Story Date: Friday, June 13, 2008
Pickens eyeing spot on U.S. Olympic team
By Ben Gouldsmith
Sun staff writer
JONESBORO — The last time Andree Pickens was preparing for the Olympic trials was in 1996. At that time she was a 16-year-old gymnast with hopes of competing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta.
Now, 12 years later, Pickens is an Olympic hopeful once again. Only this time, she’s a POLE VAULTer hoping to earn a spot on the United States team that travels to Beijing, China, in August.
“This was a new challenge for me,” Pickens said of POLE VAULTing. “With gymnastics, I had achieved so much already.”
Though Pickens failed to qualify for the 1996 Olympics in which the United States won the team gold medal, she went on to have a decorated collegiate career at Alabama. She won individual NCAA titles on the uneven bars and the balance beam, and led the Crimson Tide to the 2002 national championship.
Pickens was the 2002 Southeastern Conference Female Athlete of the Year, a 3-time SEC Gymnast of the Year and earned 14 All-America awards during her time at Alabama.
“It was my life,” Pickens said of gymnastics, a sport in which she competed since age 6.
Yet after her four years of college eligibility expired in gymnastics, Pickens joined the Crimson Tide track and field squad as a POLE VAULTer for one season.
Following a 1-year stint as an assistant gymnastics coach at Southeast Missouri State in 2005, Pickens moved to Jonesboro to pursue her dream of qualifying for the 2008 Olympic Games as a POLE VAULTer.
Since moving to Jonesboro, Pickens has trained with Earl Bell, a 3-time Olympian, 5-time NCAA champion and former world record-holder. She trains alongside other Olympic POLE VAULT hopefuls such as Jillian Schwartz, Jeff Hartwig, Jeremy Scott, Randalene Sergent and Daniel Ryland.
“Her work ethic is really, really good,” said Schwartz, who qualified for the 2004 Olympics in Athens Greece. “I think that comes from gymnastics, where you just work and work and work. The competitiveness and drive to get better is pretty much the same across all sports at that level.”
The U.S. Olympic Team Trials for track and field start June 27 in Eugene, Ore., but the women’s POLE VAULT final isn’t until July 6. That’s when three jumps will make or break a POLE VAULTer’s Olympic dreams.
Pickens, of course, has experience competing in that pressure-packed atmosphere, albeit in a different sport. She remembers the gymnastics trials in Boston. She remembers placing 12th in the all-around. And she remembers the feeling of competing against the best in the country.
“It was just one of those days where you had to be perfect to make the team,” Pickens said.
She expects a similar test this time around, when only the top three from the trials qualify to compete in Beijing. But unlike 12 years ago, when a panel of judges decided Pickens’ fate, the only thing that matters now is how far she flings herself over a horizontal bar with a fiberglass pole.
bgouldsmith@jonesborosun.com
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