How important are team points..........to you?

[RidinHigh]

I know exactly what you mean because no one watched, cheered, or wrote about us either. We did our own thing all the time.

It could also be because we only had 15 runners between the guys and girls teams!

[scubastevesgirly]

I don't think you're supposed to be thinking about the points, but you have to do your best for yourself. The points kinda come as a bonus for doing your best. There's no point in thinking about the points, b/c it may make you nervous (i guess in some cases it could be incentive), but w/ most PVers, you ALWAYS want to improve and do your best, so the pts. are just gonna come when they happen to.

...like in basketball..you want to make a basket to make a basket...you're not thinking about making pts., you're thinking about making the basket

...at least that's one way to look at it

[master]

Consider this as a situation where you might think about team points. Let's say you are a good vaulter and you use the strategy of passing until a height of 6" or 12" below your PR. You do this so you can have a lot of energy when you jump at heights that will give you a new PR. But that strategy sometimes causes a person to NH.

What if the competition is such that you could guarantee a place (get points) by changing your strategy and jumping once at a lower height (less risk of a NH) than you were planning to open at? Would you do that to score some team points, knowing it could cause you to have a little less energy at your higher jumps?

There are times when you can increase your chances of contributing to the team score with very little cost to your personal goals.

[CHC04Vault]

I don't think you're supposed to be thinking about the points, but you have to do your best for yourself. The points kinda come as a bonus for doing your best. There's no point in thinking about the points, b/c it may make you nervous (i guess in some cases it could be incentive), but w/ most PVers, you ALWAYS want to improve and do your best, so the pts. are just gonna come when they happen to.

...like in basketball..you want to make a basket to make a basket...you're not thinking about making pts., you're thinking about making the basket

...at least that's one way to look at it

I think points are important, but shouldn't be live/die for. As a member of the team, u HAVE to take one for the team, if that means clearing lower hieghts if need be, then u HAVE to, if it means taking on 3 more events, then u HAVE to, if my coach told me to jump though a flamin hula-hoop i would without questioning it. You are a team MEMBER first, then u are the individual. As for poitns, each season i put a goal of how many points i would want to get, but i would also have my main goals of heights.

[BeamQueen987]

I am the only girl vaulter who actually cares about getting team points. At state last weekend, our 4X100 relay team dropped the baton, it pushed us back to 3rd place. I knew i had to do good to win, so i cowgirl'ed up and pr'd with 11' which was good enough for 4th place individually. That put our team back in first and we earned our 10th straight team title.

[Aviendha]

i must say i never really felt like part of a team until sectionals, when there were only 9 of us that qualified, even more so at state with 7 of us, but at that point, team points didn't matter, because we didn't have enough of a team to matter. I've had meets before where most of the team points would come from my place in pv...our track team has a few strong events/individuals, but the rest is pretty weak...

I never really got to know many of the people on track outside of pv, because we're always off on our own, so I would have to say, i vault for me.

[scubastevesgirly]

I think points are important, but shouldn't be live/die for. As a member of the team, u HAVE to take one for the team, if that means clearing lower hieghts if need be

I guess I'm never really in that situation since I tend to start a minimum of 4 heights lower than I can vault comfortably....but maybe that's bad

[CHC04Vault]

I guess I'm never really in that situation since I tend to start a minimum of 4 heights lower than I can vault comfortably....but maybe that's bad

I wouldn't always go for minimum heights, if a team was really bad or we knew we were gonna win an inivite i was told to go for w/e i felt like i could get. Usually i would clear 12'6" and then jack it up all the way to 14 or 15 and i will always miss it just a lil bit

[Vaulter99]

My coach once told me at sectionals, "I would rather have you jump 11 feet and get first place then you get 14 feet and not even place." I don't know about you all, but when he told me this I got extremely pissed, to the point where I was about to flip out.

[breaker]

My coach once told me at sectionals, "I would rather have you jump 11 feet and get first place then you get 14 feet and not even place." I don't know about you all, but when he told me this I got extremely pissed, to the point where I was about to flip out.

i feel your pain, that might just make me explode. it allways kind of bugged me when during the season i was never asked "how well did you do" but rather "how did you place" they didnt seem to get that i would be happy getting second or third if i jumped well.

so i guess "team loyalty" isnt too big with me, i jump to jump and really dont care about the points i score, but i mean of course i would like to win, so i guess indirectly i do. i do have a lot of club loyalty and if i could score points for my club rather than for my team, i think i would care a lot more

[izzystikchik]

Well, my highschool years of track were pretty good to me. Our head coach was the only one who cared about points, our individual coaches paid attention to our technique and well being. I came from a very large highschool and our girls track team had like 80-90 girls all very talented. We were awesome across the board, Conference champs, Sectional Champs, 20 State qualifiers...
So i never felt the pressure of having to win..(even though i did win about 99% of the time ) my event. That help me a lot during most meets. You don't want the burden of expectation to bear you down when trying to make a bar.

[souleman]

Ok, when it comes to the rest of the team paying any attention to your event, there's one simple statement that says it all, "YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE". Simple as that. As to never getting anything written about you? That too has a simple answer. Write your own story! There isn't a weekly local paper in any home town that won't print a well written story about your event and the teams' progress if you write it and give it to them. Surely there has to be a journalism student on the pv team or a parent that could write and e-mail or call in results to your local paper. If you want more notoriety, create it yourself. In the PR business it's called "creating a buzz". If no one will do it for you then do it yourself. If you're not willing to put forth the effort to accomplish possitive results to either of these subjects, then you'll get what you've always gotten...........nothin'. And if you get nothin' because you weren't willing to do something about it............don't b*tch about it. To be a team member, you have to be a contributing "member" of a team. Later...................Mike