Menlo School’s boys’ 4x1600 relay team of juniors Will Hauser, Landon Pretre and Jared Saal and freshman Henry Hauser took second place Friday night at the 46th Annual Mt. Sac Relays, a nationally-renowned event at Hillmer Lodge in Walnut.

Despite missing two graduated seniors from its relay from last year’s team, the Knights repeated last year’s second-place finish. The team finished in 17:34.64, just behind Ventura in 17:23.17. Menlo was the only team to return to the top 5.

“They all raced their legs well tonight,” Menlo coach Jorge Chen said. “I’m very proud of all four of them, and this is a great start for this quartet.”

Juniors Will Hauser and Landon Pretre return to the big stage after running with Justin Pretre, now racing for Cal and Aiden Deffner, now running for Johns Hopkins. This year’s race was similarly impressive as Saal and Henry Hauser are longtime runners but relative newcomers to track.

“By the time we were going into this race last year, we had already had a couple big relays under our belt, and knew what we had to do,” Will Hauser said. “This was our first big relay of the year, and so we just went into it with the goal to race as well as we could.”

Knights track and field next competes at the WBAL Trials April 30 at Gunn.

Courtesy Photo: Menlo’s 4x1600 team, from left, Will Hauser, Landon Pretre, Henry Hauser and Jared Saal.