Back in the 1990s, Lenawee County schools didn’t do a lot of pole vault due to the inherent risks involved.
So when Trevor Van Valkenburg wanted to pole vault for Madison in high school, he came to longtime Madison track and field head coach Josh Powers with the perfect pole vault coach: his father Larry Van Valkenburg.
“I didn’t get to start (pole vault) until I was a sophomore because Madison didn’t have pole vault,” said Trevor Van Valkenburg. “A lot of the schools in the county didn’t in the late 1990s, they shut them down because they thought it was too dangerous and couldn’t get insurance. I really wanted to pole vault, so I talked to coach Powers and said ‘Hey, I really wanna pole vault.’ He said, ‘Ok we’ll see what we can do,’ and thats when I said ‘my dad’s pole vaulted before, he’d love to come help and teach everybody how to do it.’ So that’s how that got started and here we are almost 20 years later.”
