What You Don't Know About: Triple Jump

Published by Will Claye on The Players' Tribune on October 13, 2015

Nobody wakes up one morning, leaps out of bed and yells, “Hey mom, I want to be a triple jumper!”

For that matter, no kid decides to triple jump on his own. Generally, the sport has to find you.

I was a football player in high school and ran track just to keep my speed right — to increase my quickness. But one day at track practice, my coach, Larry Todd, had us all doing bounds — different jumping exercises designed to increase speed and explosion. He looked at me and said, “Will, you’re just a natural triple jumper.”

I had no idea what that even meant. I just nodded.

I’d done long jump since maybe sixth or seventh grade, but that’s just sprinting down a runway, hitting the board and taking one jump into the sand. Now coach had me doing different triple jump drills, which included all of these different bounds. It was a little out there, but my coach was right: I was natural triple jumper. Not too long after learning that the sport existed, I ended up winning a state championship my freshman year of high school.