Gill Skydex Soft Plant Box Issue

[crvictor]

Hi,
Just wanted to bring this your attention:

My school recently built a new field house, and we decided to go with the new Gill skydex Soft plant boxes for our two runways. They worked great all year and I had no complaints. Some visiting teams said the all white box was hard to see at times, but after the box showed some scuff marks and got a little dirtier it was easy to see the box depth.
Towards the end of the season I noticed the officials were measuring the bar height from the top back side of the box (the part that is flat & level with the track surface right after the back wall.) ,as I have seen done hundreds of times throughout my college career. The reason that this caught my attention is that the Gill soft box is not flush with the track surface like normal metal boxes. Because of the nature of how the soft box is constructed the plastic wrap is domed up from the track surface. Am I right in thinking that if the bar is measured from this part of the box that the bar height would be incorrect?
On both of our boxes the top of the box (where the bar measurment usally takes place) comes up about 1-1.5” higher than the track surface. So wouldn’t this mean that bar measured to be 16’ would actually be 16’ 1.5”.
I understand that in competitions this is not the biggest deal because everyone would be jumping at the same height as other competitors, but what about at the elite level? College records, American records, and possibly world records, an inch can mean a LOT!

Has anyone else observed this? Or could it simply be a poor installation?

[rainbowgirl28]

Officials should always be measuring from a height that is level with the runway. Unfortunately, this does not always happen!

[drcurran]

Have had this situation at Penn State where they have a soft box on both indoor runways. I always measure from the surface just behind the top back of the box, which is the same level as the runway. And of course the standards are not rolled to zero, but rather 1" back.

Dan

PS - Might be a different type of box or install, because the back edge of the PSU boxes are maybe up a little, but not 1.5" above the runway.