By Dave Matter Columbia Daily Tribune
Saturday, February 19, 2011

A year ago Missouri assistant track coach Dan Lefever wasn’t sure if he’d ever see Brian Hancock pole vault again. Years of vaulting and weightlifting had punished the senior All-American’s lower back, causing two stress fractures in his L5 vertebrae.

The prescription was just as painful: No pole vaulting for a year.

That meant two seasons on the sideline — the 2010 indoor and outdoor campaigns.

“We weren’t really sure if he would be able to get back to full form,” Lefever said yesterday.

“My senior year,” Hancock said, “just disappeared on me.”

That chapter in Hancock’s MU career explains yesterday’s euphoric celebration inside the Hearnes Center fieldhouse.

On his second attempt at 17 feet, 7¾ inches at the Missouri Collegiate Challenge, Hancock cleared the bar but tapped it just enough for a wobble, leaving the crowd breathless as he watched from the mat below.

“I clipped it a little bit, but I thought I had a shot,” he said later.

He did. The bar snuggled into place on the standard for a new Missouri indoor record. Hancock broke his own school mark in the event (17-7¼), last set during the 2009 indoor season.

“It wasn’t my most technical jump in the world,” he said, “but it went down as a make and a make is all that matters in the end.”

The record-breaking vault stands as the best by a Big 12 athlete this year and should establish Hancock as a favorite at next week’s Big 12 Championships in Lincoln, Neb. Even better for the fifth-year senior, he most likely clinched a spot in next month’s NCAA Indoor Championships. Yesterday’s mark is the seventh-best height eclipsed by a vaulter this season.

“I came into the season with a goal of getting my mark and getting it over with so I knew I was in nationals and I could relax and just focus on jumping high,” Hancock said. “Second-to-last meet of the year I get it. Almost every meet of the year I’ve at least had a shot at this bar. So it’s nice to finally put one together, especially in front of my home crowd.”

Hancock hoped to treat the crowd to another broken record, but he fell short in three attempts at 18-0½. On the final attempt the bar cracked him on the head after he nicked it off the standard. But a bump on the head couldn’t spoil the performance Hancock had been chasing since his back abandoned him last year.

“Like a lot of sports, if your back is hurting, it can debilitate you,” said Lefever, MU’s associate head coach who specializes in the jumps and combined events. “It’s like a golfer swinging a golf club. You can’t do that with a bad back. And that’s just holding a stick. You run full force and put a 15-foot pole into an immovable object — that’s a lot of force going through your body. And if you’ve got any pain in your back, it’s really hard to do.”

After sitting out last spring’s outdoor season — the injury required only rest, not surgery — Hancock refined his technique last summer while gradually getting back into shape. The rest and preparation have contributed to what’s become his most productive season at MU.

“It’s kind of clichéd,” Lefever said, “but the silver lining is it’s helped him become a better vaulter than he was before. It forced him to make some changes.”

He wasn’t the only Missouri standout during yesterday’s meet, which also served as the American Midwest Conference championship meet. Freshman Kearsten Peoples swept the weight throw (60-3) and shot put (48-0½), while teammate Chris Holly won the men’s weight throw (61-9¾) and MU’s Corey Jones won the shot put (56-6½).

Missouri’s Leslie Farmer captured the 600-yard run, setting a meet record with a time of 1 minute, 23.13 seconds, her second-best time of the season. Also for MU, Tre Chambers won the 60 meters with a meet-record time (6.84 seconds), also his second-fastest time this season.

MU sophomore pole vaulter Heather Green smashed the meet record with a personal-best height of 12-6.

“It was exactly the type of meet that we needed heading into Big 12s,” MU Coach Brett Halter said. “We had a lot of big things happen in the field events today, and we were able to give tune-ups to the people on the track that needed them.”