It’s been a big week for H
opkins boys’ track coach James Kiss. His Vikings last Monday won the O-K Silver Conference championship and they took Division 3 regional championship Friday at Kent City.
The Vikings scored 98 team points, six more than runner-up Grand Rapids West Catholic and 16 more than third-place Ravenna. There were 10 teams in all in the competition.
Perhaps as expected, Hopkins senior Quincy Collings won two individual regional championships. The defending state champion in the high jump at 6-9 a year ago, he was first in that event this year with a leap of 6-4. He also captured first place in the long jump at 21 feet, 5 inches, more than a foot further than the runner-up.
Joining Collings as a regional champ was Anthony Steffens, who crossed the finish line first in the 200-meter dash in 23.32 seconds.
Another Viking who snuck up on everybody was Jared Coad, who finished second in the open 800-meter run with his personal best time of 2:02.03. He was joined in that category by Michael Francis, who snared a second in the 100-meter hurdles with a time of 16.64 seconds, and Spencer Timm, who copped a second in the 100-meter dash with a time of 11.54 seconds.
Also taking second was the 800-meter relay team of Collings, Steffens, Wyatt Stegeman and Timm, which hit the tape at 1:33.98, less than seven-tenths of a second slower than the regional champion quartet from Ravenna. The 400 relay foursome of Collings, Nick Schoonveld, Steffens and Timm was second to Ravenna in 45.20 seconds.
But the biggest unexpected development of the day was a fourth-place finish by James McCann, who ran the 3200 run in 9:42 and qualified for the state meet.
