The Universal Pole System
This one goes out to every athletic coordinator, every equipment manager, and every poor mother and father thats had to drag around fifty thousand poles just so one person can compete. Pole vaulting is one of the most athletic events in track and field. Vaulters risk life and limb every day to do what they love, overcoming vertigo and a completely rational fear being impaled. Now that I’m done jazzing up all you pole vaulters out there, we have to have a serious conversation about how god damn inconvenient y’all are. I was once on a travel trip flying from Indiana to Philadelphia for Penn Relays. It was a fine trip, maybe four hours of travel and we were in the heart of the city, staring down the rocky statue and trying to avoid eagles fans. However, this was not the case for our pole vault squad. Because they were lugging around enough poles to scaffold the Eiffel tower, there wasn’t a big enough plane flying from Indiana to accommodate them. These poor kids flew from Indianapolis, all the way down to Florida, just to go back up the east coast to get to Pennsylvania. All together with layovers? They probably spent over 12 hours the day before their competition traveling and on their feet. Ridiculous.
Enter the universal pole system.
Hear me out all you NCAA athletic coordinators. Every school that hosts track meets invests in a standard number of poles that the entire field can use, so no one has to bring their own. Everything from your shortest poles for the baby freshman trying to clear 9 feet, to whatever the hell Mondo uses to clear 19. Sounds expensive? Think of it as an investment. You already have to buy half those poles anyways for your athletes to practice on, and you would definitely save money in the long-term dodging what must be insane checked bag fees. It only makes sense, you don’t see 100m runners carrying around their blocks through Dulles, and while throwers have their own shots and weights, at least those fit in a standard carry-on bag. This is one of those ideas that I can’t comprehend why it’s not already a thing. That being said, I don’t know catching a mid from a trail leg, so I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Also sorry high schoolers, your athletic department definitely doesn’t have that type of cash, so I’d tell mom not to sell that Honda Odyssey quite yet.
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