All Sport Academy - How Good Do You Want To Be Today?

As I’ve written a few times, my youngest son, Derek, is a pretty good high jumper. Fortunately for me, I’ve been able to help him along his path for the last couple of years and like any father I like to help him with the things that you can only know if you’ve done something yourself. I’ve tried to teach him when to warm up, when to stretch, what height to come in the competition at, how to keep warm between jumps, etc., etc., etc. It’s been fun for us, but I know he rolls his eyes at me a lot (don’t all teenagers?).

When I jumped in both high school and college I was that lone guy wandering around the infield talking to myself (everyone knows high jumpers are flaky…), listening to music with full sweats and a stocking hat on, even if it was 90 degrees out. I had my routine before I jumped, I had my superstitions, I had my music… Bottom line was that I was weird, there’s no denying it. But, in my defense, it worked for me. So, here I am trying to get my son to follow along with some of the things I believe are good, warming up, staying focused, keeping loose, etc. Today, pretty much all my thoughts on what should work for him got thrown out the window and I learned something pretty important, to let the kid be himself and enjoy the ride.

Once again they started the high jump competition as the 4×400 relay was just finishing. If you’ve been to any high school track meet you know that this means that the meet is basically over. Because of this, the entire team was in the infield, standing next to the high jump pit (it was the only thing going on). I was in a semi-panic as his friends were standing right next to him talking to him as he was standing ready to jump. I keep mumbling that someone needed to get them away, let him focus, stop talking to him… As he cleared height after height I could see the interaction between the group get more animated and he seemed more and more relaxed with each jump (I on the other hand got more and more tense). When he cleared 6′, which was a new personal record, he calmly jumped out the of the pit, jogged back to his friends to a mob of high-fives, chest bumps and screams (there were a few girls there too). To see the look on his face and the way his teammates carried on you’d have thought he just won the state meet, but his jumping parter, Sean Lease, cleared 6′2″ to win the competition. Yeah, that 6′ mark is a big one for a high jumper, but as far as I’m concerned it wasn’t the most important thing that came out of that meet. Derek took the next step in his career as a jumper and it was really fun to see his teammates make a big deal out of it for him. Derek’s coach (yeah, that would be me) took an even bigger step as a coach today by learning that we need to let our athletes be themselves and not carbon copies of what we think works. Every athlete is different, every athlete has to find their own style and way of doing things and when it all comes together, big things happen. I’m just glad I was there to see it…

A million years ago my wife and I went to high school together (of course, we weren’t married then, but we did date…). We were both three-sport athletes, one of which was track and field. We both continued our love of the track after high school as I high jumped in college and she was head girls track coach at a high school in Michigan and then later was the head boys and girls track coach at a high school in Wisconsin. In other words, we’ve spent a day or two on a track between us.

In high school one of the big meets we used to compete in was the Prairie du Chien Invitational. We loved going there because there were a lot of schools and they gave medals for placing. Of course, to this day she rolls her eyes when I talk about it because the medals the boys got were, as we like to say, the size of a garbage can lid and the medals the girls got were the size of a silver dollar. Anyway, the point is, the Prairie Invite was always a highlight of our track season and we small-town farm kids loved our garbage-can lid medals!

When I went off to college I found myself in a similar situation I had in high school, my school wasn’t fortunate enough to have a track. As a high jumper, I found myself working out on the basketball court in high school and when I got to Columbia we had an old gym that we could work out in, but most of the time we hopped into vans and went to Randall Island to jump at Downing Stadium.

Skip to the beginning of track season in 2006. My youngest son decides he wants to go out for track instead of baseball and both my wife and I are thrilled, we are going back to the track! Derek has been very successful in his brief career, but he’s in high school now and the slate’s wiped clean…

Last weekend everything sort of hit me, where we’ve been, were we are and where we’re going. When the schedule came out I looked at it and saw a familar place, Randall Island. Downing Stadium isn’t there anymore, it’s been replaced by Icahn Stadium (”Fast Times, Fast Pace, This IS the Place”, say that 400 times and you’ll know what we went through on Saturday…). We jumped in the car and drove up the Turnpike, over the George Washington Bridge, by Yankee Stadium (both Yankee Stadiums), over the Triborough Bridge and onto Randall Island. As we pulled up I remember going there like it was yesterday and it brought back a lot of really great memories, but as we pulled up I also remember thinking, “We’re Not in Prairie du Chien Anymore Toto…” You see, for us to get to Prairie from Fennimore (yeah, we lived in the sticks, I admit it), you basically drive 30 miles through farm land. On the way you go through two or three towns with no more than 200 people in them and I think Prairie has about 4,000. There are no baseball stadiums, there are no toll booths, there are no skyscrapers in the background. There are cows, there are corn fields and there is the smell of farmland USA (yes, we love Wisconsin…). As we sat 50 rows up in the stadium and looked down at the nine-lane, all-weather track, I couldn’t help but realize how much better our son has it than we did. We didn’t have a track, he’s got one of the nicest in the area at South Brunswick. We didn’t get to wear spikes at meets for the most part because most of the tracks in the early 80s in our area were asphalt, he gets to wear spikes in practice and every meet they go to (and he’s wearing my prize possession, my spikes, with signatures of four Olympic high jumpers on them). We went to Prairie du Chien, he’s jumping on Randall Island were Jessie Owens won the 1936 Olympic Trials in front of President Roosevelt and Pele played his first soccer game in the United States in 1975. I only got to practice in our high school gym and only during track season, he works out at ASA or at a track practically year-round. My dad and high school coach (Coach Vince Lease, best coach I ever had!) used to stand in the exact same area at each meet because of some superstition they had (but didn’t tell me about until I graduated), his dad just video tapes and tries to coach him after every jump, before every jump, when to loosen up, when to start, etc., etc., etc… Come to think of it, I win that one, my dad was way cooler than his dad will ever be…

To say that I’m jealous would be and understatement! To say that we are looking forward to the next four years would be a gross understatement…