superpipe wrote:Question. The depth of the plant box was mentioned as something to be aware of. Plant box specs are hard rules just like not climbing the pole during your vault right? It's a matter of a legal vault vs. an illegal vault. It's one thing to not have your standards calibrated, but an illegal plant box is illegal. Misplacend standards ( within the legal range ) don't constitute an illegal vault, but a plant box that doesn't meet specs definitely constitutes an illegal vault right?
Don't mean to pick apart the discussion because I thinks it's interesting to think about the equipment influence. Just trying to separate influence vs. legality.
We actually have a local high school that put in a brand new track and the idiots installed the plant box level with the ground before they laid the inch or so of final rubber surface. This is technically an illegal facility correct?
This is absolutely right. Joe Dial and I were talking about this just this weekend. He told me that just before the NCAA championships in Austin his senior year, he called the coaches at Texas and made that exact argument. The box there was over an inch deep, and he always had a tough time competing at that facility because he practiced on a regulation box. They fixed the box, and he won the meet, while several athletes who were used to the facility no-heighted.
He also made a point that I had not thought about. This is a safety issue. If athletes practice at a facility that has a very deep box and then go to a meet where the box is legal, they will come up short on poles that they are used to blowing out. We were watching this very thing actually happen at a meet when we were discussing this. It scared the hell out of us to watch all of the athletes from one school consistently land close to the box. Joe and I were both familiar with this school's home facility, and the box there is deep and the runway is downhill.
When I was training at OU, they resurfaced the track in preparation for hosting the Olympic Festival. I actually found out the day they were doing the runways and helped them set the box a half inch high from the concrete foundation so it would be level when they put the surface down. That was the only way I could be sure it would be right. The construction people who build tracks don't necessarily know the rules and certainly don't know how significant the box depth is to the event. But I found that they were more than happy to work with me to get it right.
I think it is a shame to spend tens of thousands of dollars making pits larger and then ignore this issue that is so easy to fix and has such a significant impact on the athlete's ability to penetrate safely into the pit.
