PoleVaultPower.com

Alrighty, here's my delima. I valuted junior and senior year of high school. I never did any off season work for various reasons, but managed to jump 8 feet with about six months total of vaulting. I PRed at my last meet in high school and was mentally done with vaulting until last week when I met a girl that was on the team at my school. Apparently we had two girl vaulters, but she quit for cheerleading, so now we only have one senior. I thought about e-mailing the coach for about a day, slept on it and decided to just stick with club gymnastics this year (this is my 13th year as a gymnast).

Then tonight I met a guy in one of my classes that throws for my school. I told me to talk to the coach because the team REALLY needs girls. To the point where they had to cut some guys for title IX reasons. That re-sparked my interest and now I don't know what to do. I mean, vaulting was really fun for me, but it also made me miss gymnastics. I would hands down probably be the most under qualified athlete on the team, especially considering the girl that quit had a PR of 10 feet. I'm also really slow when I run with shoes. It sounds weird, I know, but I'm pretty sure than sprinting 70 feet barefoot for thirteen years and then suddenly trying to run with something on my feet freaked out my body.

I think my big thing right now is the fact that I don't know how college vaulting practices are structured. I know its different for every school, but in general how much sprint work is done? Is it done with the sprinters? Things like that.... I know there are only ten hours of practices a week which seems like nothing compared to the 20 hours a week I did for gymnastics in high school.

Anyways, any help that ya'll could give me would be awesome.

It's different for every school and it varies a lot depending on what time of year it is. You need to talk to the coaches at your school ASAP because they have likely already started practices, and you'll still need a physical and such.

The 10 hours a week only applies really early in the season, then it goes up to 20 hours max, but you might not use the full 20 hours. I would expect to have at least 2 hours of running/track stuff every day plus weight lifting 2-3 times a week, maybe gymnastics work once or twice a week.

Doing track in college is not any more of a time commitment than doing serious club gymnastics in high school. I was never any busier in college than I was in high school when I did high school cross country/gymnastics/track plus club gymnastics plus club pole vaulting plus 2 AP classes.

Talk to the coaches right away. They might not be interested but you won't know until you try. You'll get a better idea of if it's a good fit for you once you talk to them.

As far as the running slow in shoes, did you ever get pole vaulting spikes? I am not a big fan of vaulting in sneakers, but spikes are much closer to being barefoot.

It varies from school to school, but the biggest transition i think a lot of freshman see is the commitment to conditioning early on. Of the 20 hours limit now in place, i would say most will have you vault between 3-6 of those hours, generously. You REALLY have to love the vault to do it in college, because you will be doing a lot of sprinting, running, gymnastics, lifting, etc before you vault. But it makes the vault THAT much better .