Tricks of the Trade

(Officiating a Mammoth Vault Competition)

Ashland

Tomorrow I’m officiating at the Ashland University indoor high school pole vault competition.  It’s exciting, there are great vaulters on both the boys and girls side, including two boys trying to get over sixteen feet. And there’s no friendlier place than Ashland to officiate a track meet. The athletes, coaches, and meet management are always great to work with.  That’s the good news.  

The bad news:  there’s forty-seven boys and forty girls, starting at ten in the morning.  And it’s Super Bowl Sunday, so there’s just a little pressure (a little) to get the meet done at a reasonable time (6:30 kickoff). And I’m officiating the pole vault by myself.  I do know that the Ashland track athletes working the vault will be incredibly efficient.   So how can we (official, workers, vaulters, coaches, parents) get through two mammoth competitions in a “reasonable” amount of time?

Five Alive

The first thing I do is to “prepare” the day before the meet.  I know that there’s going to be a lot heights in both competitions, where they’ll be nine or more vaulters at a height.  To be fair to those kids, and to follow Ohio high school procedures, that means “Five Alive” (see this link for more details).  

To make “five alive” easier (while still calling the makes and misses and standards for the vault) I try to get the vault “event sheet” on as few pages as possible.  The Meet Management put the “start lists” up a day in advance.  It’s likely that they’ll hand me six pages for the boys, and five pages for the girl’s competition. But I can create a three page boys sheet (two competitors on the last page), and a two page girls sheet.  That keeps my “Five Alive” mostly on the same page, reducing the amount of “page turning”.  Ten extra seconds of searching for each vault will add up to over an hour of time on the day!  

(87 vaulters with an average of 6 attempts is 522 vaults.  If each vault takes a minute, that’s 8 ½ hours of vaulting.  We start at 10, with a 40 min break between boys and girls.  So if we “hurry”, we won’t get done until 7ish?? I hope it’s faster than that.)

A note on making my own sheets:  I cross-check with the “official” meet sheets to make sure the order is identical.  I’ve been on the “other side” of field event entries, and it’s a real pain if the official’s order is different than what’s in the system.  If mine are out of order, I either use theirs, or I re-write mine onto theirs after the competition. (A post-script on making my own sheets – when I handed them to the computer guys, their first and only question – are these in the same order as ours? I assured them they were – I even cross-checked again on the runway before we started.)

Games Committee

The most important “efficiency” will be the setting the starting heights and increments.  That’s a meet management (Games Committee) decision, but often at these indoor meets it’s left to the folks (like Ashland’s Pole Vault Coach) and official at the pit.  The boys entries go from 7’ to 15’. My recommendation will be to begin at 8’, then go 12” increments to 11’, then 6” after.  That’s 11 heights to 15’.  The girls go from 6’ to 12’.   I’ll recommend 7’ start, 12” to 9’, then 6”.   That’s 9 heights to 12’.  A factor that often gets overlooked:  we want to be “fair” to everyone, but everyone includes both the lowest and the highest entries.  

Competition

Here’s a primary concern – I don’t want the vaulters to feel “rushed”.  So while I am on a clock (I hope not a calendar), each vaulter gets their minute, and needs to do whatever they do for their best effort.  But I’m also aware that “the best vaulters” will be sitting, at least for a couple hours for the guys, and an hour and a half for the girls. 

So I’ve got to think about keeping the entire event “efficient”, even though it’s going to be long no matter what.  In my competitor meeting before we start, I’ll emphasize being on the runway when called up, and the one minute time limit.  I have a stopwatch around my neck, and my Yellow Flag ready to raise at 15 seconds left.

Game Day

My schedule for “game day”:  I plan on getting to Ashland by eight am. I know that the Ashland University team will have the venue well prepared, though I’ll still do a visual check for safety considerations.  But that gives me two hours for mostly check-in activities; cross checking my event sheet, checking in poles, getting paperwork from coaches, and getting kids warmed up for a 10 am start.  There’s going to be a big line on the runway.

Checking in between the boys and girls competition is more difficult.  The clock is “running”, so I’ve got to get the poles and paperwork as “efficiently” as possible.  I hope to start the girls competition by 2 pm.  And If I can find some help on pole check-ins, I’ll definitely take it (Head Field Judge or other official).  

So I’m ready to go.  I’ll let you know how the competition went (and if I get to watch the Super Bowl, go Chiefs!!).

The Best Laid Plans

I arrived at the track at 8am, and things went according to plan. Every pole was checked and every coach filled out the required paperwork. Meet management agreed with my starting height and increments suggestions. We started on time, and lasted a full four hours. As many times as I’ve used “Five Alive”, I still lost focus once or twice in the competition and had to “regroup”. But I didn’t miss a vault, or a kid in the rotation, so I know that I “regrouped”, but no one else did.

I had a first, an eighteen minute warmup period at 12’6″ (nine kids entered the competition). I was able to get all my paperwork together. There were 250 vaults in the boys competition. Using the minute a vault criteria, the boys were actually under that, even with warmup times. A ton of credit goes to the Ashland University track kids, who had bars up and standards set instantly. They were almost psychic!!

Four hours put us at 2:00pm. and the number of girls required a full hour warmup. So we started at 3:00, that’s an hour “late” in my plan. Several girls weren’t there (flu) and the competition went fast. We had 159 vaults in the competition (including a tie breaking 2 extra attempts at 12′). And the “formula” held true – we were done about 5:15pm, ahead of the last heat of the 4×400 relay. Pole Vault does not need to be the last event of the day!!!

So I was about forty-five minutes “late” in my head. But meet management, athletes, coaches and spectators seemed pleased with the timing. I don’t feel that athletes were “rushed” on the runway. We were efficient – and we got the work done.

And I got home in the middle of the first quarter of the Super Bowl – to watch the Eagles thump the Chiefs: Oh well!!