FREDONIA — Razor-thin margins were common Thursday as several Humboldt High track and field athletes punched their tickets to state.
Humboldt’s Peyton Wallace and Mateo Miller led the Cub charge at Thursday’s Class 3A Regional Track Meet by qualifying in multiple events.
Wallace, a senior, will end his high school career at state in both the 3200- and 1600-meter runs. His time of 11 minutes, 21.8 seconds was good for third in the 3200. He took fourth in the 1600 with a mark of 5:01.00. Both times were personal records.
(The top four regional marks qualify for state).
Miller, meanwhile, will compete in Wichita next week at state in both the 110- and 300-meter hurdles races, having placed fourth in both at regionals.
He did so in dramatic fashion.
His 300 hurdles time of 44.55 seconds was .01 faster than Anderson County’s Danny Jungo.
But that paled in comparison to the skin-of-his-teeth finish in the 110 hurdles. Mateo finished in 17.026 seconds, or .002 — that’s two-thousandths of a second — ahead of Caney Valley’s Elijah Birk.
They’ll be joined by senior teammates Maddox Johnson, who placed third in the javelin at 163’2”, and Javyn Hess, who finished fourth in the 800-meter run with a personal-best time of 2:09.97.
On the girls side, Humboldt’s 4×800-meter relay team of Skylar Hottenstein, Anna Heisler, Ricklyn Hillmon and McKenna Jones nabbed a state bid by placing fourth at 11:00.15, their best mark of the season. They did so the hard way, starting in seventh after the first leg, bumping up to fifth by the time Heisler completed her run. Hillmon’s blistering leg pushed the squad into fourth, where Jones pulled away from the fifth-place Neodesha runner by a full 19 seconds.
The quartet missed a school record by 3 seconds, head coach Eric Carlson said.
THE THEME of the day was also Humboldt’s near-misses.
One day after helping pitch the Cub baseball team to a state playoff bid, senior Trey Sommer donned his track cleats and finished in fifth in the long jump in gut-wrenching fashion.
Sommer’s last jump of the day went a personal-best 20’1.75”, only to be eclipsed by a quarter of an inch by Fredonia’s Jeremiah Clounch for the fourth final state bid on Clounch’s last jump of the day.
Freshman Laney Hull also missed out on state bids in both the high jump and 110-meter hurdles by the slimmest of margins, taking fifth in both. Hull cleared 4’8” in the high jump, 2 inches below the fourth-place finisher, and finished the hurdles raced in 17.62 seconds, or .05 seconds behind Riverton’s Chloe Parker.
Johnson, meanwhile, found himself up against three of the top throwers in the state at any level in the shot put. His mark of 46’2” was good for sixth, a scant 2.5 inches out of the top four.
