SHIPPENSBURG -- Camp Hill junior athlete Zack Kuntz is hoping to end his final trip to the PIAA Track and Field championships with a bang.

Yes, that's right: This year will be his final opportunity to win gold at the statewide event, despite the fact that he has a year of school left.

The pieces to the puzzle should not be hard to put together here, but to spell it out, the 6-foot-8, 221-pound tight end on the football field and Penn State Class of 2018 verbal commitment told PennLive on Friday that he plans to be an early, January enrollee with the Lions, a decision he said he made only recently.

"After talking it over with my family and my coaches, I think it's the best decision for me," Kuntz said.

"It's a great advantage getting to do spring ball with the team, and for me, a big part of football is, I'm going to need to put on weight, and that's something I'll be able to do under the coaches' guidance and everything."

It might be humorous to read that a nearly 7-foot high school student thinks that he needs to get bigger, but in the weight sense, he does, as Penn State's depth chart at the end of the 2016 season was filled with tight ends who tipped the scales at an average of 244 pounds.

Kuntz would ideally bulk up to somewhere between 240 and 250, and his mammoth frame looks ideal for that kind of bulk. He has plenty of time to do it, but the decision will help speed up the process, which could be key as Mike Gesicki is gone after this season, leaving the position's pecking order in a bit of flux in 2018; Jon Holland, Danny Dalton, and Nick Bowers will presumably all return, and Pat Freiermuth is also a 2018 verbal commit, but none are yet as proven as the likely early-NFL draft pick Gesicki.

Adding weight while keeping his speed will be the focus, then, and with good reason, because there are not too many 6-8 prospects cruising to victory on the track, which is exactly what Kuntz did in a breezy 110 meter hurdles preliminary heat victory on Friday. His winning time was clocked at 14.76 seconds, nearly a second faster than the heat's runner-up, who ran the distance in 15.49 seconds.

The time will make Kuntz the top seed in Saturday's semifinals, and only one runner, Kane Area's Joseph Newton, clocked a sub-15 second time.

The future Lion also competed in the high jump and 300 meter hurdles on Friday. Results from those events will be added once they become available.

"It helps in the long run," he said when asked about how track benefits him on the football field.

"That's why I started doing track, freshman year. I just wanted to get conditioned so that going into summer training, I'd be conditioned."

But those days will soon be behind him, as his start with the Lions is only about eight months away. He'll finish track season, gear up for The Opening, an annual July high school football showcase in Oregon for elite prospects that he was invited to just this week, and then get ready for what he hopes will be a big senior season.

Then, it'll be off to Penn State.