Lansing’s Matheny wins national title

It was an exciting weekend for Ithaca College track and field at the Division III National Championships, highlighted by a fourth-place overall finish for the team and three individual victories. The first athlete to take home a National Championship this year for Ithaca was Lansing High School alum Meghan Matheny, who won the pole vault event May 27.

It was an intense competition that came down to three athletes from a field of 19 attempting to clear 3.85 meters. On her final attempt, Matheny was the only one to clear the bar, and the former state champion at Lansing claimed the national title. She discussed her final jump.

“I just knew that I needed to clear it and just took a deep breath,” Matheny said. “I always look at [coach Matt] Scheffler before I go and then just was really focusing on all my cues he’d been giving me and then clearing the bar. It was so exciting, and I know I yelled on the way down and landing it. I was like, ‘OK, I think I’m good. I think I’ve done this.’ But I still had to wait to see Isabel [Saridakis] from Emory [University] jump behind me. It wasn’t like that moment where you go over the bar and know you’ve won; it was like a waiting game.”

After missing her first two attempts at the winning height, Matheny made sure her mind was in the right place for her final jump. The work she put in with Scheffler helped ease her mind before taking off.

“I definitely felt a sense of calmness but also a lot of pressure,” Matheny said. “I tend to put a lot of internal pressure on myself. I knew that all the training and everything that all my coaches did, especially Scheffler had been having us do, really had been preparing us well for this meet. I knew that if I just did what I knew how to do, listen to Scheffler and trusted him, and trusted my coaches and just really went out there and had fun with it and enjoyed being there in that moment that everything would fall into place.”

Scheffler, who coaches pole vaulting at both Ithaca College and Lansing High School, has built a strong contingent of local pole vaulters over the years. Matheny gives him all the credit for helping her get to where she is today.

“The recipe for success definitely starts with my coach Matt Scheffler,” she said. “He’s been my coach since I was in eighth grade. That’s when I started pole vaulting. Just having that consistency and being used to his training schedules and the way that he coaches [is so important], just having him really understand me as a jumper but also as a person and knowing that I could trust him to prepare me the best I needed to be for any meet in general.”

Alongside Matheny at the National Championships in Charlotte, North Carolina, were eight of her teammates including three other pole vaulters. The strong group of athletes helped lift one another to a fourth-place finish overall.

“Having so many people there was the best part of the meet honestly, more than winning anything, just being surrounded by my teammates, who were all there to do the same thing and who all wanted to support each other,” Matheny said. “We had seven women qualify and two men qualify. I was so lucky because my event was one of the first on Thursday. Then, I just got to watch and cheer on the rest of my teammates.”

This success comes after a year in which the indoor track and field championships were canceled at the last possible moment, and the outdoor track and field season never happened. That difficult experience gave the Bombers the motivation they needed to reach new heights.

“We were so close to accomplishing everything we wanted to as individuals but also as a team [last year],” Matheny said. “Having that cut short, we emphasized that it’s fueling the fire for this year and putting that as motivation towards what we wanted to accomplish. Having such a long offseason where we couldn’t train together, and having to improvise our workouts and do things not as we were used to, then having all of the fall where we also weren’t able to be together. When we all were able to finally come back in January and train together, we were all just so excited.”

Matheny is a junior at IC and will have a chance to defend her title next year. She’s now completed the journey from standout pole vaulter at Lansing to the best Division III pole vaulter in the nation.