With this year’s Cinnaminson High School Winter Track team ready to compete in December, the team was striving to do their absolute best in the face of losing 18 seniors from the 45-person team from last season. While that may not seem like a big class to some schools, being the second-smallest group 2 team in the state made it difficult for the Pirates to rebuild after the loss of the outstanding group of seniors from last year.

Prior to the season beginning, Head Coach Charles Kind said “It is going to be somewhat of a rebuilding year due to the loss of 18 seniors.”

Some of the big point scorers that CHS lost were two outstanding 50-foot throwers in Mateus Medeiros and Frank Stepnowski, with the only returning 50-plus thrower being senior Kamron Kobolak with a personal best throw of 58’1″ from last spring.  Also looking to add depth will be seniors Justin Arnold and Max Adams, who will return from a very good distance team from last winter that tied Haddonfield for the school’s first-ever indoor sectional championship.  They will look to replace do-everything distance stud Mike Ungvarsky, who is now competing for Duke University.

The team will also not be able to replace their three pole vaulting stars in Christian Neuman, Pat Bearint and James Wood because they team will not field any pole vaulters this indoor season.  

Kind says, “We will be competitive at sectionals but we just don’t have the depth of the team especially on the boy side as we did last year.”

The loss of many good people of the team slows the team down and is tough to recover from, but that is okay because “with every good small-school team you have to rebuild a little,” Kind stated.

Senior distance runner is returns from her state place-winning indoor season of 2017 to follow up what was an outstanding cross country season where she helped the team to a third-place finish at sectionals this past fall.  Edwards, along with senior Haley Adams will return and help to lead a strong contingent of female distance runners for Cinnaminson.

Difficult competitors this year for Cinnaminson will be Haddonfield along with Delsea, both South Group 2 teams that CHS will see a great deal in their meets at Tom’s River.  With Coach Kind’s goal for the team to “go out and do the best they possibly can every time,” the team had some ups and down for the season heading into this weekend’s state group championships. 

Only two members of the team placed at sectionals to allow them to move on to the state group championships  when Kobolak won the shot put with a 56’1″ heave and Edwards placed third in the 1600 with a time of 5:20.18 and 11:40.82 in the 3200 to place fourth, qualifying them both for the State Championships and New York’s Eastern Regionals next week.  In order to qualify for the Meet of Champions, each competitor will have to place top six at states or hope for a top-ten wild card after all groups compete at states.  Madison will have a seed of seventh in the mile and tenth in the two-mile while Kam will be a two seed in the shot put based on his sectionals performance.

While Kam will only be the second seed at states, he made a tremendous amount of noise on Tuesday, February 6 when he broke the Cinnaminson High School and Burlington County all-time record with a throw of 61-3 at the Cherokee throwdown, good enough for second overall in the entire state at the time and 11th nationally.