Mikula takes 2nd in pole vault at Championships

On May 27, Dom Mikula, Trumansburg alum and Ithaca College junior, snagged the runner-up honors in the pole vault at the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Mikula tied the national champion from University of Wisconsin-Stout with a final height of 5.10 meters but finished second due to his higher number of attempts to get over the bar.

“When I cleared 5.10 on my second attempt, that was just a great jump,” Mikula said of his performance. “The person who won, I know him personally, he’s a great jumper and had a great season. He just had a little bit of an off day, so he definitely deserved the win, but it leaves me with a little hunger, knowing the national championship is right there.”

This was Mikula’s third time competing in a collegiate national championship, though he qualified for another.

In early March of 2020, Mikula was at a hotel in North Carolina gearing up for the indoor national championships where he was predicted to place in the top five for pole vault. But, the night before competition began, he and his teammates found out that the meet had been canceled.

“We didn’t hear it from the NCAA or coaches; we saw it on Instagram,” Mikula said. “We went outside and saw the disappointment on everyone’s faces. We were sharing a hotel with a lot of teams, and you could tell who was a senior; they were just heartbroken because they made it to the top level in track and field and weren’t able to compete.”

The team flew back to Ithaca the next day and was told that the college was going on spring break, which eventually turned into a fully remote rest of the semester. There would be no outdoor 2020 season, and the team wouldn’t practice together again until January 2021.

Luckily for Mikula, he was able to start jumping in July 2020 thanks to a local resource: Matt Scheffler.

Scheffler, a Groton native and SUNY Brockport alum, is the area’s pole vault specialist. He currently teaches physical education at Lansing High School, is the head varsity track coach for Lansing, is the pole vault coach at Ithaca College and runs his own Tompkins County Pole Vault Club.

During the pandemic, Scheffler found an old fire truck factory sitting vacant in Groton and turned it into a makeshift pole vault practice area. Mikula worked as a delivery driver for Southern Tier Coal in Woodhull, New York, over the summer but would drive to Groton to practice with Scheffler and other local athletes.

Scheffler has been working with Mikula since high school and said he’s an easy kid to coach.

“He’s one of those athletes that you ask him to do something, and he goes and does it,” Scheffler said. “There’s no hesitation. He’s very confident in himself and in the instruction that you give him. He’s very trusting in that way, which is very important in pole vault.”

Specialists like Scheffler are important because pole vault is a technically difficult field event to master. It consists of five steps: sprinting toward the bar while holding the pole, planting the pole into a metal box in the ground and jumping up in the air, shooting up over the bar (in Mikula’s case, almost 17 feet in the air), arriving over the bar and finally falling to land on the mat.

While the indoor 2021 season only had one meet, the outdoor season put athletes back on a more normal schedule, albeit with many COVID-19 rules. The athletes took two COVID-19 tests per week, filled out daily health screenings, stayed in pods while practicing, limited the number of people allowed in facilities at one time and wore masks unless they were actively competing in a meet. But they kept their spirits high.

“We were all just happy to be back and ready to go,” Mikula said. “We were just like, ‘Let›s get back in there as soon as we can!’ We sucked it up a little bit with all the testing and protocols and got it done and were able to have a season.”

Unlike past years where meets would have 30 to 40 teams, the Bombers stuck to competitions with around five teams. They also traveled less than usual.

While the life of a student-athlete is always a balancing act, Mikula said this past year and a half has been more difficult than ever for him.

“It’s been a little harder during COVID because practice times had to be moved around a lot,” Mikula said. “Typically, in a normal year, we’d start practice around 4 p.m., but this year, you could practice at 2, 5, 6 because of how many pods we have to get into the Athletics and Events Center [A&E] to practice. I think some professors don’t realize what it takes to be a student-athlete and the time that needs to be put into it. There’s days I was in the A&E for four hours just doing practices.”

But even in a global pandemic, Mikula was able to perform at the top of his game.

And because of the lost season, the NCAA has granted athletes another year of eligibility, something Mikula plans to take advantage of during his fifth year at IC in his Occupational Therapy master’s program.

Mikula said he plans to take a few weeks off from training to relax and recover, but he’s already thinking about next year’s season.

“I still want to continue to improve my height,” Mikula said. “I don’t think I’ve peaked out yet. I think I can grab a couple more centimeters here and there. I’d love to become a national champion if the opportunity presents itself. I think 17 feet is within reason for next year.”