Naperville Central came in sixth overall at the IHSA track & field finals at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston in May, and Brooke Sawatzky, a senior, took first place in an individual event to contribute to the team’s score, recording a personal best of 5.69 meters in the running long jump, reports Jay Deegan in the school’s student newspaper.
Sawatzky’s best-of-five jump, 18’8″, missed the IHSA record in the event by about 2 feet (6.3246 m, 20’9″), set by Alexandria Anderson of Chicago’s Morgan Park High School. The national record for girls’ long jump in a state title series goes back to 1976, when Kathy McMillan of Hoke County High School in Raeford, North Carolina, recorded a jump of 22’1¾”.
The records go up about a foot at the collegiate level. Just last year at the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships, Jasmine Moore of the University of Florida broke the NCAA indoor long jump record with a jump of 7.03 meters (23’¾”). The current record holder in the Olympics is Jackie Joyner-Kersee of the United States, who jumped 7.40 m (24’3¼”) in 1988 in Seoul.
Any jump over 18½ feet would probably be considered competitive at the high school level. It would be a top-three performance in states other than Texas, New Jersey, California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and a few others. Anything over 19 feet easily qualifies a high school senior for scholarships, depending on the student-athlete’s performance in other events.
“My teammates, my coaches, my friends, my parents, my family, everyone just jumped up and started screaming,” the paper quoted Sawatzky as saying. “Seeing the excitement on their faces really just reminded me of how amazing this moment was. It was crazy.”
