Where are they now? - Scott Fisher

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http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2006 ... 4sport.htm

Where Are They Now?

Scott Fisher
Medford High School, 1974
By TIM TROWER
Mail Tribune

Scott Fisher dominated at nearly every level in the pole vault. But he never got a chance at the highest of all levels, the Olympic Games.

The former Oregon prep and then-Pac-8 Conference champion narrowly missed qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Trials in 1976 while a sophomore at Oregon State, but he shrugged it off and looked toward the 1980 Games. However, the U.S. boycotted those Moscow Games, Fisher’s career ended about the same time and "just sort of ambled into the business world. There was nothing left I wanted to do in the sport ... I was disappointed. I’d always dreamed of competing in the Olympics since grade school."

Fisher took his degree in mechanical engineering to the Seattle area and has been there since. Save for a three-year stint as a general contractor building luxury homes on Lake Washington, he has been in sales in the electrical industry. He worked for Westinghouse, General Electric and Square D before venturing into building. Two months ago he returned to sales with N-Tron, a 7-year-old company that manufactures ethernet network equipment.

"It’s a young company that has doubled in size every year," says Fisher, who is the West Coast regional sales director. "I thought it would be a neat deal to get back into the industry and see what happens."

He enjoyed building luxury homes, but skyrocketing liability insurance prompted him to abandon the effort. Sale is pending on the last one he built, a 7,200-square-foot beauty with a pricetag of about $4 million.

Fisher lives in Bellevue, Wash., with his wife of 18 years, Lucia, and their two children, Jake, 16, and Grace, 9.

Growing up in Medford, Fisher was a four-sport athlete through the ninth grade.

"We were very, very fortunate," he says. "We had a very active athletic program in grade school."

In high school, track coach Dean Benson took an interest in Fisher, and pole vaulting became a year-round sport. They trained in the fall, then jumped on airbag landing pits in the gym in winter, mixing in indoor meets until the outdoor season started.

Fisher won state at 14-4 as a junior and 15-0 as a senior. His prep best was 15-6.

He went on to OSU, clearing 16-8 as a freshman and being named the program’s most improved performer. A year later, he won the Pac-8 with a mark of 17-0¼ , the third-best mark in school history.

It was at that meet that Fisher and two others were still alive as the bar neared 17 feet. They put it at what was believed to be the Olympic Trials qualifying standard, and all three cleared the height. When it was remeasured, the bar was a half-inch too low, says Fisher. It was raised again the standard increment of 4 inches, but no one cleared it.

Fisher placed 19th at the NCAAs, but was beset by injuries thereafter. He redshirted in 1977 with a leg tendon injury, and the following year competed with a broken bone in his foot, the result of hitting the side of the landing box in practice. A year later, his career was over.

Nowadays, Fisher remains active following his kids’ athletic pursuits â€â€