Kentridge’s Tyler Cronk is ready to climb even higher this track and field season.<\/p>\n
The 6-foot-8 senior – the state’s defending 4A champion and school record holder at 7 feet, 2 inches in the high jump – already has cleared 7 feet in two meets this season, even coming close to mastering 7-4. His mark of 7-2, set last May in the West Central District meet, remains the third-best effort nationally among returning high school athletes.<\/p>\n
Cronk has entered the heralded Arcadia (Calif.) Invitational on Saturday, April 7, which will bring together the top three high jumpers in the nation.<\/p>\n
“There’s a very good chance,” according to Kentridge coach Al Waltner, that Cronk could beat the state’s all-time best mark of 7-4½ set by Franklin’s Rick Noji in 1984.<\/p>\n
Cronk, who also played basketball for the Chargers, first tried high jumping in middle school but took his freshman year off to focus on school.<\/p>\n
“My sophomore year, I was like I am going do track because my grades were better,” he said. “I just went straight to high jump. I started jumping 6 feet. I was like ‘OK, I’ve grown since eighth grade.’”<\/p>\n
Cronk’s height gives him an advantage, Waltner said.<\/p>\n
“There’s other people who high jump, but they aren’t going to be 7-foot high jumpers,” Waltner said. “He has the build of a high jumper. … You don’t get an athlete with that kind of talent and all the right pieces. Those don’t come around that often.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Senior invited to compete at national meet <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":33784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33783"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}