COLUMN: NCAA fouls in pole vault leap

She finished seventh. This year Desai improved her mark by almost two inches, jumping 9'6.25''. But she finished only 25th. Why has the competition in the women's pole vault gotten so much better? Because the women have had to start from scratch. Last year was the first time that the women's pole vault was contested in the Ivy League. After two years of exhibition status, the vault will finally become an official event next year. Just in time to keep up with the meteoric rise of the women vaulters. "The women are improving leaps and bounds in this event," Penn assistant coach Tony Tenisci said. "The learning curve is really expanding. Next year, 11 feet might only be eighth [at ECACs]." This year, 11 feet was good enough for second place. College coaches and athletes are learning the intricacies of the vault, so now women can no longer expect to succeed with athletic talent alone. But not all the pole vault improvement has come from within. "High school girls are going over 12 feet now," Tenisci said. "When they join the ranks of the collegiates, [the pole vault] will be even harder." For the first time, college coaches are recruiting women vaulters instead of trying to convert other women's athletes to the highly technical event. "We have been just taking our lesser long jumpers and making them into vaulters," Dartmouth assistant coach Carl Wallin said. Now athletes are coming in as freshmen with knowledge of the vault -- and thus a higher ceiling. "Soon at the college level there will be tons of kids vaulting over 13 feet," Wallin said. "And the top athletes will clear 15 feet." But while the Ivy League will make the women's pole vault an official event last year, this year marks the second consecutive season that NCAA will contest the vault as a scoring event. "My initial reaction was I wasn't happy because [the pole vault] wasn't a widely contested high school event," Cornell coach Lou Duesing said. "It didn't give schools time to recruit and it's not the safest of our events. To just throw us into the situation, I thought it was a mistake." Faced with the NCAA's surprisingly swift addition of the women's pole vault, the Ivy coaches voted to make the event an exhibition for two years before it became an official scoring event at Heptagonals. "The thinking was we wanted to give coaches and athletes time to develop," Brown coach Rob Rothenberg said. "Because the event was so new, there was a question of equipment, a question of coaching expertise, and a question of time needed to develop athletes that wanted to do the event." Now, on the eve of the pole vault becoming a scoring event, the vaulters are finally competing at a championship level. Fresno State's Melissa Price, the top collegiate pole vaulter, has already cleared 14 feet this season. But the NCAA may have cheapened the value of a championship in the pole vault by being so quick to add it to the women's slate. Last year's NCAA champion, Bianca Maran from Cal Poly Tech, cleared only 12'5.5'' in Nationals -- nearly 10 inches less than Tracey O'Hara's best jump last year as a high school senior. "If the NCAA were to add the 200 [meter dash] to the Indoor Nationals, it would immediately be run at a championship level," Rothenberg said. "But the pole vault is such a technical event." Like the hammer throw or high jump, the pole vault takes time to perfect. And time was now at a premium for college coaches, who had to scramble to find vaulters. Princeton's first women's pole vaulter last year was, according to coach Peter Farrell, "someone I noticed with upper body strength." So while Farrell tried to compete with a rookie vaulter, the NCAA had implemented the pole vault as a scoring event in Nationals. Many of the top women's track programs in the country were without a pole vaulter -- yet the event would still factor in determining the next national champion. The NCAA should have done what the Ivy League coaches did. Wait.

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