http://www.journalstar.com/articles/200 ... 293494.txt
Pole vaulter ready to return to action
BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
Jenny Green’s back hurt so much last year, she couldn’t walk right. Couldn’t bend right. Couldn’t buy milk right. Nothing was right.
Life was a constant, literal pain. But you want to know the biggest pain?
It was watching the Nebraska women’s track and field team win the indoor and outdoor Big 12 Conference championships.
It’s not that the sophomore pole vaulter wanted her teammates to lose. It’s just that she didn’t do anything to help them win.
If you know Green, you know that cheerleading doesn’t get her blood rushing. Clearing a bar 14 feet in the air does. That’s what she’d like to do this year, a year after wondering if she’d ever vault again.
Kris Grimes is in his first year of coaching Husker pole vaulters, but he already calls Green “one of the most driven athletes I’ve ever coached.â€Â
Jenny Green ready to return to action
-
rainbowgirl28
- I'm in Charge
- Posts: 30435
- Joined: Sat Aug 31, 2002 1:59 pm
- Expertise: Former College Vaulter, I coach and officiate as life allows
- Lifetime Best: 11'6"
- Gender: Female
- World Record Holder?: Renaud Lavillenie
- Favorite Vaulter: Casey Carrigan
- Location: A Temperate Island
- Contact:
Jenny is great girl, i'll be glad to see here competing again this season...it was a rough time for her when she fell in italy, and glad to see she's moving on
Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill. - Muhammad Ali
Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
-Stephen King
Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
-Stephen King
-
rainbowgirl28
- I'm in Charge
- Posts: 30435
- Joined: Sat Aug 31, 2002 1:59 pm
- Expertise: Former College Vaulter, I coach and officiate as life allows
- Lifetime Best: 11'6"
- Gender: Female
- World Record Holder?: Renaud Lavillenie
- Favorite Vaulter: Casey Carrigan
- Location: A Temperate Island
- Contact:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/365 ... e=r_health
Ready for flightNebraska Pole Vaulter Jenny Green is Back in Action After Chronic Back Troubles and Injuries From a Fall Threatened to End Her Career.
By Dirk Chatelain
LINCOLN -- Long before the fall shattered her hopes of singing the "The StarSpangled Banner" atop a medal stand in Italy, before she shattered state records without a driver's license and won a Big 12 title as an 18-year-old, Jenny Green was a seventh-grader jogging around a Grand Island track on a spring afternoon.
Not far away, boys practiced an event as foreign to 12-year-old girls as five-inch stilettos. Pole vaulting kind of looked like fun, though. A friend, knowing Green wasn't one to back away from a challenge, dared her to try it.
So Green ran over to Grand Island Central Catholic coach Bob Zavala and asked. The coach grimaced. Pole vaulting wasn't even a girls high school event -- it wouldn't be until Green's eighth- grade year.
Besides, vaulting required speed and upper body strength, abilities most seventhgrade girls don't have. She could fall. She could break her back.
Come back tomorrow, Zavala said.
"I was hoping she wouldn't," he said.
Next day, Green returned. Please, she said. Please. Two weeks later, Zavala said, "she was going higher than my freshman boys."
Eight years later, the owner of one of her state's most glorious high school track and field resumes sits about 13 feet from the Devaney Center pole vaulting runway, alternating between happy and sad memories.
Just a week ago, the Husker redshirt sophomore sprung over a bar in competition for the first time in 17 months, a lapse that seemed like decades, a lapse resulting from a fall half a world away.
Green had always wanted to wear red, white and blue. She got the chance in July 2004 when she qualified for the Junior World Championships in Italy.
It was quite a scene: You walk around in USA gear listening to dozens of languages, watching dozens of national flags wave in the wind.
Every time an athlete climbed the medal stand, Green remembers, her national anthem echoed through the stadium.
"That entire trip, I was like, that's going to be me," she said. "I'm going to be up there."
She had come into the event ranked the second-best teenage pole vaulter in the world, winner of the Nebraska all-class gold medal four times in high school.
Her first spring at Nebraska, she won the Big 12 indoor and outdoor titles.
She won bronze at the national indoor and outdoor championships. She even dabbled with the heptathlon.
All through that 2004 season, though, Green's back gave her fits. It spasmed regularly. She struggled through stress fractures.
Though winning had become habitual, she had never perfected the proper technique. Her running strides put extreme pressure on her spine. And she never really jumped to vault; "she let the pole jerk her off the ground," said Rick Attig, Green's NU coach at the time.
Each time she vaulted, the spine hyperextended. The pain became excruciating when a vertebra cracked at the Texas Relays, but she still managed to set a personal record 13-11 1/4 .
By the time she got to the World Championships, Green was tired. Her poles had gotten lost on the way to Italy. Then, on the final warm-up vault before the finals, her technique broke down. She sprung straight up instead of over the bar, landing tailbone first on concrete.
"I instantly thought I had shattered every bone in my body," Green said. "It was like my entire dream, everything I had worked for, it was ended."
She watched the medal ceremony and listened to the national anthems from the bleachers.
"I remember meeting my parents outside of the gate. I lost it. I just started bawling."
The fall injured Green's back muscles, but most of the damage had already been done by five years of wear and tear. She wore a back brace for four months. She ate in it. Slept in it.
The hardest times came when her four roommates, all teammates, left for weekend meets, leaving Green to an empty house. A year ago, Green watched the Huskers celebrate the Big 12 indoor and outdoor titles.
All the while, she asked mother Kathie Green, "Do you think I'll come back?"
"If anybody can, you can," Mom replied.
During months of rehabilitation, she often practiced 150 to 200 takeoffs per day. She actually went over the bar for the first time last summer.
"It was so scary," Green said. "Once I went upside down the first time, I was like, I can do this again."
She's tweaked her mechanics. If she can vault without hyperextending her back, maybe she'll get another chance to wear red, white and blue.
Now her worry is getting back to where she was. She vaulted 12- 11 1/2 a week ago, hardly up to her standards. She'll try again today at the Devaney Center during the adidas Classic. If she can get back near 14 feet, she might win back that Big 12 title a month from now.
If anybody can, you can, Mom says.
You know, there were doctors who told Jenny to give it up. If she wants to have children and walk and run and bend over, well, pole vaulting could jeopardize all of that. This is a spine we're talking about. It reminds one of another memory.
Long ago, about the time Bob Zavala was shaking his head at the persistent girl, the junior high boys told her she couldn't do it.
"If a boy tells her she can't do it," Mom says, "by God, she's going to show them she can."
Source: Omaha World - Herald
Ready for flightNebraska Pole Vaulter Jenny Green is Back in Action After Chronic Back Troubles and Injuries From a Fall Threatened to End Her Career.
By Dirk Chatelain
LINCOLN -- Long before the fall shattered her hopes of singing the "The StarSpangled Banner" atop a medal stand in Italy, before she shattered state records without a driver's license and won a Big 12 title as an 18-year-old, Jenny Green was a seventh-grader jogging around a Grand Island track on a spring afternoon.
Not far away, boys practiced an event as foreign to 12-year-old girls as five-inch stilettos. Pole vaulting kind of looked like fun, though. A friend, knowing Green wasn't one to back away from a challenge, dared her to try it.
So Green ran over to Grand Island Central Catholic coach Bob Zavala and asked. The coach grimaced. Pole vaulting wasn't even a girls high school event -- it wouldn't be until Green's eighth- grade year.
Besides, vaulting required speed and upper body strength, abilities most seventhgrade girls don't have. She could fall. She could break her back.
Come back tomorrow, Zavala said.
"I was hoping she wouldn't," he said.
Next day, Green returned. Please, she said. Please. Two weeks later, Zavala said, "she was going higher than my freshman boys."
Eight years later, the owner of one of her state's most glorious high school track and field resumes sits about 13 feet from the Devaney Center pole vaulting runway, alternating between happy and sad memories.
Just a week ago, the Husker redshirt sophomore sprung over a bar in competition for the first time in 17 months, a lapse that seemed like decades, a lapse resulting from a fall half a world away.
Green had always wanted to wear red, white and blue. She got the chance in July 2004 when she qualified for the Junior World Championships in Italy.
It was quite a scene: You walk around in USA gear listening to dozens of languages, watching dozens of national flags wave in the wind.
Every time an athlete climbed the medal stand, Green remembers, her national anthem echoed through the stadium.
"That entire trip, I was like, that's going to be me," she said. "I'm going to be up there."
She had come into the event ranked the second-best teenage pole vaulter in the world, winner of the Nebraska all-class gold medal four times in high school.
Her first spring at Nebraska, she won the Big 12 indoor and outdoor titles.
She won bronze at the national indoor and outdoor championships. She even dabbled with the heptathlon.
All through that 2004 season, though, Green's back gave her fits. It spasmed regularly. She struggled through stress fractures.
Though winning had become habitual, she had never perfected the proper technique. Her running strides put extreme pressure on her spine. And she never really jumped to vault; "she let the pole jerk her off the ground," said Rick Attig, Green's NU coach at the time.
Each time she vaulted, the spine hyperextended. The pain became excruciating when a vertebra cracked at the Texas Relays, but she still managed to set a personal record 13-11 1/4 .
By the time she got to the World Championships, Green was tired. Her poles had gotten lost on the way to Italy. Then, on the final warm-up vault before the finals, her technique broke down. She sprung straight up instead of over the bar, landing tailbone first on concrete.
"I instantly thought I had shattered every bone in my body," Green said. "It was like my entire dream, everything I had worked for, it was ended."
She watched the medal ceremony and listened to the national anthems from the bleachers.
"I remember meeting my parents outside of the gate. I lost it. I just started bawling."
The fall injured Green's back muscles, but most of the damage had already been done by five years of wear and tear. She wore a back brace for four months. She ate in it. Slept in it.
The hardest times came when her four roommates, all teammates, left for weekend meets, leaving Green to an empty house. A year ago, Green watched the Huskers celebrate the Big 12 indoor and outdoor titles.
All the while, she asked mother Kathie Green, "Do you think I'll come back?"
"If anybody can, you can," Mom replied.
During months of rehabilitation, she often practiced 150 to 200 takeoffs per day. She actually went over the bar for the first time last summer.
"It was so scary," Green said. "Once I went upside down the first time, I was like, I can do this again."
She's tweaked her mechanics. If she can vault without hyperextending her back, maybe she'll get another chance to wear red, white and blue.
Now her worry is getting back to where she was. She vaulted 12- 11 1/2 a week ago, hardly up to her standards. She'll try again today at the Devaney Center during the adidas Classic. If she can get back near 14 feet, she might win back that Big 12 title a month from now.
If anybody can, you can, Mom says.
You know, there were doctors who told Jenny to give it up. If she wants to have children and walk and run and bend over, well, pole vaulting could jeopardize all of that. This is a spine we're talking about. It reminds one of another memory.
Long ago, about the time Bob Zavala was shaking his head at the persistent girl, the junior high boys told her she couldn't do it.
"If a boy tells her she can't do it," Mom says, "by God, she's going to show them she can."
Source: Omaha World - Herald
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