Pole vault opens door to more college scholarships for girls

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Pole vault opens door to more college scholarships for girls
Sunday, January 28, 2007
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
Natalie Parkes spent her early teens bouncing from sport to sport like a twentysomething searching for the right career.

Gymnastics was fun for a while. She could pull off a round-off and back-handspring, but her talent was more cheerleader than Mary Lou Retton.

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Nearly 5-9, she gave basketball a shot once she entered Hunterdon Central High School in Flemington. But then one day, during practice, she noticed girls on the other side of the gym doing something that looked like a heck of a lot more fun. Something that involved sticking a pole in the ground and vaulting higher than a basketball hoop.

She never looked back -- or down, and now she's one of the best young female pole vaulters in the state.

"I like being that high and then free falling," Parkes, a junior, said recently before a practice. "It's a different kind of experience. It's also a good conversation starter."

It may also help pay for her college education.

A quarter century after Title IX mandated equal opportunities for female athletes, talented soccer and basketball players have become a dime a dozen. Now, the hottest ticket to success for athletic girls has shifted to a sport that didn't even exist for college women a decade ago.

Looking for a college scholarship? Forget girls soccer. Pick up a pole, because girl pole vaulters are to college track and field coaches what quality left-handed pitchers are to Major League Baseball general managers.

"There aren't enough of them," John Moon, head track and field coach at Seton Hall and a former Olympic coach, said of the annual girls' pole-vaulting crop. Moon should know. He has no women pole vaulters on the Seton Hall team. "If you go 11 feet these days in high school, you are going to get recruited somewhere."

College women didn't start competing in the pole vault until 1996. The Olympics didn't add the sport until 2000. In sports, an event doesn't get much newer than that. Of course, not everyone is cut out for something that can seem a little reckless and has led to the occasional death.

"You need some gumption," said Ludwig Lubasky, head track and field coach at Hunterdon Central, which led the fight to allow girls to compete in pole vaulting in New Jersey. "You've got to get yourself to run fast, stick a pole in a box and jump up, then push yourself upside down and then fall backward into the pits."

Or, as James Robinson, head track and field coach at Rutgers, joked: "Those pole vaulters are definitely a breed apart."

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Robinson, who has just a one female pole vaulter on his team now, added, "I mean who in their right mind would actually want to do this sort of thing with everything that can go wrong?"


HOW GIRLS GOT UP THERE

That girls who can pole vault would become so sought after seemed unfathomable here just six years ago.

It all started in 1995 when Lauren Contursi arrived at Hunterdon Central and said she wanted to pole vault. It turned out she was pretty good, too -- good enough to compete against and beat many of the boys.

Contursi's success got other girls at the school interested in the sport. So, in 1998 Hunterdon Central began lobbying the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, which oversees high school sports, to add the event for girls. But the NJSIAA refused, citing a lack of interest. It didn't budge from its position for three years. Then, in June 2001, Hunterdon Central told the NJSIAA it would file a lawsuit to gain acceptance for the event.

To Bob Rossi, Hunterdon Central's athletic director, the NJSIAA got it backwards by declaring there wasn't enough interest in pole vaulting before it offered girls the opportunity.

"It just seemed to me like it was discrimination," he said. "Girls can pole vault. They can do anything you give them the opportunity to do."

To avoid litigation, the NJSIAA added the sport for the following year.

Today, there are roughly 80 high school girls in New Jersey competing in either indoor or outdoor pole vaulting. While that might sound like a lot, consider the thousands of scholastic soccer or basketball players. Eighty girls would make up just four high school soccer teams or five basketball teams, or a single high school football program.

Other high schools with strong pole-vaulting programs include Ridgewood, Clifton, and a few schools in south Jersey near Cherry Hill.

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THE NATIONAL SCENE

Nationally, coaches estimate there are perhaps a few thousand scholastic pole vaulters, but only a small percentage of them pursue it seriously. Because of all the technical training pole vaulting requires, the sport has a slow learning curve. Many girls try it for a season but stop because they don't progress.

Schools are also often reluctant to offer the sport because of the expenses involved -- $10,000 for the mats, $200 for each pole, plus extra insurance.

"It's growing but it's not yet a glamour event," Moon said. "On top of that, some schools are still nervous that it might lead to a lawsuit, especially after what happened to the kid from Penn State."

In 2002, Penn State pole vaulter Kevin Dare died after he became disoriented in the middle of a jump and landed on his head in the planting box during the Big Ten indoor championships.

Despite that tragedy, pole-vaulting deaths are extremely rare, and as more girls who are better athletes try the sport, the competition is getting tougher.

The women's world record for pole vaulting is 16'5." This year's college champ will likely vault more than 14 feet, nearly two feet higher than when the event began at the collegiate level.

Five years ago at the scholastic level, girls only had to pole vault 10 feet to attract the attention of collegiate track coaches. Now a junior who is making progress and can go 11 feet will get recruited, and a 12-foot vault is needed to guarantee a scholarship from a top school.

"If I see a kid who is just hitting her stride go 11 feet, that's a kid I'm feeling good about," said Robinson, the Rutgers track coach.

A pole-vaulting scholarship, like most track scholarships, might not cover the entire cost of tuition, but success in the event can also help a girl gain consideration from a more competitive college.

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And yet, for now, the shortage of good female pole vaulters remains.

Robinson said most of the good ones end up at the schools with a history of pole vaulting success, including Oregon, Florida State, Arkansas and North Carolina. Everyone else fights over what is left.


THE SEARCH

Brooke Kohler, a 15-year-old sophomore at Hunterdon Central, was a frustrated gymnast with a quirky streak when the school's pole-vaulting coach, Jeff Tindall, found her last year.

Kohler, who has wide, bright eyes and the kind of tight, athletic build Tindall looks for, told him she'd seen pole vaulting in the Olympics and wanted to give it a shot.

"I didn't mind being upside down," Kohler said with a giggle at a recent practice.

Tindall, who learned pole vaulting 45 years ago using a bamboo pole and falling into a sand pit, likes to cherry-pick gymnasts because they are used to running full speed and throwing their bodies into compromising positions. They also have upper body strength from years in the gym, and tend to be somewhat fearless.

Aside from gymnasts, Tindall likes soccer players with speed and good body control. He likes tall dancers who can leap. He'll also look for good skiers, snowboarders and skateboarders familiar with the feeling of letting their bodies "slip and slide."

"It's more of a swinging event rather than a strength event because it's the swinging of the trail leg that really brings the body up," said Tindall, who is 62 and still competes in the event. "I tell the kids if the school knew how much fun this was, they wouldn't let us do it."

Cheryl Kohler, Brooke's mother, said she never expected to be the mother of a pole vaulter. But her daughter, she said, has always been "kind of out there."

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With Brooke's coaches expecting her to clear 11 feet this year, Cheryl Kohler is learning about the doors the sport may open and the scholarship money it can bring. Brooke certainly has her family's support in her endeavor.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kohler and Parkes, who improved three and a half feet in a single year, go straight from Hunterdon Central's practice to Vertical Assault, a pole vaulting academy near Bethlehem, Penn., where they practice until 7 p.m. The training sessions cost about $1,000 for the school year, though serious pole vaulters usually also attend special camps during the summer.

Mike Lawryk, who started Vertical Assault a decade ago, said the sport offers something for both the parents and the kids, many of whom are former gymnasts like Kohler and Parkes.

"The kids just want to go high," Lawryk said. "But the parents realize when they come look at where the kids who have come here end up going to school that this can lead to some real money."

Cheryl Kohler said the sport helps her daughter stick out from the crowd, something that can't help but make life easier for her when the time comes to apply to college. Brooke attended a pole-vault camp in Kutztown, Pa., last summer and met several college coaches there, including the coach from Bucknell, her parents' alma mater.

"She's developing the contacts," Cheryl Kohler said. "Now you hope for a match."