Moundridge freshman Kaden Elmore wins historic Kansas high school state championship
The stories of Kaden Elmore’s speed have been circulating for some time now in Moundridge.
Moundridge High School track and field coach Brian Holloway remembers hearing about him in grade school. And when Elmore started dominating middle school track meets, the buzz grew even louder.
“The middle school coach kept telling me, ‘This kid is pretty fast,’” Holloway said. “I just thought, ‘Well, that’s junior high fast. We’ll see.’”
The stories were true. In fact, they might not have done Elmore justice.
And now after his first Kansas high school state track and field meet, the whole state knows about Elmore’s speed after a historic performance for a freshman where he brought home two gold medals and two silver medals in the sprints and helped Moundridge to its first boys team championship in school history last weekend.
“It’s so impressive he was able to do all of those things as a freshman,” Holloway said. “Watching him race this weekend was just like, ‘Woah.’ And the scary thing is we think he’s only scratched the surface.
Elmore won the Class 2A championship in the 400-meter dash in a season-best time of 50.82 seconds, the only freshman boy to win a state title in the event in the past two decades and maybe longer — full meet records are unavailable online prior to 2002.
“The funny thing is we just threw him in the 400 in the middle of the season,” Holloway said. “We decided to give it a shot, just to see what it looked like. It looks like he’s even stronger in the 400 than he is in the shorter sprints.”
He also ran a career-best 10.76 seconds in the 100-meter dash, which placed second in the race but broke the 31-year-old state meet record.
For context, only 50 freshmen boys have qualified for state in the 100 in the six classes combined for the past decade and of those 50 state qualifiers, only 12 have made the finals. The only one with a faster time than Elmore? Topeka Seaman’s Joe Reagan, who won the Class 5A title as a freshman in 2012 in a time of 10.45.
Elmore added a silver medal in the 200-meter dash with a time of 22.83 seconds, then teamed up with Garrett Doherty, Landon Kaufman and Mac Unruh to win the 2A title in the 4x1 relay with a school-record time of 43.68 seconds.
“We actually set the school record and won state last year, but we lost our fastest runner,” Holloway. “We brought the other three back and added Kaden and he actually made us even faster. It’s just incredible.”
But even after Elmore finalized his historic performance in the 200, Moundridge still needed one more clutch performance — not involving Elmore — to pull out the team title.
Entering the final event of the meet, the 4x4 relay, Garden Plain (52) held a slight advantage in the team title race over Moundridge (48) and Inman (45) with all three schools having a relay team in the race.
Moundridge and Inman had battled back and forth in the race all season and were the clear favorites at state, but Moundridge knew if it finished second and Garden Plain took fourth or better, the Owls would be the ones hoisting the team trophy.
It was no surprise when entering the final lap, Moundridge and Inman were within a second of each other with the team’s anchors — Moundridge’s Mac Unruh and Inman’s Harrison Brunk, who had just won the 200 title — set to decide the gold.
Unruh would not be denied, delivering a 48-second split on the anchor leg to hold off Brunk and deliver Moundridge the gold medal in the relay with Kaufman, Logan Churchill and Caleb Samland in a time of 3:28.23, less than a second faster than Inman’s time of 3:28.53.
It didn’t take long after that to figure out Moundridge had just won the 2A team championship, as the Wildcats (58 points) had barely edged Garden Plain (56) with the final race of the meet.
“We knew if Mac got the baton and if he had any kind of lead that Mac would pull a 48 and hang on,” Holloway said. “Harrison Brunk is one fast dude and he made a move coming down the stretch, but I know Mac well enough and I saw him dig down and find that extra little ounce of energy to deny that late charge. He knew what was at stake and what it meant.”
This story was originally published June 2, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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