Lifelong Dedication To Pole Vaulting Pays Dividends For Tim Reilly's Growing Number Of Standouts And Record-Breakers

By Keenan Gray of DyeStat

As a crowd closely watched World U20 pole vault champion Hana Moll at the 55th Arcadia Invitational, her coach, Tim Reilly, casually sat back and let his protégé do her thing.

Moll entered the competition for the first time with the bar at 13-feet-9. On her first attempt, she hit the bar with her back. Then, on her second try, she failed to reach the bar.

Facing the brink of elimination, Moll took a moment to chat with Reilly. 

“There’s always a little calculation at the start of meet,” Reilly said. “Do I have the right pole in my hand? Are my standards a little too deep? So I said, ‘We can push them back or go up a pole.’ And Hana said, ‘I’m going with the big pole, and let's keep the standards deep.’ So that just said to me, ‘She’s ready.’

Moments later, Moll was back on the runway. She charged confidently through her approach, planted the end of the pole, and cleared the bar by a foot. That set off a string of clearances at higher bars. 

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On her next height, Moll made 14-3 on her first attempt. She missed once at 14-10 but then cleared it on her second try, breaking her twin sister Amanda's national high school outdoor record of 14-9.50.

The bar went to 15 feet.

In hopes of making history, Moll took one deep breath and began her acceleration down the runway. She planted high, swung to vertical and soared over cleanly with inches to spare.  

Moll clapped her hands on the way down and popped up immediately to celebrate, becoming the first female prep athlete in outdoor track to clear 15 feet in pole vault.

Reilly sat there smiling, soaking in every moment.

“Hana, you know, she’s been in such a good place,” Reilly said. “She finally harvested what I’ve seen coming for a while. It was beautiful.”

One simple conversation between Reilly and Moll led to a record-setting night in Southern California. It also reaffirmed Reilly’s status as one of the top field event coaches in the nation who has been in formation for many years.

Growing up in Spokane, Wash., Reilly was an active kid with a daredevil streak. In the fourth grade, he and a friend had a fondness for bounding over obstacles in his backyard. With limited resources, they managed to tie a rope between two trees and began vaulting over the rope with a bamboo pole.  

One neighbor was so concerned he offered to build a rudimentary pole-vaulting standard, which alleviated some of the danger.

“My neighbor was watching that from his deck, and he thought, ‘Oh my God, that kid's gonna kill himself over there. I have to make him some kind of standards’” Reilly said. “So he got a couple of carjacks that held vertical 2x2s with nails in them to support a crossbar.”

Reilly made the most of it.

While attending high school at Gonzaga Prep, Reilly got a real sense of pole vaulting for the first time, but even then, it wasn’t the greatest experience.

“I might have chosen baseball except I was the best pole vaulter at the time in Spokane, for grade school kids,” Reilly said. “So, I kept doing it. But I I didn’t have a vault coach and we had very limited poles.”  

He’d go onto clear 13-6 during his prep career, leading to a spot on the University of Idaho track team. 

As a freshman at Idaho, Reilly was forced to borrow the same pole from his senior year in high school due to a lack of equipment in the Idaho program, but was able to improve by more than a foot and a half, clearing 15 feet. Still lacking support, Reilly decided to transfer out of the school and step away from competition.

Reilly enrolled at Seattle University the following year to continue his studies. Once there, his interest in teaching grew, eventually leading to him beginning his coaching career in pole vaulting with local high schoolers. He quickly recognized that he wasn't helping his athletes enough.

“I was doing that badly, too,” Reilly said, “so I was reading everything I could find and seeking mentors.”

One mentor he reached out to was Baylor University coach Carl Erickson. 

“He blew my mind open with new ideas for how to teach it,” Reilly said. “He said to me how off target I was with my expectations. He said, ‘You could put me anywhere on the planet. And in three years, I'm going to have a 16-footer every year, a 17-footer every five years, and an 18-footer every 10 years.’ Well, you know, that was pretty outrageous.”

Reilly, along with one of the athletes he was coaching at the time, made their way down to Waco, Texas to see firsthand what Erickson offered as a coach. The two attended a series of summer camps with Erickson where Reilly worked as an assistant and could learn more from the hall of fame coach. Within three years Reilly's athlete, JJ Shephard, won back to back Washington state titles (1989-90) at Eastside Catholic.

“He broke the dam for me and introduced me to the possibility that you can let a kid feel perfect, world class posture on a bending pole the first day,” Reilly said. 

Reilly was inspired to start his own camp, the Northwest Pole Vault Camps, in Seattle in 1989.

His first camp, which took place in a small gym with a plant box cut into the floor and one pit, had roughly 50 kids sign up. Reilly was overwhelmed by the turnout.

“Oh, my. I don't even know what I'm gonna do with all these people for a weekend,” Reilly said. “We had to start doing two weekends, back-to-back. And I had to start recruiting more buddies to do it with me, and set up some more things in the gym, you know, as stations to occupy them. It was, in hindsight, some pretty mediocre camp structure.”

As years went by, the camps grew in popularity, leading Reilly to start renting trucks to carry equipment around, asking schools to borrow their pits and bringing in more coaches for instruction, including longtime University of Washington coach Pat Licari.

“While I was coaching the beginners, most of my best kids were going to Pat,” Reilly said. “He loved coming to work my camps with me. He’s still local and continues to be my favorite partner in crime to keep improving each other.”

For 25 years, Reilly ran some of the best pole vault camps not just in Washington but within the Pacific Northwest. Upon retiring from teaching high school English in 2014, Reilly was presented with another opportunity to grow the sport – the start of Northwest Pole Vault Club.

Located in a fitness warehouse in south Seattle, Reilly set up a pit, cameras, rings and ropes, and began training local vaulters a few nights a week, year round. 

“I think I had about a dozen, and probably six of them came from a friend's place at a nearby school,” Reilly said. “He was very enthused that suddenly you know, his kids could enjoy our own club system like other places in the United States had, which made it very difficult for Washington state athletes ever to be All-Americans.  We were pretty excited to think that, now we can start competing with the nation rather than just with our state.”

In this year-round coaching environment, Reilly’s teaching methods improved exponentially, especially in his beginner’s sequence, which encourages world-class plant and take-off positions on lighter poles almost immediately.  

“Among old-school coaches, there is some skeptical head scratching when I share this, but it’s getting harder and harder to deny the results,” he said. 

More and more kids started to trickle in as they saw what a great opportunity Reilly presented to get better at vaulting. Among the first kids to arrive were future Duke University All-American Laura Marty and future professional vaulter Chloe Cunliffe, the first of Reilly’s athletes to break a national record.

Within the last few years, Reilly’s most notable athletes have been the Moll sisters from Capital WA – the only two female prep athletes to clear 15 feet; Ally Neiders, a former high school All-American who currently vaults for Duke; and Ella McRitchie, a junior from Bainbridge WA who ranks fourth in the nation this season. 

“You can tell he loves what he does,” McRitchie said. “He’s very collaborative with everything and always values our opinions. It’s obvious he’s experienced, and it shows, so I trust him.”

At the Texas Relays earlier this month, the Molls and McRitchie completed a 1-2-3 sweep in the talented high school event, with Amanda winning the competition at 14-7.25, Hana placing second at 14-1.25, and McRitchie in third at 13-9.25. The same three swept at Nike Outdoor Nationals last June in Eugene.  

Now more than ever, folks are paying attention to what Reilly had been accomplishing with his system. 

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“The teacher in me has been able to assimilate stuff that I find and turn it into something hybrid that I've kind of made my own. Is there anything I'm doing that's a Reilly original? Or has it all been kind of stolen by my hunting and gathering system over the years? I’m happy to credit every mentor I’ve learned from,” he said.  

Perhaps what’s been most effective is his ability to get young athletes to believe and trust themselves to make the right judgements. 

“He’s given me a lot of confidence,” said McRitchie, who doesn't have the gymnastics background that many of the other top vaulters share. “He taught me how to trust myself…He never really gives you the answer; you have to figure it out yourself and I think that mentality gave me more confidence with my abilities.”

Reilly's communication skills, developed over countless of hours in the classroom, are one of his greatest assets.

“Randy Huntington, a legendary long jump coach, I've heard him in a seminar say, ‘You know, you train dogs. Teach kids. Explain to them why you're doing things,’” Reilly said. “I like for my camps to be structured in a way that the lecture items are really lively, valuable and refreshed all the time.”

Perhaps no athletes have taken his teachings to heart the way Amanda and Hana Moll have. 

The twins have been fortunate enough to have been under Reilly’s guidance since the seventh grade, and with him joining the Capital team this season as an assistant coach, the bond is as close as ever.  Next year they’ll all be moving onto the University of Washington together with Reilly set to join the Huskies' staff.  

On Saturday, the Moll twins are expected to compete in the pole vault at the Oregon Relays, hosted at Hayward Field in Eugene, where Reilly will be in attendance to watch them continue their historic senior seasons.

Reilly has played a leading role in this “golden era” of high school girls pole vaulting, but its a byproduct of 35 years of coaching and and a love of the event that goes back even farther. 

“I think it's a really beautiful time,” Reilly said. “I think that the event in general, and club coaches in general, are really collaborative and supportive of each other in a way that football coaches would not share their secrets, you know, but all of us do. We all are so happy for each other's kids when progress is made.

"It is not surprising that the best junior vaulters in the world are coming of age in the USA.”