Comet T&F state-qualifiers take familiar flight paths to Des Moines

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

CLEAR LAKE — Like migrating birds you can almost set your calendar to, Charles City is once again sending a group of frequent-flier jumpers to soar at next week’s State Track and Field Championships.

They’ll be taking off and landing soon.

For Comet senior Keely Collins, it will be her eighth trip down to the Blue Oval at Drake University. Yeah, eight — four times as a Drake Relays qualifier and four times as a state qualifier as she assured her trip early into Thursday’s Class 3A State-Qualifier at Clear Lake.

Having already won the girls high jump, Collins was attempting to match her personal- and school-record when the bar was set at 5 feet, 7 inches.

She would have likely gone higher had she not scratched three times at that height. Collins has only one more meet — state — before her T&F career is over as she plans to only play volleyball at (ironically) Drake University her next school year and probably wants to add a few inches to her school record.

She may need to if she wants to stay on the leaderboard much longer because an upstart Comet is rising fast.

“If she ends up breaking or not, I don’t care,” Keely said of her freshman sister Edie Collins, who also qualified for state in the girls HJ with a personal-record height of 5 feet, 2 inches. “I’m just glad we’re going down together.”

Though Keely and Edie didn’t break any school HJ records at Clear Lake, they were part of the Comets’ winning shuttle hurdle relay with senior Lauren Staudt and Sophia Calpito that broke a school record with a time of 1 minute, 6.37 seconds — a whole second better than their previous PR and about .85th of a second better than the previous school record Brianna Carey, Taylor Schmidt, Lynn Hoeft and Sadie Ruzicka set in 2017.

Charles City senior and defending Class 3A boys long jump champion Josiah Cunnings also advanced to state in multiple events. First, he won the LJ with a flight of 22 feet, even. And then later he was the anchor leg in the boys 4-by-400 relay which didn’t disappoint in another Comet tradition — finishing a long meet with an exciting climax.

After three legs including in order junior Xander Graeser, senior Keenan Wiley and junior Nick Williams, Cunnings was in third place like he was last week during the end of the Northeast Iowa Conference Meet. Then, Cunnings’s late surge came up a split-second short in catching Waverly-Shell Rock at the finish line.

This time Cunnings and company were not going to be denied as their winning time of 3:27.26 ahead of runner-up Decorah (3:27.65) was a squad record this season.

Other automatic qualifiers by finishing in the top two included Calpito, who finished second in both the girls long jump (16 feet, 3 inches) and in the girls 100 hurdles (15.90 seconds — a PR); and Staudt in the girls 400 hurdles as she overtook two hurdlers after the third turn and placed second with a time of 1:09.97 seconds.

The Comets may take on some more passengers to Des Moines with some outside the top two possibly making the state cut with times placing them among the Top 24 in the state when matched against other Class 3A SQ times.

The Comet girls 4-by-100 relay team of Edie Collins, Emerson Bohlen, Madison Lensing and Destiny Kolheim recorded a third-place time of 51.46 seconds that may punch their ticket.

Charles City’s boys distance medley relay team of John Bruening, Wiley, Cunnings and Graeser recorded at season-best squad time of 3:38.75 that was less than a second slower than runner-up Humboldt (3:38.23) and winner Algona (3:38.07) in a race that had some fans comparing it to the most-recent “instant classic” Kentucky Derby.