Rhooms wins MEAC men’s triple jump title
FORMER Cornwall College athlete Kobe-jordan Rhooms won the Mideastern Athletics Conference (MEAC) men’s triple jump title at last weekend’s outdoor track and field championships hosted by North Carolina A&T University.
Rhooms, a former COCAA high jump champion and CARIFTA medallist, scored points for Morgan State University in three individual events and the men’s 4x400m relays.
Two other former Cornwall College athletes, freshman Tarique Gooden, also of Morgan State, and Brenton Shippy of South Carolina State, were also finalists at the two-day championships.
Rhooms, who is a senior but will have a full year of eligibility remaining after the coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of the 2020 outdoors and the MEAC cancelled their 2021 indoors season, improved on his second place in the triple jump from 2019 after jumping 15.02m (-2.5m/s) to win the event, adding to the indoor title he won in 2020.
He also improved his positions in the high jump, placing second with 1.98m, and the long jump where he was fourth with 6.80m (-2m/s).
Shippy, who also represented Cornwall College before completing high school in Florida, ran 10.66 seconds (0.1m/s) in the final of the men’s 100m on Saturday.
In Friday’s preliminaries, he had run a personal best 10.39 seconds (1.1m/s), the second fastest by a Jamaican junior male so far this year, and eighth best overall in the MEAC Conference. Gooden, last year’s COCAA Western Champs winner, ran 54.91 seconds on Saturday after he had run 54.44 seconds in Friday’s first round, 12th best overall and best by a freshman.