Sallie Gurganus sets new standard in pole vault
By Bill Cain

GREENSBORO — After Ashley Beale of Southeast Raleigh failed to make it over the bar at 11 feet in the pole vault Saturday at the NCHSAA 4-A State Championships at North Carolina A&T, Sallie Gurganus had won yet another state championship. That’s three over the last three track and field seasons, outdoor, indoor and now outdoor again.

She had done all she could for her team in the event, and was now focusing on her own goal, breaking the state record.

The old record was 11 feet, 8-inches, set in 2001 by Erica Derrickson of Millbrook and was the 4-A record and the overall state record. Gurganus asked the officials to move the bar to 11-8. About 15 minutes later, a group of officials and coaches had verified the height of the bar and told Sallie, who had been waiting patiently and nervously on the grass beside the runway, that she could give it a try.

“That’s the part I hate the most and they had to do that at conference too and at some other meets that I’ve been at,” Gurganus said. “It was a little nerve-racking with it being state and going for the record, and that’s all I was going for today. I was really nervous, which I’m not usually, but it turned out pretty good.”

One attempt later, she had added to her growing assortment of state crowns a state record at 11-8.

After having raised the bar for the rest of the state, she raised it for herself. She tried 12-1 and came close, but kept landing on the bar. With more practice at 12 feet and above, she said she should be able to make the height. She added that she still hasn’t tired of the event and will be vaulting through a good portion of the summer.

Two other state records fell Saturday, as Kamorean Hayes of Harding broke the record she set last year in the shot put of 47-7 1/2 with a throw of 47-9 and J-Mee Samuels of Mount Tabor broke the 1980 record set by Alston Glenn of Northern Durham in the 200 (21.02 seconds) with a time of 20.61.

Seven Watauga track and field athletes in all went to the state meet and five of them returned with six personal records, another with a personal best for this season. All of the girls and two of the boys also placed.

As a team, those places added up to an eighth place finish for the four girls, who finished with 26.5 points. The boys finished in a tie for 35th.

“That was a coaches dream to have that many do that well,” Watauga coach Randy McDonough said. “You usually hope for about half of them and we had all but two of them PR. I think the kids were ready to go. They did the right things to get themselves ready and went out and did it.”

Julie Ward also placed in the pole vault, finishing tied for third but receiving fifth place points because other vaulters made the height of 10 feet on earlier attempts. Ward also hit 5-2 in the high jump to place seventh, though her height was even with that of fifth place.

McDonough said he and the coaching staff had been waiting for a breakthrough from Ward and had known all along what she was capable of doing. Ward was a little less confident of her ability, but found a way to get past the barriers that had held her all season.

“I’ve kind of always had a trust issue,” she said. “I finally said, ‘God, you’ve got to help me because I can’t do this on my own,’ and he did. This is all Him.”

Watauga’s two girls’ distance runners at the meet also set a personal record in the 3,200-meter run. Anna Mae Flynn was seeded first in the event and ran her PR of 11:16.50, less than a second behind Green Hope’s Brittany Johnson, who won the event in 11:15.59. Danielle Cullen came in with a PR of 11:41.09 for a fifth-place finish.

Flynn was unhappy with the top seed because she prefers to be the chaser and not the chased. Early in the race, she was waiting for Chapel Hill’s Lindsey Nadolski to move ahead of her, but Nadolski stayed beside Flynn for a few laps. Then came Johnson, who Flynn gladly let take the lead in the sixth lap.

“That’s usually my thing,” Flynn said. “It’s always easier to follow and that’s what I’ve been doing. But I’m kind of proud that I was able to go out there and run a gutsy race. When she passed me I thought that would be good.”

But Johnson is a good 800 runner and had just 800 meters to go. Johnson kicked her way through the last lap well enough to stay just ahead of Flynn.

Cullen was within an arm’s length of the leaders on the fifth and sixth lap, but then the leaders started to pull away and the field started to spread out.

“I surged in the fourth or fifth lap and I thought I could stay there,” Cullen said. “I tried to gut it out, and I thought I did pretty well. People started to separate too, by the fifth and sixth lap. They went out there and did it and I tried to stay with them, it just didn’t happen.”

But Cullen was pleased with fifth place after finishing in eighth in her last two trips to state. The PR in her final race as a high school athlete was also an accomplishment she was proud of.

Breaking the 12 minute mark in the Northwestern 4-A Conference meet also helped her in her last two meets, she said.

“I had a good season up until conference and I really wanted to break 12 then and I did,” she said. “That helped a lot. At regionals I thought, ‘I did it at conference, I can do it again.’ Then when I got here, I thought, ‘You know what, I’m here, this is the last time I will ever run the 32 in high school, why not try to break it even more?’ I did that and I’m very happy with it.”

The second and fifth place finish in the event will help perpetuate the perennial success the Pioneers have in girls’ distance events, McDonough said.

“We have a streak of girls making the state meet and doing well and I think that will fire the other girls up and make them want to go do what these ladies did,” McDonough said. “There are several of them that came to watch the meet and I think they were just excited by everything they saw and want to get there. Then with Danielle and Anna Mae doing as well as they did, that gives them something to shoot for.”

The eighth place finish overall was another mark for future teams to set in their sights. With four girls setting personal bests in five events, there is little else that could be asked of the team.

Of course, this group has gotten used to giving everything they have for the team.

“I was talking with them earlier in kind of our little prep talk, and I just realized that this group that has made it has done a lot of work,” Flynn said. “When we had the Tennessee invitational, this group was the one that went down to the Tennessee invitational the same weekend as homecoming. We put in a lot of dedication and we were rewarded for it.”

Macey Ruble was also rewarded with a personal best. His top effort in the pole vault entering the outdoor season had been a 10-foot mark set in indoor. He soon ascended to 12 feet, but was stuck there until Saturday, when he broke 13 feet to claim ninth place with a mark equal to that of fourth place.

All of this seems more significant when you consider a mental barrier Ruble had to overcome.

“I get pretty scared,” he said. “It’s all mental and that’s probably why I didn’t go over 13 before this. I think I’m scared of heights.”

All kidding aside, one factor that may have kept Ruble from going even higher Saturday was the length of his pole. He was using the longest pole Watauga has, but he has out-vaulted that pole now and his coaches are planning on getting a longer one soon.

“The higher the pole, the higher I can go,” Ruble said. “Hopefully by indoor, I can go 14 or over.”

McDonough said that Ruble finally went after 12-6 and 13-0 as if they were nothing new. In the past, he would change his technique after clearing 12 feet and those changes would throw him off.

The other two boys at the meet for the Pioneers were throwers Daniel Corriher and Andrew Salzano. Corriher finished seventh in the shot put with a season’s best of 48-8 and Salzano faltered a little and finished 12th in the discus with a 133-10.

For Corriher, seventh was an improvement over last year’s ninth, which left him just out of scoring position. That improvement gave him some satisfaction, but he said he still thought he had more in him that a mistake in technique held back.

“I had more in me if I had had the right technique at the right time today,” he said. “On the 48-8 throw, I dropped my chest too soon and that made the shot go flat. If I’d have kept my chest up, it would have been over 50.”

Salzano said technique was also the reason he didn’t make finals. His prelim throw fell three and a half feet short of making finals. His top throw is 148 and change, which would have put him in fifth. His seed mark, thrown last weekend at regionals, was 143, which would have been good for sixth.

“I was too conservative in my throwing,” Salzano said. “I went through my spin kind of slow and didn’t really put a lot into the throw. I should have. I don’t know why. I guess I was just scared of throwing it out of bounds.”

Even though he didn’t advance to the finals, Salzano said he enjoyed being a part of the competition. He may not have placed, but he was and is among the best throwers in the state.

“I’m pretty happy to be here,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of these guys before and gotten to know a few of them. It was nice to get everybody together and throw again, but I was a little disappointed with the way I performed. But it’s a good experience to be at the state meet with the top throwers in the state.”

Corriher and Salzano were two of the most dependable scorers for the boys’ team this season, finishing 1-2 in many of the meets in both shot put and discus. McDonough said their performances throughout the season will be the stuff of stories told to future Pioneer throwers, once the team gets their hands on a few more throwers.

“I wish we had more throwers to look up to them, we need to get some more,” he said. “But we’ll use them all the time in our stories, talking about their exploits and everything. They were two great kids who worked their rear ends off to get to where they are and that will set the precedent for years to come.”

Each of the Pioneers at the meet threw everything they had that day into the competition, and McDonough said he could not ask for anything more from them. The athletes who turned in their best times and distances but didn’t win, he said, have nothing to be disappointed about, as they were just beaten by someone who had a better day.

Those returning athletes that he will see for the indoor season will be exciting to coach, and he said he is looking forward to getting his hands back on them.

“The ones we are losing are going to be hard to replace, but I’m really looking forward to what we have coming back,” McDonough said. “I think we have a good group coming back with good state-meet experience and I think we’ll be very satisfied with what we see.”