On Thursday morning inside the Model Laboratory school library, Hannah Durbin signed her national letter of intent to pole vault for the U.S. Air Force Academy track team.
Getting accepted to compete for one of the U.S. Military Academies is a remarkable achievement for any high school athlete.
But Durbin’s signing was an even more remarkable feat considering she only began pole vaulting 15 months ago.
“Hannah is one of the strongest and most determined and hard-working athletes that I have coached in the 20-plus years I’ve been coaching,” Model track coach Mark Pressley said. “It’s phenomenal that she has gone to this level in less than two years. That’s a testament to her determination and work ethic. I just wish we could have started earlier. I think she would be around 12 or 13 feet by now.”
Durbin, who has been running track for Model since 2010, said she wanted to try pole vaulting for about a year before she approached Pressley about the idea.
“I would always run the mile and doing like 100,000 laps and I would see people doing the pole vault and they looked like they were having more fun than me, so I always wanted to do it,” Durbin said. “I finally asked coach Pressley about it and he said Model didn’t have the money to have a vault coach that year. But finally last year Coach (David) Townsend could be a coach and I finally got to do it.”
That first taste of the sport was all it took to get her hooked, she said.
“It was the first sport that I ever fell in love with instantly, so I knew I didn’t want to stop doing it when I graduated, so I knew I had to work hard to make it happen,” she added.
Though Model was finally able to allow her to vault, the school had no equipment for Durbin to use.
But assistant track coach Monte Orchard came through for her and let her use some of Madison Central’s equipment.
Durbin said she knew she wasn’t very good when she began but she loved it so much that no amount of work was going to stop her from getting better.
She began working with Orchard, then went to Fuzion Athletic Club coach Jamie Steffen for instruction as well, looking for the help she needed to reach her goal of vaulting at the collegiate level.
Steffen said that after watching Durbin vault for the first time, he didn’t think there was any way she was going to reach her goals and he tried to tell her so.
But as he would soon learn, she was determined to make it happen and was willing to do whatever it took to get there.
She kept making the 1 1/2 hour drive to Shelbyville three or four times a week after school to practice. She kept doing the exercises he gave her to do and started altering her eating habits to get her body in the best shape of her life.
And soon the girl who couldn’t vault over seven foot when she came to him, was vaulting nine foot, then more than 10 foot in just a matter of months.
Last winter, Durbin said she became interested in attending the Air Force Academy. Later she went to Colorado Springs and attended a summer seminar program at the Academy and she knew that’s where she wanted to go to school.
“I really like the Academy so much. The campus is so beautiful and stunning. That summer made me determined to go there no matter what it took to make it happen,” she said. “It’s a super long application process. It took more than a year. You have to get a congressional nomination and do all kinds of stuff and I knew it was a long shot. But I did it and I got in. That’s when I turned my full attention to finishing pole vaulting and reaching the marks they set to making the vaulting team.”
To qualify for the Falcons vaulting team, an athlete has to achieve a vault of at least 11 feet. So from that point she said, she worked as hard as she could to reach that mark.
The work paid off and a few weeks ago at a meet at Madison Central, she achieved the coveted 11 foot mark that she needed to qualify for the track team at the Academy.
‘I like challenges and I definitely had dreams of vaulting for Air Force, so I knew I was going to reach 11 feet,” Durbin said.
“After getting the mark at Central, it took all the pressure off so last week at regional was so much fun. Now I’m ready to go to state. Eleven foot makes me competitive with the other girls at state. I can’t wait to get up there and compete. There’s no pressure, I can just go and enjoy it.”
Heading into the state meet, Durbin is ranked in the top seven in the pole vault. She also is ranked in the top seven in the state in the 300 meter hurdles — another event she only began competing in just over a year ago — after winning the event in the regional meet last week.
She has been one of Model’s strongest distance runners for the past few years and she will be running the anchor leg for the Patriots’ second-ranked 4x400 relay team at the state meet as well.
Townsend, who was in the military for more than 25 years, said Durbin’s incredible strength and endurance, both physical and mental will serve her well in her military career.
“As somebody with 25 years military experience, I can say that I would be proud to serve under Hannah after she completes the Air Force Academy because she displays all the characteristics of an officer already,” he said. “She displays the leadership. She’s able to motivate people. She’s able to bring you up when you’re down. She’s about to take the bull by the reigns when she needs to. That’s the type of leadership we expect in the military and that’s the type of leadership I liked to serve under when I was in the military.”
“All I can say is Hannah is remarkable. She’s going to make a great officer,” he added.
Durbin reports for five weeks of basic training in June before entering the Academy in the fall.
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