Don’t Dally
If you’re the lone pole vault official, looking at a one-day meet with 35 boys vaulting and 28 girls, you know one thing for sure. You have to be efficient. The average working number is six vaults per vaulter per competition. A little simple math: that’s 378 vaults. At a minute a vault (including moving standards and placing bars), it’s over six hours of vaulting. Add another hour for warmups between the boys and girls; and you get exactly what everyone complains about – the “eternal” pole vault competition, that starts at 10:00 am and ends at 5:00 pm. It finishes sometime after the 4×400’s, the traditional end of the meet, and teams are desperate to get their trophies and head home.
With cooperation from the games committee on height increments, and coaches with vaulters checking out, we beat that by an hour and a half last Saturday at Pickerington. I watched the 800’s on the track as I took in the final results. But there was no time to “dally”, all day long.
The “system” worked. Using “five alive” through six heights (boys and girls) kept the competitors fresh. And I made sure the athletes and coaches were communicating through me, not to my high school JV distance runners setting bars and standards. It kept everyone on task. By the way, the two distance runners “assigned” to the pole vault were outstanding. They learned everything “on the job”, and kept focus for the entire time. They even figured out how to deal with a “spinney” crossbar, on their own, and setting a bar at 15’6”.
Equipment
Pole vault coaches are equipment oriented. They have to be. The poles make all the difference in success or failure. And most pole vault coaches know exactly how to set up their pit, and their standards, to meet the rules and allow for the best competition. It’s part of the “duties” of the trade. I was one of those coaches too. So one of my officiating tasks is to work through issues coaches have with the equipment, without letting them takeover and unnecessarily delay the meet. I make it plain: communicate through me; don’t talk to my bar and standard setters.
So I was immediately alert when I asked a vaulter where she wanted her standards, and she asked me to talk to her coach. I was even more concerned when the coach said: “I’ve already told the kids”. I don’t think I was too snarky when I said, “Well, you still have to tell me.” The coach paused, then almost whispered, “15 ½”.
It’s been thirteen years since the rule changed, altering the minimum setting standard from 15½ to 18 inches. The coach might have been a young vaulter in the “15 ½” days, though this coach doesn’t really look that old. I quickly said “no”. The next tentative request was, “16”? Again, I don’t think I was snarky when I responded, “18 is a close as you can go.” And, I don’t think I went into the history of vault, (surprising for me). There wasn’t time. The vaulter competed with her bar set at 18” for her attempts.
Something Fishy
But as the competition went on, and I battled through one “bad round” of Five Alive (if you’re a PV official you know what that means – I got lost, but I got found) – there was a question in the back of my mind (that’s why I got lost). Did this coach intentionally try to violate the rules? Was this more than a case of “ignorance”, but an intentional attempt to subvert them? Should I stop the competition, go find the referee, and “accuse” the coach of unsportsmanlike conduct?
After all, the coach specifically went to my “workers” to tell them where to set the bar. And then tried to bypass me, and even declined to tell me the setting at first. It all looked “fishy”.
Coaches unsportsmanlike conduct might be the biggest deal in high school sports. Ok, it’s easy when a coach comes out of the stands screaming and swearing. But it’s still not: there’s getting meet management to remove the coach, and there’s a mound of “paperwork” (all online) and communication with the school administrators and the state office. As an official, I better be damn sure that it truly is “unsportsmanlike”. It can smell fishy, but you better have the rotten fish in hand before you proceed.
Besides, it was early in the girl’s vault competition. We still had 100 vaults to go. An unsportsmanlike “charge” would take a long time to adjudicate, and I was the only vault official.
The best move was, as Obi Won Kenobi would say: “Nothing to see here. Move along, Move along”.
Due Diligence
Today I did my “due diligence”. I went back through pole vault safety presentations in the last twenty years, to find exactly when we made the change to 18” as the minimum standard setting (2013 track season). Now you get the history: when I started as a track coach back in 1978, the standard settings were left over from the “sawdust pit” days. You could put the bar from 24” back to 24” in front of the “zero” mark. Then it was changed Zero to 24” back. The next adjustment was 12” to 24”, then 15 ½” to 31 ½”, and finally the current 18” to 31 ½”.
After all of that, I’ll give the coach benefit of the doubt. Maybe this was an old vaulter back to help. And maybe, the whispered instruction to my “crew”, and then me, was just that coach’s way of communicating. Maybe…or maybe the coach was trying to pull a fast one, in the heat of a very complicated day. Either way, I don’t have “the fish” in hand. So I’ll just get my issue out on this post, and leave it there.
Addendum
Two weeks later at another competition with different schools, a competitor asked for “standards at 16”. Of course, I said no. Then his teammate asked for standards at 17. Both seemed generally confused when they were only allowed to vault at an 18″ minimum. I had a word with their coach, who didn’t really respond, but it was clear to me that they vaulted both practices and other competitions on the “old 2012 rule”.
What’s the problem? All of their vaults were “close”, and a couple ended in landing around the box area. Here’s the liability issue: if there was a serious injury in the box, and an insurance company determined to “recover costs” by suing in court, not only would the coach and school be in a bad position, but also the officials, licensed or not, who were running the pole vault. The “18 to 31 1/2” rule was specifically enacted for safety reasons. Not following that rule puts everyone at risk. The coach wasn’t being unsportsmanlike – the coach wasn’t “up” on the rules, and dangerous.
Ohio Pole Vault Safety 