Today we’d like to introduce you to Keon Howe.
Hi Keon, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I started off wanting to be a basketball player and I’ve always run track as an alternative to not making the team. I had some experience doing cross country so I was always a distance runner on the track team. As I experimented with events, I discovered high jump which was explained to me as ‘a lay-up with a half-flip’. This caused my athletic career to take off as a high jumping distance runner, but the awkward combination of events lead to a bizarre kind of injury that required me to either sit out or find a different event. The distance coach was also the pole vault coach at my high school so I decided to try pole vault. Immediately after trying it, I had fell in love with the sport and did it all the way through college as my main event holding the UNC Charlotte school record for six years straight jumping 18’4.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, there were several times where I had qualified for the national qualifier and didn’t end up going for freak accident reasons and the one time where I auto-qualified for indoor nationals, the pandemic shut down the competition 24 hours before the time of my competition. There were also injuries and stuff to work through.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
In track, everything is mostly numbers based but there is some luck involved with getting the right person to see you do the right thing at the right time.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: instagram.com/kreeceman
Image Credits
UNC Charlotte
