Finder: Helmets, certifications would help pole vaulters

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http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05114/493095.stm

Finder: Helmets, certifications would help pole vaulters


Sunday, April 24, 2005
By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Pole vaulting and Pennsylvania have an inextricable relationship. They are the plant box and the padding. They are the propulsion skyward and the gravitational pull back to earth.

This is the home of the late Kevin Dare, the 19-year-old pole vaulter from Port Matilda and Penn State killed after a headlong fall at the Big Ten indoor track championships three years ago.

This is the ground zero from which his father, Ed, and his school's athletic director, Tim Curley, provided a significant national push to enhance the safety of a discipline that also in the 2002 spring claimed the lives of two high school vaulters, Jesus Queseda, 16, in a Florida practice session and Samoa Fili, 17, in a Wichita, Kans., meet that his father was videotaping.

This is the place where, after two years of new rules with nary a serious accident in America, Knoch High freshman Ryan Adler leaped from the North Allegheny track and into the Children's Hospital intensive-care unit.

Let Pennsylvania lead the charge down that runway to safety once again.

No more Ryan Adlers, if we can help it.

No more unprotected kids.

True, no athletic endeavor is fully without risk. A diver on a slippery board, a cross-country runner near a busy street, a girls' lacrosse player without a helmet -- and what's up with that, it'll muss their hair? The point is, some danger remains implicit in our games, the same as in everyday life with driving a car or fighting a fire. When it involves our children, though, we owe it to ourselves, our children, our communities to exhaust every possibility for precaution.

You knew football was brutal. That was reinforced locally last August when Conneaut Valley High sophomore Rocco Zicarelli died after a helmet-on-helmet collision in practice. He was the first football death on the U.S. Catastrophic Sports Injury list of 2004, in the same, sad way Adler was the first serious accident in pole vaulting since the three deaths of 2002. You just didn't know pole vaulting was so deadly.

This sport, based on a significantly fewer number of participants, is more dangerous than football. It certainly has far more Catastrophic Sports Injury listings: 17 deaths among high school athletes in the past 22 years, 47 deaths or debilitating injuries overall in the past 34 years. By anybody's math, any number greater than one is too high.

There are two simple ways to increase pole vaulters' safety, to prevent some serious accidents.

Certification.

And helmets.

Ten states mandate that their track coaches must be certified in pole vaulting. Six states require pole vaulters to wear helmets. Pennsylvania isn't among either group.

Certification is easy. It's something that Adler's Knoch coach, 16-year veteran Wes Brahler, long held. It's something attained by the folks at North Allegheny, where the incident happened. It's something every scholastic track coach in Pennsylvania, in all of America for that matter, should be required to have.

"Knowledge in this event is going to keep people healthy," said Mark Hannay.

Hannay is the Slippery Rock University pole-vault coach, the Northeast U.S. regional chairman of the national Pole Vault Safety Certification Committee and an expert who found nothing but proper facilities and correct reactions after interviewing people from the North Allegheny meet Monday. He provides certification courses, teaches camps, investigates accidents and writes papers on pole-vault safety. Here's hoping the WPIAL and its PIAA governing body, each of which quickly enacted the new pole-vault rules two years ago, soon make another demand on Hannay's time: Please train and certify every track coach in the state.

It's a no-brainer.

"If you were a high school athletic director, would you allow swimming without a lifeguard?" asked Jan Johnson, a 1972 Olympic medalist and Hannay's superior on the national safety committee.

Don't stop at the coaches, either. Every boy and girl should be certified as well. They should, at their own cost or one shared by their school, attend a camp/course to further teach them the proper techniques, safety requirements, guidelines. At every meet, the PIAA demands a verification form be completed on site affirming that each pole vaulter uses equipment appropriate to his or her size. What better piece of equipment is there than a participant's well-educated mind?

The helmet thing is a more slippery issue. There is no proven research, no manufacturer's guarantee beyond a fall of 7 feet or so, that a headgear similar to a hockey helmet can completely protect a pole vaulter. As in the case of Adler, who fell on his head and shoulders onto some padding after trying to leap 9 feet, no headgear could prevent a brain injury -- to which football players who get concussions readily can attest.

Even if its protective abilities aren't as hard and fast as a track, a helmet should be offered to every PIAA pole vaulter by his or her school. That's a $100 commitment per school, one lid for each of the boys' and girls' team. "Wearing a helmet is a personal choice," Johnson said. So give them that choice, at least.

Education and headgear wouldn't have prevented Adler's accident. But it certainly may allow Pennsylvania to go years before another one.



(Chuck Finder can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1724.)