Cal Pit Burned, Ruled Arson

[mowad1]

Actually fireworks set the Altoona Area High School pit on fire 3 years ago on 4 July weekend. It burned right to the ground. They caught the kids who admitted to using a spining flare. It went up pretty fast.

[Carolina Extreme]

"$35,000 fiberglass pit"

???

I would have loved to have seen that pit prior to burning. I'm sure it was quite impressive. Anyone care to speculate what it was made of? Satin mesh laced with gold, top pad. Maybe that space foam they advertise on TV. Wow-wee! LOL

Maybe that's the ticket to getting the top athletes to take up vaulting... a very, very comfortable and high class pit. Why LJ or run sprints when your friends will oooh and aaah as you land in the Ferrari of landing systems

[TVVAcoach]

http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=18968

The Picture here tells the story. The damage to the round on the track is pretty bad. Officiated there for the NCS Meet of Champions this year and it will be expensive to get the field back to competition ready.

[liveinthesky]

i may be wrong here, but I know that some of us had that crappy pit in high school, or maybe even in college. AND some of us thought about burning down our track shed to get all NEW equipment....

We had a set of crappy outdoor pits my freshman year in college and had talked about putting a match to our pits to get new ones......

Anybody know what kind of condition their mats were in?

I go to school at Cal, I've been home all summer so I haven't seen the pits but they were in pretty nice condition before and are not that old. The other pole vaulter and a heptalthete were walking down the street and saw the light from the track and jumped over to see what it was and saw teh pits on fire. I cant imagine what it would be like to see your pits on fire. I go back in a few weeks and Ill let you know if they found anything else out.

[Sebes]

BJ- I laughed out loud when I read your comment: I was thinking exactly the same thing! We had thought about burning our old equipment in order to recieve newer, state of the art equipment. The police shouldn't rule out any bitter vaulters...( I would be bitter too if I had to land on a giant block of fibreglass!)

[polevaultdad]

A couple of kids torched the Track Shed at Mission Viejo High School 2 years ago. Got the PV pads (boys and girls), high jump (boys and girls), hurdles, team tug, and all the poles (boys and girls-80+ poles). Basically 20+ years of accumulated stuff that all had to be replaced.

Over $100k to replace it all.

They got caught - don't know the punishment.

[flyingfox21]

The pads were in reallly good condition. They were nice and stiff, but not too hard, and they were HUGE!! i was talkin to the coach about 2 weeks ago and he said the pads were only bout 2 years old. He also said that the track is gonna be hard to fix cas the company that origionally put it in went out of business, so they have to get it done by some other company and it will never look the same. Its a shame that someone could do this