For Arnott, it was a long journey to silver in the senior girls’ pole vault competition. The Grade 11 student tried out lots of track-and-field events when she was younger, but discovered she wasn’t a great runner and wasn’t very well-suited to the high jump because she was short.
“Pole vaulting is pretty out there, but I got into it and I really loved it,” Arnott recounts. “The fact that you’re going so high was so cool to me.”
It’s not that Arnott was a slow learner at all, but it’s a very long path to become a successful pole vaulter. She began in the long jump pit, simply learning to properly plant the pole and move forward. Then she progressed into the next stage: learning to go up. Lastly, she worked on going upside down – the final piece of the puzzle that “really only gets put all together for the meets.”
Arnott, who earned plenty of back bruises from landing on the bar along the way, set herself a goal of achieving a new personal-best at OFSAA this year – a task she accomplished on her second attempt at 3.15 metres to better her old benchmark of 3.10 m.
“I was over the moon. I was so happy because that was the only thing I wanted to do,” says Arnott, also a competitive swimmer with the Greater Ottawa Kingfish. “It reflects all the work that went into it, with swimming and track. Reaching that goal was awesome.”
For midget boys’ competitor Mbuyamba, the trip to the long jump podium was more like a short crash course.
The former Gloucester-Cumberland Wolverine, now an Ottawa Guardsmen player, was very busy with basketball and didn’t really get to practice long jump prior to the east conference meet about a month ago.
Although the big-time springs he owned thanks to basketball allowed him to excel against his competition immediately, Mbuyamba improved leaps and bounds by following teammate Brian Okeny – who placed 14th in the OFSAA senior boys’ long jump – to his Ottawa Lions club.
“His coach really helped me out,” notes Mbuyamba, who went to practices every day for three weeks. “I didn’t know how to land really until the very end.”
Another technical element the Grade 9 student had to learn in a hurry was to develop consistency in his approach – always arriving with the same speed in order to take off as close as possible to the start board.
Everything came together on Mbuyamba’s very first jump at OFSAA when he flew 6.28 m, which proved to be good enough for second place.
“I was really excited,” recalls Mbuyamba, who says his next challenge will be balancing basketball and track-and-field to devote time to both. “I was clapping, so I got some energy from the crowd. It was really fun.”
Louis-Riel high school also had a pair of medal winners at OFSAA, with David Nsabua taking gold in the senior boys’ triple jump and Joel MacDonald placing third in the midget boys’ 400 m.
Lindsay Kary (St. Matthew), Jaimee Loh (Cairine Wilson), Al Itani (Colonel By), Sebastian Saville (Colonel By), Amanda McKinnon (Louis-Riel) and Gift Okankwu (Louis-Riel) all reached OFSAA event finals.
