Pole vaulter keeps her head in the game
that year she starred on defence for a flag football team sponsored so proudly by upper Crust bagels is nowhere to be found on robin bone’s lengthy list of athletic achievements.
She’s a 26-year-old pole vaulter, after all, and a fifth grade, coed championship seems a tad irrelevant. but it’s really not, as her father, Jamie, explained.
And yes, he’s that Jamie bone, former quarterback for the university of Western Ontario mustangs, two-time national champ, Hec Crighton
winner, longtime coach and broadcaster. He knows athletic ability, commitment and mental toughness.
“Her team won everything and she was the star on defence,” Jamie said Friday from the family cottage in New brunswick. “Fourth and fifth grade boys could play, and fifth grade girls could play, but when robin went to the tryouts and ran, they implemented a rule, hard to believe, that said fifth grade girls could not carry the ball,” he laughed. “Her coach, a good friend of mine still, said it didn’t matter. ‘She’s still going to be my firstround draft pick if I get the first pick.’ Sure enough he picked her. He played her in the middle on defence, like a nose guard. robin chased down the ball carrier all the time.
“Nobody could score on them. They lost one game that year.”
robin, who was born in Toronto but grew up in Connecticut as her mom, manon’s, microsoft career prompted a move, was a fine sprinter and basketball player, a hurdler and a gymnast until a fifth concussion by age 16 made it too risky. during grades 9 and 10 she kept on sprinting, took up lacrosse and switched out gymnastics for pole vault, under a doctor’s proviso that she wear a helmet. It became a topic of derision.
“In high school I knew people were talking about it but I just never cared,” robin said from her new training base in Atlanta. “my dad was a football coach and I was always tagging along, so wearing a helmet didn’t seem like this embarrassing thing. It never seemed silly to me.
“When I was a freshman at these track meets, I could hear the whispers. It just motivated me. It showed me how much I care about pole vault and why I could be just as good as the people making fun of me.”
back in Ontario for grades 11 and 12, she made great strides training with current Canadian champ and record holder Alysha Newman under the tutelage of coach dave Collins, who broke bone of enough bad habits to see her jump her personal best of 4.36 metres in 2015. She was captain of the track team at her dad’s alma mater and a perennial CIS pole vault champ, cashing in on genetics and trademark determination. When she joined an Altis training group in Phoenix in 2017, the learning curve was steep and highly necessary.
“When I jumped my Pr, the technical aspect of it was really awful. I was doing the best I could with what I knew how to do.
“I was only gripping maybe 13 feet when I jumped 4.36 and the best women in the world are on 15-foot poles. So I needed to forget the gymnastics way that I would jump. I really had to start dialing in to utilizing my feet, having a good takeoff, and making a fluid jump. I had to kind of relearn the whole pole vault. I had time to do that.”
but as that time went on, her older training partners retired and she was stagnating. She found the motivational lift she needed last October in Atlanta, training with American star Katie Nageotte under coach brad Walker.
“It goes back to that saying in football, iron sharpens iron,” said robin.
She feels it’s going to pay off in a realistic shot at making the Canadian Olympic team for Tokyo next summer.