Bloomington Central Catholic IL Standout Has Already Conquered 16-9.50 At Age 15

By David Woods for DyeStat

John Nepolitan photos (Nike Indoor Nationals)

NORMAL, Ill. – The coach is Yoda of the pole vault. The kid is Luke Skywalker. 

Together, they are not trying to defeat an empire, but build on one. They are the Flying Dragons. 

Base is not a rebel camp on the moon Yavin 4, but 9,000-square feet at one end of a warehouse, surrounded by farmland and windcatchers. Murals of vaulters adorn the walls. 

Isaiah Whitaker, 15, is a freshman at Bloomington Central Catholic. He doesn’t need windcatchers to produce The Force. It is all him. He is 6-3, 160 pounds, braces on his teeth, mop of curls on his head, sprinter speed down a runway. 

“I like falling down on the mat after you make a bar,” he said, “looking up and seeing the bar still there.” 

Last August, in the AAU Junior Olympics at Greensboro, N.C., Whitaker set an age-14 world record, vaulting 16 feet, 2 inches. He broke a 35-year-old meet record. Mondo Duplantis, the world and Olympic champion and world-record holder, owns almost every age record from 7 to 23 … but not this one. 

And Whitaker’s 70-year-old coach, Mike Cockerham, saw it coming. In fact, the coach said he has been struck by visions ever since he was struck by lightning in the mid-1990s.  Sounds crazy, he knows. 

“Sometimes when I see kids,” Cockerham said, “I can tell immediately what’s going to go on.” 

And he knows the vault. Since the days his high school coach transported him to meets all over Nebraska and Kansas, he has resolved to pay it forward.  

That’s how this indoor facility, informally known as the Dragons’ Den, came to be built. There have been five iterations of it over two decades in Bloomington-Normal, and a case could be made for The Den as the best vaulting space in the country. 

Stacy Dragila, Sandi Morris, Katie Moon, Tim Mack and Brad Walker – all Olympic or world champions -- have practiced or appeared at camps here. 

Most prominent Den alumnus is Bloomington’s Zach Bradford, 23, of Texas Tech. Bradford was an under-20 world silver medalist in 2018 and vaulted 19-4.75 at March’s NCAA Indoors, a bar bettered by only four collegians in indoor history (including Duplantis). 

An alumna is Emily Grove, 29, of Pontiac, Ill.. She competed in the 2017 World Championships and last year won a NACAC silver medal and was No. 9 in the world at 15-7. 

Over Illinois’ past three state meets (three classes), 15 of 18 boys and girls vault champions came out of The Den.

For a mainstream sport, the pole vault – running with a long noodle, launching into the air from a box toward a crossbar, landing in a foam pit  – is about as extreme as it gets.

Whitaker saw older brother Isaac vaulting, and it looked cool. Eventually, it looked scary.

“My 16-2 jump, I looked down the runway, and I thought the bar looked way higher than 16 feet,” Whitaker said. “I got over it, and I was, ‘wow.’ “

He kept climbing in March, exceeding 16-2 indoors three times in 15 days. He vaulted 16-4 to finish second at Nike Indoor Nationals at New York, then 16-8 and 16-6.50 in meets at Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington. (Duplantis, of Lafayette, La., set the freshman indoor record of 16-9.50 in 2015.)

High school outdoor records are 17-4.50 by Duplantis for freshmen, 17-6 by Jacob Davis, Orangefield, Texas, 1994, for age-15.

Whitaker is aiming at 17-6 or even 18 feet. This year.

Cockerham is convinced the teen can get there, despite training part-time. Whitaker not only vaults this spring, he is a pitcher and catcher for the baseball junior varsity. He played varsity football last fall and didn’t give up basketball until this season.

“It was a tough decision,” Whitaker said. “But I want to focus on this more.”

He began vaulting in fifth grade, at age 11, and cleared 10 feet. In subsequent years, he has gone 11-6, 14-7, 16-2, 16-8.

Previous age-14 record was 16-1.75 by Sasha Zhova of France in 2017.

Central Catholic’s coach, Sean Clark, a former decathlete, remembers watching the fifth-grade Whitaker.

“‘Who is this guy?’ I had no idea it would turn into this,” Clark said.

The coach’s biggest challenge is to ensure other schools’ facilities are safe enough. Big difference accommodating 12 feet and 17 feet.

In eighth grade, Whitaker was clocked in 11.88 for 100 meters. In the middle-school state meet, he won the 400 meters (54.84) and pole vault (15-0). He has bench-pressed 190 pounds.

He is forever adjusting to newer and bigger poles.

“Mentally, it’s tough,” Whitaker conceded. “Once you get used to it, you don’t have that fear any more.”

Paying It Forward

Cockerham’s career has been in maintenance, including work on Illinois State University student apartments and owning his own company. His love has been pole vault.

Injury shortened his own vaulting, but not before he developed a passion for it from the late Patrick H. Murphy, an innovative coach in Fremont, Neb. Cockerham was a 1971 state runner-up.

In describing the incident Cockerham said changed him, lightning struck a telephone pole, came through the line to his phone, burned his ear and neck and knocked him out. Maybe the idea of a vault facility had long been in his subconscious, but later there was urgency. He arose one night at 2:01 a.m. – not 2 o’clock, 2:01 – and told his wife of a vision.

“I said, ‘I’ve got to build a pole vault training facility with two pits running opposite directions with AstroTurf in the middle,’ “ he recalled. “She goes, ‘Go back to sleep.’ “

Instead, it was an awakening.

Cockerham had started a vaulting club in Pekin and called it the Flying Dragons, named after the high school’s Dragons mascot. Coincidentally, he even found – and bought – a black-and-red sculpture of a dragon decorating a storefront in Manito, where he lives, 42 miles west of Normal and 16 miles south of Pekin. Now the dragon is in The Den.

Cockerham’s facility formerly accommodated other field events, such as high jump, long and triple jump, shot put. Now it is confined to vaulting and would be suitable as a U.S. Olympic training center.  

Cockerham has calculated his vaulters have earned a cumulative $4.2 million in college scholarships. His net revenue? 

 $0.00. 

He charges users $200 a month – 53 vaulters now coming from a 200-mile radius –  for  fund to pay the $2,000 building rent and upkeep. 

“It’s not about the money,” Cockerham said. “Never has been.”

It’s about the love, and about athletes’ dreams.

“If they come out of the pit and give me a big hug when they get a big PR,” Cockerham said, “that’s what it’s about for me.”

Sky's The Limit

It would be unfair to project who Whitaker might become, merely because he has climbed so high so fast. Athletes’ trajectories differ. Cockerham resolves to keep it fun, even if he would rather see the teen give up football and baseball.

Whitaker has qualities that cannot be coached: height, agility, speed, fearlessness. Yeah, the bars sometimes look daunting. But . . .

“All that fear usually goes away when I’m running down, planting in the box,” he said. “You do whatever it takes to get over it.”

A New York stage didn’t bother him, either.

At Nike Indoor Nationals, he cleared 16-4 on his first attempt and would have made 16-8 if his jersey hadn’t dislodged the bar. Other vaulters inquired about his class in school. Freshman, he said.

“They didn’t believe me,” Whitaker said.

Cockerham believes. The coach wants to correct flaws in technique – Whitaker’s drive on takeoff, for instance – but said the teen adjusts quickly to longer, stiffer poles.

Whitaker was sidelined briefly this spring by a leg injury but vaulted a PB of 16-9.25 Friday for a US#5 at Metamora, Ill. He might have attempted a bigger bar, but that's as high as the standards went.

If Whitaker doesn’t reach 17-6 by the 1A state meet May 27 at Charleston, he has all summer: a high school nationals, AAU district, regional and Junior Olympics.

He doesn’t need a light saber to win his battles. His Jedi weapon is fiberglass.

Contact David Woods at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.