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I was officiating a girls high school meet yesterday. A vaulter cleared the bar at the 6' 0" opening height and pushed her pole back with such force that the top of the pole hit the box-side front corner of the right front bun of the pit and bounced back up and hit the crossbar causing it to fall. I think that the place where the pole hit the front bun was beyond the minimum dimension of a high school legal pit. Never seen this happen before and probably won't again. My guess is that it was technically a miss but I called it good (opening height, early season meet around here, new vaulter . . .). Was it a make or a miss?

By rule, it would be a miss. I probably would have called it a make myself though.

Haha at that low of a height, that early in the season, I probably would have called it a make too. The odds of it happening again are pretty slim.

In a meet other then a national or state meet, I think there can be alot of grey when it comes to the rules, because at local meets the volunteer running off the vault does not know many of the rules. I run off the pole vault at local meets in Oklahoma and have given alot more then they do at a big meet. I have ran off three meets in Oklahoma and would have had to disqualify most of the kids due to the label rule alone, most of the coach's in Oklahoma do not know that rule among others.

Hey Darth -
Good call! I think I would have also taken the athlete aside and explained that was a miss, but we are going to count it as a make and explain why. The problem (and I see it all the time) is when we don't make calls like this, or labels, or breaking the plane and contact, and then the athlete gets to a "Big Meet" the official at the "Big Meet" makes the prober call and then he or she hears, "We have been allowed to do this all year". And then the "fun" begins. OK just my .02

Dan

Thanks for the thoughts. I also thought this situation was analogous to one where a properly released pole is falling back away from the bar and the standards and anything that could affect either, is caught by a the pole/step catcher and then he or she stumbles and knocks the bar off. That certainly would not have been a miss. Here the pole literally rose from the dead and dislodged the bar.

Darth Vaulter wrote: I also thought this situation was analogous to one where a properly released pole is falling back away from the bar and the standards and anything that could affect either, is caught by a the pole/step catcher and then he or she stumbles and knocks the bar off. That certainly would not have been a miss. Here the pole literally rose from the dead and dislodged the bar.

Along the same lines, I was thinking that perhaps it's similar to if a vaulter ATTEMPTS to throw the pole back, but a gust of wind (or something else outside of the vaulter's control) blows it back and knocks the bar off.

In this case, it wasn't a fluke of nature, but simply another kind of fluke. Since the vaulter clearly threw the pole away from the bar (or at least attempted to), and clearly cleared the bar, the fact that the pole popped back up and hit the crossbar off is AFTER the vault is over, isn't it?

So my vote is that it's a MAKE (and within the rules), because either (a) the bar was knocked off AFTER it was cleanly cleared - with the pole supposedly going AWAY from the bar; or (b) the vaulter made a PROPER attempt to push the pole back (albeit too strong of a push) and thru a fluke (not ENTIRELY the vaulter's own fault), the pole knocked off the bar.

I realize that this is purely hypothetical, since it's such a fluke it might never happen again. But what if ...

... the pole catcher was quick enough to CATCH the pole after it bounced off the front bun, but before it struck the bar? Would that be INTERFERENCE by the pole-catcher, or not?

Or can the "LACK OF INTERFERENCE" by the pole-catcher be blamed for why the pole hit the bar?

Kirk

I think ferndale's pits did this often. they had new front buns made and there was no taper around the box. It happened all the time with anyone using a small pole where the front bun would fling it back into the bar. They always called it a make.