How well are you treated?

[Azbeachboy1]

What poles does your school provide for you, and do they supply you with enough. In other words does your school treat your vaulters well?

[lonpvh]

I think its all typical. The bigger budgets will get all they want, the smaller schools will pass down poles alittle more than not. The better pole vault schools will always be in good stock with poles for each vaulter though. I think you will find that you are among the luckier ones having a Chapell on the team. Or had, I don't know if he's done or not.

[rainbowgirl28]

At Geogia we have every pole I will ever need. And they are Spirits, my fave

Most bigger colleges I have seen do a good job of getting the poles their vaulters need.

[SaltoMuyAlto]

i graduated from stephen f austin 2 years ago and i must say they did not take very good care of us as far as poles are concerned. they did buy a couple of poles when we first got to the school because they had never really had any vaulters before but after that we were kind of on our own. i know that my line of poles was really difficult because to there was between .8 - 1.2 flex points between each pole. i had to buy a couple of poles to help fill the gaps but it was not enough. my wife graduated from there last spring. we ended up buying all of her poles direct from pacer because they wouldn't get her what she needed to jump on. the coach did try to order her one pole early in the year but he ordered the wrong thing and didn't bother to try to get it changed to the right pole. he was also going to order plugs one time and he thought that spirit plugs would only fit on spirits and the same for pacer. they would try to tell you that they didn't have enough money to get us new poles at sfa but as soon as everyone graduated they bought brand new pits and standards.

tom swan

[Robert schmitt]

My first two years we got one-two poles a year for five vaulters. So unless you were the top guy you got the shaft. Then we got a new vault coach who was a gill rep and he bought 20 poles the first year and 5-10 every year after until he retired and the new coach gave away most of the pole progression we had built up. Other than that the athletic dept took good care of us we were given every thing we needed other than shoe to practice shirts, shorts, warm ups, sock, Etc... and they washed them daily for us.

[Robert schmitt]

I forgot to add the coach that was gill rep. got us two new olympic sized pits plus a tone of gymnastic equp.

[smokinvaulter1]

some of the situation is how high you or your teamates jump then you get poles given to you. That helps alot. I probably got $3500 worth of poles last year and probably only paid for half.

[wacky274]

Well well, lol, i'm glad this came up....i'm starting to have problems with poles now...let me explain

Freshman year the guys got two new poles, and the girls got about 2. This was fine since we had a wide selection in the area the guys were using. Soph year, there werent any new poles for guys, but for the girls there were a couple. Still good since the guys had all the poles we needed at that time. Junior year, i got two new poles for me, but had to pay for part of them because my school has decided that "since the poles are so big, no one else is going to really get any use out of them". Going into my senior year this year i'm worried cause i'm going to need some new poles (I know this because at the end of the season i started blowing through my biggest pole we bought last year) and i'm wondering how i'm going to deal with my school....I guess i'll have to wait and see and get back to you all once the season rolls around.

[xtremevaulter]

We have a pretty good selection of poles here and if we need anymore our coach will order them. The thing that really sucks is that we have no gymnastics equipment. Well we have it but we cant use it because of a lawsuit that was brought against the school. SO SUcky Sucky

[VaultFreak]

Our track team does a fund raiser every year, and we raise a lot of money. Guess what? Our track is dirt. We aren't allowed to have more than $600 dollars in the track account at the end of the year (thanks to district administration-I'm really starting to hate that word), so we have to spend it all. We have many new hurdles (that only get used in practice-nobody wants to have a meet on a dirt track), brand new pole vault pits and standards, new long jump pits and high jump pits and standards, and runways and discus and shot areas and practice hurdles and start blocks and everything else that you could think of, but since we can't save our money and have to spend it, we get all the poles we want, well that's an exaggeration, but i've gotten at least one new one every year. Oh yeah, and we got that cool pole vault pully thing where you pull on the piece of the pole and your feet go up and you turn over, that really helps and I love it! That's it.

[indestructo]

During my 4yrs of vaulting at our school, we(the track teams) were treated very poorly. Disrespect from all other sports, coaches, athletic directors, trainers, etc. We hadn't purchased any poles for about 5yrs until my sophomore year when they realized that I(the best vaulter they had) wouldn't be able to compete without something new. the school purchased 3 poles... My junior year came around and we ended up needing and getting 3mens and 2 womens poles. Nice but with the hew poles came greater heights. At this time we found out the quality of our pads. We started to hit the ground through the middle of the pads. The pads would also slide apart from each other and we would go without being slowed down at all straight to the ground. Through many many complaints to administration, we got a big NO on getting new pads. With a budget of $15K for both mens and womens track combined, there was no way we can purchase new mats. We have attempted fundraisers, but since the university doesn't publish anything regarding our track team, we ran into a majority of the community not knowing that we existed, and thus very little support. This university(and I won't say who) is determined to run this program into the ground. In the process putting all of the athletes welfare in danger. I would like to pursue this further but I'm unsure of where to go. I'm graduated, but I'm still very concerned for those still there. I do hold some backing there, being that I was a 2yr captain, 2yr MVP, and assistant coach last year, but I've tried all I know, anyone out there have any suggestions to get this fixed. I've thought about talking to the NCAA about possible title 9 violations(which are many). I could use some advice. thanks

[VaultFreak]

Our vault team has gotten better and has been mentioned so many times (locally) that we have been getting treated a lot better, as Steven and me break the school records and our little sophomore buddy JP who will blow everyone away really soon, we can do whatever we want, lol.