COLUMN: Women's vault gets attention at Relays

Josh Callahan, Commentary While last night featured a host of championship races featuring top college athletes, the earlier hours at the 104th Penn Relays featured heat after heat of 4x100 and 4x400 relays. The first full day of competition at the Carnival shows reveals the dichotomy existing between competitors. The smooth precision of the 4x100 teams of Texas and Louisiana State, which were out simply to qualify for today's 1 p.m. championship final, matched up against countless other college teams getting 50 seconds of track time in their only race of the weekend. Schools had bibs for the college women's 4x100, beginning with the AA on LSU's backs all the way to the FM of SUNY Farmingdale. That's 127 schools. And that isn't even close to the number of high schools entered in the girls 4x100 -- their letters went all the way to ZH. · There existed no greater divide among competitors than at the high school girls' pole vault. Event No. 260 of the Penn Relays wasn't drawing the attention of the crowd, but it provided a summary of the commotion going on elsewhere on the track during the day. Contested by high school girls last year for the first time at the Relays, it is a new sport which is just now nurturing its first potential stars. When the high school boys began competing in the pole vault in 1961, they were clearing 13 feet. The girls are quickly catching up as last year's inaugural winner, Melissa Feinstein, cleared 12'1 1/2". Meet Erin Nett and Katie Bolac, two of the handful of elite high schoolers in the field yesterday. While other pole vaulters impaled themselves on the bar hanging nine and a half feet above the turf, these two competitors performed with a sizable amount of form and skill. Of 15 or so pole vaulters, these two had not taken a run at the bar before more than half the field had eliminated itself. Bolac was still in her mittens doing handstands in the middle of the field while various entrants flew parallel to the bar crashing into it. But it is a new sport and a lot of people are still high on the learning curve. Nett and Bolac both have experience with gymnastics, although Nett stoped competing in order to focus more on pole vaulting. The work has paid off, as the two are among the elite in the country. Nett finished third in indoors during the winter, just a year after taking up the sport. "One summer I was over at [my friend Matt's] house and he was like, 'watch these videos, I bet you can do this.' And I said I would try," Bolac said. "I've never been to a big meet like this. I was really, really nervous. When I walked in I was like, 'there's no way.' " Nett, the lone entrant in the Penn Relays for Bel Air High school in Maryland, is headed to Clemson on a full scholarship. Her coach Donnie Mickey convinced her to try the pole vault in part because he felt it was an easy event to get a scholarship . "By the time she finished college, I think she is going to do 14 feet," Mickey said. "She really did not have a great day, but she got her steps down on the last one, and that's the one that counts." Fourteen feet would be an amazing feat considering that when Nett started a year ago, she was vaulting using the wrong side of the pole. It was only at the county championships when another coach pointed out her backwards use of the pole that she flipped it around. And ever since, she has been winning meets consistently. After competing, Nett got to pop open the black box with her new watch inside, the traditional prize given to the winner of each event. "I lost my [old] watch last weekend," Nett said with a smile.