Local Sports
| News | Sports | Prep Sports | Business | Opinions | Columns | Entertainment |
| Science/Technology| Weather | Archives | E-mail Us |

Saturday, July 15, 2000

Acuff makes final round of Olympic trial

High jumper beats injury, lack of frequent competition

By David Lassen
Ventura County Star

Acuff

   SACRAMENTO, Calif. - With one quick effort, Amy Acuff advanced to Sunday's women's high jump final at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials.
   Acuff, from Calallen High in Corpus Christi and UCLA, was one of 13 entrants in a field of 22 to clear the opening height of 5 feet, 103/4 inches in Friday's opening event of the 10-day track meet at Cal State Sacramento.
   Her day started and ended at 12:33 p.m. PDT, but she didn't mind.
   "It was good to come out and get the juices flowing, feel a little pressure," she said. "I looked at the field and sort of figured it would take just one jump."
   The brief workout was particularly welcome, she said, since she was coming off both a lack of serious competition and recovering from an auto accident near UCLA three weeks ago.
   "I've been competing in these all-comers meets, jumping against 50-year-old men in poor conditions, jumping over curbs on dirt tracks," she said. "There weren't that many meets this year, unless you wanted to go to Europe. I didn't feel it was best for me to deal with all that travel and miss a lot of training."
   She did miss three or four days, she said, when rear-ended at a stoplight while on the way to a practice in L.A. on June 22.
   "My neck is probably a little less than 100 percent, but that's not a critical area," she said. "I've been getting a lot of therapy and living at the chiropractor's office.
   "It wasn't really bad, but I've heard that it's worse the next day, so I was just kind of stressing out with what was going to happen. For a second, it's kind of like, 'Oh, no, bad timing' (with the trials at hand), but I believe that things happen at a time for a reason and I just try to go with the flow.
   "I'm just a little tight. I don't have shooting pains or anything, but I'm not as loose as I could be."
   The temperature in Sacramento, which moved into the mid-90s on Friday, figured to help that, she said.
   "I'd rather have heat than cold," she said. "I'm just kind of acclimatizing a little bit, because it's been pretty cool in L.A. and I've become kind of soft in my California ways. In Texas we used to go out and train at noon in 104 (-degree heat), but I'm not used to that."
   Acuff, who has a personal best of 6-63/4 in 1997, predicts it will take a jump of 6-4 to qualify for the Olympics.
   "It will probably be less," she added, "but mentally, I'm going to try to be clean through 6-4 to have a little insurance."
   Others qualifying were Erin Aldrich (University of Texas), Tayyiba Haneef (Long Beach State), Vanessa Jones (Maryland), Jennifer Engelhardt (Notre Dame), Adriane Sims (St. Augustine's), Carri Long (Purdue), Gwen Wentland and Tisha Waller (Nike), Angie Spangler (Asics) and unattached jumpers Stacy-Ann Grant, Lynn Houston and Karol Damon.
   Among those not clearing the opening height were Robyn Burkhardt of Texas A&M.
  
  

---

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service

| Talk about this story | Next Story | Home |

---

[ Printer-friendly version ]
[ Subscribe to newspaper ]

SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND

---

  © 2000, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.