The indoor track team started off their season with strong showings from their upperclassmen Dec. 5 at the first MCPS meet of the season. The meet was against every other team from MCPS, with the exception of the Thomas Edison High School of Technology.

This meet, by design, didn’t crown a specific winner. The Vikes placed in the top 20 eleven times in the meet.

The team’s best event was the women’s 800m, where five runners finished in the top 20, led by junior Breanna McDonald, who finished fourth. McDonald also finished 2nd in the women’s 1600m. Sophomore Alicia Lauwers, one of the top women’s runners from the cross country team, finished sixth in the 1600m.

Junior Justin Carboni and senior Josh Engels led the boys side on Tuesday. Carboni finished seventh in the men’s 55m sprint, as well as fifth in the men’s 300m. Engels finished 18th in the men’s 800m and seventh in the men’s 1600m.

Coach Stephen Hays expected these kind of results for the first meet, saying that the team even exceeded his expectations.

“The first meet of the year is always sort of a baseline,” Hays said. “If you look at it from where we were last year to this year, we’re ahead of the game.”

A number of the runners had personal bests at the meet, junior Julia Johnson said. A number of people returned from injuries, including Engels, who had high hopes for the cross country season, but had a femoral stress fracture which sidelined him from the whole season. Unfortunately, the injury returned during the meet and Engels can’t run again for a minimum of two weeks.

The team has a periodization plan where, from November until May, each event group focuses on a different aspect of their race.

“Maybe in the beginning for let’s say sprinters, we’re mostly working on strength and general fitness,” Hays said. “But at the end, we’re mostly working on speed.”

The team lost a number of talented seniors from last year, including Emma Liles, Michael Gorman and Dylan Madden, who are all running in college. Hays doesn’t feel like it’ll have large effect on the team this season.

“It doesn’t change who we are as a team,” Hays said. “We’re trying to get better as a team and do the best we can.”

Hays feels like this season is no different than any other, and expects the team to perform just as well as any other group.

“Our goal is always the same every year, just to keep getting better,” Hays said. “It’s one of the sports where it’s easy to tell if you’ve gotten better, you just look at the watch or the tape measure.”