I was preparing for an interview with Erik Kynard Jr., a stellar high jumper for K-State, when I did some quick research about head coach Cliff Rovelto. His resume looked extremely impressive at first glance.
After the interview with Kynard, who called Rovelto the ?hidden treasure? of Manhattan, I hit up my laptop and checked out Rovelto myself. I came to one conclusion:
Cliff Rovelto is the best head coach at K-State. No one else even comes close.
This man co-authored a book, ?101 High Jump Drills,? that has a rating of four-and-a-half stars on Amazon, which is just the tip of the iceberg.
Rovelto, who is 20 years into his tenure at K-State, was given the title of the best women?s outdoor track and field coach in the country by the U.S. Track Coaches Association in 2001. He has coached 180 All-Americans as well as 114 conference champions. He has represented the U.S. eight times as a coach, primarily for his expertise in the high jump.
In his tenure with K-State, he has had five NCAA champions alone in the high jump (Kynard is the fifth) and turned K-State into a high jump powerhouse. Forty-four of his 180 All-Americans are high jumpers.
His body of work, however, is not limited to just K-State athletes. He has coached nine Olympians, four of them high jumpers. Perhaps his two greatest athletes were Matt Hemingway and Austra Skujyte, both of whom took silver medals at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. Hemingway represented the U.S. in the high jump and posted a mark of 2.34 meters. Skujyte represented Lithuania, her country of origin, in the heptathlon event and earned a point total of 6,435, her personal best.
His resume, which is known worldwide, goes on and on. If you Google his name, endless pages of track-related materials, including athletes he has coached and drill techniques he has created, come up. However, as my research continued, I found out that Rovelto is probably the most intricate coach I have ever seen when it comes to analytics.
A paper written by Rovelto, titled ?High Jump: Beyond the Basics ? Anatomy of Elite Performance and Elite Testing Data,? is posted on the U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association website. In the paper, he features 10 of his current and former athletes, including Hemingway and Kynard, and shows how he used countless pages of data to determine whether an athlete is ?elite? or not.
Rovelto is the only coach at the school to coach a single athlete who won an Olympic medal in a solo sport. Maybe the only thing wrong with him in a K-Stater?s mind is that his degree says ?University of Kansas.? He is truly a hidden treasure at K-State. But with the 2012 Summer Olympics in London less than 100 days away and K-State hosting the Big 12 Track and Field Championships this spring, people should start to take notice of Rovelto?s success and give him the credit he deserves.
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