Morry Sanders Keeps Finding Himself In Pole Position

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http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/sports_ ... 809.126586

Morry Sanders Keeps Finding Himself In Pole Position
by Philip Seaton
Morry Sanders had no one to blame but himself when his 17-year-old state pole vaulting record was broken by Bryant’s Spencer McCorkel in 2006.

Sanders, who set the record in 1988 while a senior at Lake Hamilton High School, helped coach McCorkel at his Black Springs residence (about 40 minutes from the Lake Hamilton campus).

It wasn’t a path that Sanders set out on. After vaulting for Arkansas State, Sanders received his degree in exercise science and started working in the fitness industry. While he didn’t see a pole for eight years, it was almost by accident that he got into coaching.

“Out of the blue, a guy named Billy Plyler calls me up and say his daughter’s [Brandie] starting to pole vault, and that he had heard that I used to vault and wanted me to come work with her,” Sanders said. “She had so much success so fast that I decided that this was my calling.”

He went back to college to get his teaching certification and, after completing that, coached at Caddo Hills for three years before returning to his alma mater as assistant track and football coach.

In the mean time, the 39-year-old rediscovered his passion for the sport and decided to create a vaulters’ haven on his property in Black Springs.

“We started [Arkansas Vault Club] in 1999 and didn’t have a facility or any equipment of any kind,” he said of the facility he operates with his wife, Christy. “We just had Brandi and couple of Lake Hamilton kids … before I knew it we had 20 kids and they started coming out on a regular basis.”

The non-profit club, which raises funds through clinics and selling vaulting equipment, has since taken over a larger arch-style building with two mondo rubber runways.

He has coached 61 state (indoor and outdoor) title holders in that span, and sent countless club members on to college, including schools such as Arkansas, Penn State, Ole Miss, Arkansas State and Princeton to name a few.

“I’m really excited with what we have got going on,” Sanders said. “Every year it seems to get better and better. Last year we had four 15-foot plus vaulters and this year we already have five [in March].”

State of Vaulting
If the national barometer for high school track is the Nike Championships, then Arkansas can take pride in calling itself one of the top vaulting states in the country.

Arkansas has produced two Nike Champions in Bryant’s Spencer McCorkel in 2007 and Jason Pelletier, also of Bryant, in 2008. Both trained at Lake Hamilton coach Morry Sanders’ Arkansas Vault Club in Montgomery County.

Sanders says he would take the state’s best and stack them up against anybody nationally.

“We’d be one of the top states in the country,” he said. “We are always right there in the hunt and we are always near the top [at the Nike meet].”

Asked what makes the state so special as far as producing vaulters, he laughed.

“Maybe there is just nothing else around here to do but pole vault,” Sanders said.

Sanders, who owned the state record for 17 years before McCorkel broke it in 2006, vaulted at Lake Hamilton under coach Karl Koonce.

Koonce, who still coaches at the school, offered a different reason for the state’s success.

“What makes it so special is people like Morry Sanders and [Olympian] Earl Bell,” he said. “Earl, back in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, set the trend. And then all the press that Morry and Walter [Mooneyhan of Heber Springs] got in the late ’80s when they were moving the state record up on the high school level – it went from 15-4 to 16-8 in a two-year span. That’s part of it.”

Koonce, who has coached more than a handful of state champions in pole vault, was a distance runner in high school and college. He said he got his education in the sport from Bell and former Arkansas State coach Guy Kochel.

“The pole vault is one of those events that you don’t have to have the best athletes but you can out-work and out-coach some others instead of relying on natural talent,” he said. “For some reason or another we have developed a good trend in pole vaulting.”