Team: Track and field
Hometown: Santa Clara, Calif.
Major: Chemistry
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Emily Zas (EZ): How did you get into pole vaulting?
Jae Yu (JY): I was a gymnast, and then I quit gymnastics. In my high school, if you did a varsity sport, you wouldn’t have to do P.E., and so I decided to do pole vault — because it’s similar to gymnastics. There were no pole vaulters, so they couldn’t cut me from the team. [Laughs.]
EZ: I would imagine that the pole vaulting community is pretty small, right?
JY: The vaulters are a special family for sure. There are six of us. I wouldn’t call it trauma bonding, but something about flinging yourself 10 to 15 feet in the air for hours at a time creates community. Even outside of Williams, we’re super tight with the other NESCAC vaulters. We’ll hang out or get lunch at meets.
EZ: Do you have a favorite memory on the track team? Any traditions that stand out?
JY: Freshman year at indoor Div. III New Englands, Williams and Tufts were pretty much tied in first place for the team scores. There was one event left — the 4×400m relay — and whoever beat the other would win. There’s a tradition that we do called the “whoosh line” where, on the last stretch of a relay, our teams will line up on either side of the lane, and as the runner passes through, we, like, “whoosh” them along. [Mimics waving runners along with her hands.] In this meet, Tufts and Williams decided to join together to whoosh all of our runners, because they were so neck and neck. It was super cute. And then we won the meet by half a point. That meet, I only scored one thing for the team, and it was half a point. So I like to think that I really won us the meet. [Laughs.]
EZ: Track is the biggest team on campus. How do you balance being a captain for so many different events?
JY: There are three men’s and three women’s captains for all of track and field, which is divided into men’s and women’s distance, sprints, and field events. But we don’t just captain our respective sections — we are captains of the whole team, and we perform our captain roles with the whole team in mind. It’s been super helpful to have the other captains working alongside me, and also the team makes it easy. They’re all great people, and I love them. They’re my family.
EZ: Tell me about your song choice for when you vault.
JY: At outdoor meets, the pole vault setup is usually far away from the rest of the meet, so sometimes the vaulters will bring their own speakers. You can be competing for hours at a time — usually you compete for six seconds and then you wait 10 minutes, so we play walk up songs to keep the energy up for those six seconds. There was one meet last year when I was the last person standing, and the first six seconds of Abba’s “Money, Money, Money” played, I think, 12 times on repeat. The opening riff just gets me hyped.
EZ: I hear that the track team loves to bond outside of the sport. In fact, I’ve heard rumors about a gambling ring. Tell me about the poker group.
JY: It’s definitely not how I envisioned my team bonding to go when I first joined the team. Most of the time it’s the men’s sophomores that are playing, since the poker table is in their common room, and other people on the team will join from time to time. It’s honestly a pretty good form of team bonding, if you’re into it, because there aren’t that many team events that draw across class years and event groups.
EZ: Your first meet is this Saturday. What are your hopes for yourself and the team going into the indoor season?
JY: Our December meet is a really chill, low-stakes meet. It’s sort of practice, for funsies. I’m just excited to be back in the uniform, starting my last year as a Williams vaulter. And I’m super excited for the new freshman class and to see how the whole season turns out, because everyone’s been working so hard.
