Chris Nilsen of Park Hill High School in Missouri broke the national high school record in the pole vault yesterday with a mark of 18-4.75--his second time ever over 18 feet in competition. Below, Greg Hall examines how Nilsen went from average soccer player to world-class track athlete. This article was originally published on May 6; read more about the new national record here.
18 Feet and Climbing
The first time Rick Attig saw Chris Nilsen, he was frightened.
"Chris Nilsen was scary," said Attig, one of the most revered and accomplished pole vault coaches in the Midwest. "He scared me! I was afraid that the kid was going to hurt himself! He did so many things wrong that kids naturally want to do in the vault."
Nilsen was well into his junior year at Park Hill High School when he decided to try and improve his meager 12-foot-3 PR by taking the sport seriously.
"I really liked the pole vault as a sophomore and I really liked my vault coach, Stephanie Yuen," said Nilsen.
Yuen had taught Nilsen at Congress Middle School. His familiarity with her was the reason he first decided to try pole vaulting, and she encouraged Nilsen to keep working at it.
"I really like the feeling of pole vaulting," said Nilsen. "I like the feeling of going up in midair and that really cool sensation. It's a really weird feeling but it's also really cool."
Nilsen's main focus his freshman and sophomore years was soccer.
"I really wanted to go to college and play soccer because I had been playing since I was three years old," said Nilsen.
So how good of a soccer player is the 6-foot-5, 185-pound Nilsen?
"I like to think I'm pretty good," said Nilsen. "But I'm not any Renaldo or anything."
He needed something to do in the spring so he could avoid playing soccer year-round, but still maintain his fitness and have fun. Yuen was the only Park Hill track coach he knew, so he tried pole vaulting, liked it and decided to get serious.
"In November of my junior year, my dad asked me if I really wanted to pursue pole vaulting as an actual thing and not just a one-season deal," said Nilsen.
Nilsen's dad searched for pole vault camps in the Kansas City area, which led them to Attig.
"I saw this big kid, and I asked him what he vaulted as a sophomore," said Attig. "He told me 12-3, and I thought, 'Gosh, that can't be true! He has to be vaulting higher than that!' But after I watched him jump a few times, I was like, 'Yeah, I can see him only jumping that high.'"
Nilsen's vaulting mechanics were so flawed that Attig wasn't sure where to start.
"Chris had a dinky little stride, and his approach on the runway was horrible," Attig said.
"Pole vaulters at first think they need to pull with their arms, and if you do that, you're going to screw things up! His perception of the vault was all about pulling, and it made it very difficult."
An athlete's potential for improvement is often dependent on how coachable they are. At first, Nilsen struggled to give up the concepts he thought were tried and true.
"When I mentioned to him to not pull, he questioned whether or not that was right," said Attig. "Unless an athlete makes some changes, they're not going to go very far. He had a lot of changes to make and he made them. He was very coachable after that," said Attig.
"I was jumping 12-3 at the time my dad and I drove down to Merriam, Kansas, to meet Rick," Nilsen said. "Within a month after working with Rick, I was jumping 14-6. So I said, 'I'm gonna stay here for a little bit.'"
Nilsen started going three or four times a week, every week to work out with Attig, and has been doing that ever since.
"He's an amazing coach," Nilsen said. "He is the reason I got over anything above 13."
"One thing about Chris is that he is pretty fearless," Attig said. "When you vault correctly all the time, you tend to work through all those little insecurities. They no longer scare you because you've got them under control. He has no problem with coming in fast."
Nilsen thinks just as highly of Attig's talent as a coach.
"He's got this attitude about him where he isn't super hyper, but he also isn't so calm that he's boring," said Nilsen about his pole vaulting tutor. "He has such knowledge on the pole vault. If you doubt anything he says, he will reassure it with more support and back it up from his career. He also relates well to the kids. He has this fun relationship with all of us--kind of like a second parent...or a grandparent."
*****
Nilsen's big breakthrough this year happened at the Kansas Relays, where he broke a 22-year-old meet record by jumping 17-6.5, and just barely missed his last attempt at 18 feet.
"I don't think I was really going for any specific height that day at KU," Nilsen said. "I just wanted to be able to say, 'Hey, I won KU Relays!' which is a very prestigious event and would be a cool thing to do in front of my whole team. I didn't start thinking about height until I cleared 17, and then I said to myself, 'Okay, maybe we're going somewhere today.' Then 17-6 happened to match my PR."
Nilsen then asked the pole vault officials at KU to move the bar to 17-10. They refused.
"Instead of going straight to 18 from 17-6, I asked if I could go to 17-10 first and they said no because they wanted to speed up the competition to get to the pro vaulters," Nilsen said.
His last jump at 18 looked successful until a slight tailwind caught the bar and nudged it off its perch. But Nilsen took home the title and his KU Relays record.
"It really showed me I could jump 18 feet," said Nilsen. "A couple of weeks ago, I didn't know if I could go any higher. I was cruising along at low 17s for a while and I didn't know if I was going to get much higher. Almost jumping 18 at KU showed me I'm not done yet. I can keep going."
"When I saw Chris almost jump 18 feet at KU Relays, I thought he could jump 18-6 this year," said Attig. "I've worked with a lot of 18 footers, and most of them you never really know until you see them vault. When I saw him jump at Reno (in January) my thought was, 'I don't see how he can avoid jumping 18 feet!' If you wanted to keep him from jumping 18 feet, it would be hard!"
Robert Self, the head track coach at Park Hill High School, was busy hustling from event to event as his school hosted their conference meet earlier this month. As the day turned to the evening, he had yet to check on Nilsen.
"I'll be honest," confessed Self. "I was running around checking on all of our other events and I kind of forgot the vault was still going on. Then (the PA voice) announced, 'Chris Nilsen is about to attempt 18 feet,' so I rushed down there to videotape it.
"I made a smart-aleck comment to him like, 'Come on Nilsen, let's go.' And then he did it! I remembered to keep the video going all the way through his jump because I learned from KU when I threw my phone down as he cleared the bar and didn't get the end of his jump!"
"I think the PA said something like, 'Chris Nilsen is trying to become one of the best pole vaulters in high school history, blah, blah, blah,'" said Nilsen. "I had my whole team come over and watch me and clap me down the runway. It was really fun to have them all there."
"I honestly think that if he would have set that bar at the national high school record height of 18-4 that day, I think he would have gotten it," Self said. "He was a good four to six inches over that bar."
*****
Nilsen nailed his remarkable nation-leading 18-foot vault in front of not only his entire team, his cheering conference opponents and coaches, but also his parents and girlfriend, Kelly Vogel.
"I probably could not have jumped 18 without her and my parents being there," admitted Nilsen.
Vogel is a pole vaulter at Johnson County Community College and the leaping couple have been an item now for almost a year after meeting at Attig's pole-vaulting camp over two years ago.
"We were friends for about two years before we started going out," said Vogel. "I liked him from the beginning. I thought he was really cute. He was really sweet. We were never single at the same time, and then when we were single, it took him three months to ask me out. I was about to ask him out myself, I'm not going to lie!"
Following these two on social media gives you the impression they are a fun couple.
"The first thing I liked about him is he's got this goofy smile and these bright blue eyes," said Vogel. "His eyes are just killer to me! When I first met him he was a little bit of a klutz, and he still is. And he always tries to play it off. We do weird little dances for each other at practice."
"We have a really fun relationship," said Nilsen. "We never really fight, we just kind of talk. She's amazing."
Being a college athlete, Vogel doesn't have as much free time as she would like to attend Chris' meets, but she makes it a point to be at every one she can.
"I always bring his favorite snacks," explains Vogel. Nilsen favors banana chips and apples on meet days.
"I always make sure to bring a lawn chair, an umbrella and a blanket. I bring everything and anything that I think he could possibly need. I like to bring enough stuff just in case but even then he eats so much it's not a guarantee!"
Vogel knows, "It's gonna suck," when Nilsen heads off to South Dakota University next fall on a track scholarship. But she thinks coach Derek Miles, a three-time pole vault Olympian, is the perfect guy to tutor him.
"I met Derek when he came to talk to Chris on an in-home visit," Vogel said. "I knew he was a great guy and by far the best coach Chris could have besides Rick. Derek is super humble, which I think is going to help Chris. I think Derek and Chris and the (SDU) team are going to be a great match."
"Chris is unique in that his pole vaulting is just catching up to what his abilities are," said Miles. "From a pole vaulter's perspective, he's got all of the tools you're looking for. He's tall, athletic and he's got a very natural swing for the vault. That wasn't there a year ago. He made some huge strides his junior year. He's made changes to jump really high, really quickly. He sends me videos, and you can see him change in his jump every two weeks. Sometimes that takes years to figure out for most kids."
"Derek Miles called me and he just really seemed like a nice guy," said Nilsen. "He had all these philosophies about the vault and how it's not about trying to get points for the team but it's about building someone as a person and building the program as a whole. He came for a home visit and he had all this stuff prepared for the academics I wanted to go into and it really blew my mind. He's an extremely nice person and he cares about his athletes. He doesn't see them as his athletes but I think he sees them as his children, which I think is pretty fantastic. He's also really experienced and knowledgeable. When I went on a visit there and met the team and found out how good their academics are I was like, 'This is where I need to be.' I committed back in November."
What's next after jumping 18 feet and becoming one of only nine high school athletes to ever achieve that mark? The Olympic Trials in early July are Nilsen's next major goal.
"Now that I've hit 18, I just need to keep moving my goals up," said Nilsen. "Yes, 18-4 to get the all-time high school record would be nice, but my ultimate goal is 18-6.5 and making it to the Olympic Trials. If I could make the Olympic Trials my senior year in high school or my freshman year in college...that would be a dream come true! It would be a great experience to be there with all of my idols."
Attig thinks Nilsen's family might need to think about booking flights to Eugene this July.
"It is not far-fetched that he could jump 18-6," said Attig. "That would be an automatic qualifier for the Olympic Trials. I could really see it happening. He's going to have a great future."
His future college coach agrees.
"He's going to be a huge, huge deal at the next level," said Miles. "At 18 years old, Chris probably has a career at this, but let's not try to have it all in the next two years. But at the same time, let's see if we can keep getting better with some short-term goals and have some fun with it."
Greg Hall
greghall24@yahoo.com
