race for the championship. We will take a look at the teams at the varsity levels. Keep in mind that there will be dark horses that will not be on our radar screen. The beauty of this Invitational is that the dark horses who run well on this tough course will pop out on Friday. Let us start out with the girls.
Girls - It will take a lot of work the day after the race to figure out which teams actually floated to the top. Since many teams (including the Titans) split out their frosh & soph varsity runners into those frosh-specific and soph-specific races with the goal to win a cowbell (the prize for the winner of each race). The Titans have Olivia Harrigian going for the bell in the sophomore race and Alejandra Larriva-Latt in the frosh race. Joining Olivia in the soph race are varsity athletes Fiona Harrigian, Carlin Koch and Angela Wang. Throw in up-and-comer soph Sana Karimi and you have a strong SM team in that sophomore race. Could be a winner. But, the bigger take-away from the Invitational will be the performance of the virtual varsity squad against the virtual varsity squads of the other CIF division 4 contenders. Every single school in PrepCalTrack’s top 13 ranking for division 4 are running at the Invitational. Coach Mundo has opted to enter our junior and senior girls in the “varsity sub-sweepstakes” race rather than the big sweepstakes race, where most of our competitors are running. We’re speculating that the reason behind this is our soph-heavy roster. What it will do is allow us to see how all the major names do in the sweepstakes race against each other and then figure out, based upon finish times, how SM would have done in that race. But, we’ll have to pull the frosh & soph runners on those teams to make sure that they ran the sweepstakes race with their varsity teammates. This will clearly be a strong indicator of our CIF prospects.
Men - Two key schools in PrepCalTrack’s top 13 division 4 teams will not be at Mt. SAC this Friday. #2 Morro Bay and #6 Santa Ynez have chosen to look the other way. There are 3 varsity races at the Invitational this Friday. Our guys are in the least competitive of the three, although #3 Laguna Beach is in our race. Unlike the girls’ sophomore-heavy team, the men are junior- and senior-heavy so their varsity race is a true reflection of their prospects at CIF. The only varsity runner in another contest is sophomore Michael Mundo. If the other 10 teams run their top underclassmen in the varsity race, we’ll be able to tell immediately after the sweepstakes race how our guys match up in CIF.
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