Edward Watson, 37, still high on pole vault

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Watson, 37, still high on pole vault
Thursday, May 08, 2008
By ARTHUR L. MACK
Sports Correspondent
Hard work pays off and can reap dividends for many years.

Just ask Grand Bay native Edward Watson, who prepped at Mobile County High School in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a star pole vaulter and triple jumper, and also competed for Auburn University.

After competing for Auburn for a couple of years, he came back to the Mobile area and worked at Mobile Greyhound Park for two years as an assistant announcer, then joined the Navy. He has also coached in middle and high schools, and was an assistant coach at South Alabama for a year.

Now, at the relatively old age of 37, Watson is still competing and enjoying every bit of it. The love of the sport is what keeps Watson who has an official best vault of 16 feet, 4 inches going after all these years.

In fact, Watson won the pole vault (15-9) at the Jaguar Invitational meet at USA this year.

"It's all about longevity," Watson said. "It's season number 25 for me, and I figured it was time to come home and end the season on a positive note."

Watson also coaches at Belleville High (Ill.) in his spare time, and is not far from another Mobile-area track and field figure, former Blount High coach Leroy Milsap, who coaches at Cahokia High.

Watson recalled his high school days with fondness, and said that as he matured, surviving workouts and pacing himself became more of a priority.

"We would always come out, high energy and loved to practice, and talk a bunch of smack," he recalled of his Mobile County High days. "We pushed each other and made each other better. Nowadays, I've just been taking things one day at a time."

Watson got his first exposure to pole vaulting while watching the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials on television when he was 9 years old. As he recalled: "I saw the pole vault competition for the first time, and then I went down to our cow pasture, cut some bamboo poles, and started jumping over the clothesline."

Some may have thought it was crazy but Watson saw it as a means to an end.

"You have to start somewhere," he said of those experiences. "For the young athletes, the best thing is to find something to grab hold to and just keep going. If you find something you like, and if you can be productive at it, then by all means do it. Nowadays, you have kids getting into trouble left and right. For me, sports was a way out."

Watson developed a strong work ethic when he got to Mobile County High, which went from grades 7-12. That strong work ethic served him well when he reached the eighth grade.

"We were fortunate that grades went from 7-12," he said. "I got to work with coach (Edwin) Knowles for that time frame. When I came out for track in the seventh grade, the opening height for a lot of meets was always 10 feet. In the seventh grade, I couldn't clear 10 feet, but I was always good at eight feet."

With no practice mats, Watson often had to compensate by doing a lot of speed work.

"At that time, if you had speed, you could get away with a lot of things," he said.

Although Watson had some injuries starting his sophomore year, he persevered, and by the time he was a senior was one of the state's premier vaulters. As a result, he soared to a state-record 14-2 in the 1990 state meet held in Selma.

Watson also broke the state 5A outdoor record in the triple jump the same day by going 49-7. The old record had been set by Bo Jackson in 1981.

"Things were not going well for me that day in the triple jump," he recalled. "I just kept telling myself to stay focused first I had to get a good jump in, because I had two scratches in the prelims. I came though and used technique and a little bit slower approach down the runway. They were taking seven to the finals and I had that seventh-place finish. From there, I just told myself to move the steps back and give it everything you got."

Watson broke Jackson's record by a foot that day, but that wasn't his biggest thrill in track and field.

"The biggest thrill was doing something that nobody's ever done before," he said. "My freshman year at Auburn, we had the SEC Championship meet at LSU, and I placed sixth in the pole vault and sixth in the triple jump. I had a little spot in the newspaper because I went down in SEC history as having the weirdest combination ever and scoring in both events. So basically I had the most complicated and second most complicated events in track and field."

Watson joined the Navy after two years at Auburn and wound up competing for a team in Germany, called TSB 1860 Rosenheim. He said in Germany, as in most of Europe, coaches start athletes in track and field a lot sooner than in America.

With two children ages 7 and 4, Watson figures at some point he will introduce them to pole vaulting. But if he is still competing once they get old enough, they may face some tough competition.

"My mother said that I ought to let my kids do that," he said. "I told her that when they get old enough, I'll beat them too."