Ali Laros ’25 Vaults to the Top of Her Sport
by Dylan Howlett
6-minute read
Ali Laros ’25 is a state champion. It is no great surprise. Go 8,000 miles westward from Durham to South Africa, and the tea leaves are strewn across the beaches of Cape Town, the towering pines of Tokai Forest, the rugged sandstone of Table Mountain. They were the playgrounds of Laros’ childhood, and family.
That family is all As, in name and in athleticism. Adrian, her father, played 14 seasons of Division I rugby in his native South Africa and three seasons of professional rugby in France. Ann, her mother and a fourth grade teacher at Durham Academy, played Division III field hockey at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Aidan, her oldest brother, is a senior punter on the University of Kentucky football team. Adam, the middle child, plays on the rugby team at Queens University of Charlotte. They were a sporting family in a sporting country in sporting weather. And so they played, together, year round.
The proof is in the home videos that Laros and her family recently watched together. “Almost every other day, every weekend,” the Durham Academy senior says, “we were at the beach.” Summers would bring rugby in the sand. In the winter, they would don wetsuits and go boogie boarding. They hiked through Tokai Forest. They reached the peak of Table Mountain. "I think we were very outdoorsy," Laros said. "We were all on the move."
She idolized Aidan and Adam. Whenever her brothers ran off to play rugby with their father, Laros followed. “They always had so much fun together,” she says. “I wanted to be a part of that fun with them.” She would wear Aidan’s and Adam’s hand-me-down Nike T-shirts. Most of her days would end in the backyard, tossing around the rugby ball with Adrian and her brothers as the sun dipped below the horizon.
The American International School that Laros attended had a team. It was intended, mostly, for middle school and high school boys. Laros was 9. But those backyard training sessions with her brothers and father shattered any notion of gender or age divides. I can play, she thought. And so she did, often against grown men on local rugby clubs who most likely had never seen a quick-footed girl darting their way. She scored. A lot. There was one match during which two men saw Laros running and closed in. They hesitated and glanced at each other — Are you fast enough to get her? — and, amid their confusion, Laros split the ground between them and raced past. She would, in time, compete in a veritable Olympic program of sports: touch rugby and gymnastics, tennis and water polo, soccer and swimming, volleyball and field hockey, the latter two of which she would eventually play at DA.
Laros is a DA state champion in none of those. She is, however, an individual state champion in the pole vault. Twice. She has competed at nationals. She will join the track and field team at UNC-Wilmington in the fall. And as the DA spring sports season begins next week, Laros will seek a third consecutive state championship in an event that is at once obscure and familiar to a multisport athlete by way of South Africa.
“It’s so different,” Laros says of the pole vault. “It’s such a weird thing. No one knows about it.
“So when someone asks about it, you get excited to explain it.”
Almost 50 years before Laros won the first of her two NCISAA Division I state titles, a writer for Sports Illustrated, John Underwood, attempted to capture the athletic wonder, and wondrous oddity, of the pole vault:
A wonderful bird is the pole vaulter. He is supreme among track and field athletes because in his one event he is the synthesis of them all, combining — in relatively moderate supply, of course — the speed of a sprinter with the strength of a javelin thrower and the spring and elasticity of a high jumper. He must also have some of the endurance of a distance runner, because often he will still be working when everybody else has gone to bed. His 16-foot vaulting pole makes it necessary that he be cunning, too, in order to get it safely from one competition to another, to keep it out of the ears of pedestrians at the crowded intersections around arenas like Madison Square Garden and to get it in and out of taxicabs. [1960 Olympic gold medalist] Don Bragg was almost electrocuted once when his pole hit a power line as he tried to board a train at Philadelphia's 30th Street station.
The pole vault was as preposterous in 1967 to sportswriters as it is now to Laros. On each attempt she wields a pole that is, as customary for the craft, 15 to 20 pounds above her bodyweight. For Laros, that’s 160 pounds dispersed across 13 feet of fiberglass, which has a diameter of about an inch and a half. “You have to just not think about it,” Laros says, “because then you’re like, ‘Wow. That’s a big pole.’”
A gifted gymnast, she almost didn’t concern herself with the peculiarities of the pole vault. Having started gymnastics as a 4-year-old in South Africa, Laros continued after she and her family moved to Chapel Hill when she was 10. Her favorite event was the uneven bars. By the time her competitive career ended when she was 14, Laros had won several regional and national championships, and she had built formidable strength in her core and upper arms. Laros just needed a new challenge.
Her uncles had a hunch. One from Adrian’s side and one from Ann’s side saw the same things: Ali’s footspeed at track meets and in team sports, and Ali’s strength in gymnastics. Both added up to a prodigious pole vaulter. Why don’t you try? She joined the DA track and field team during her ninth grade year. Then she saw Julianna Hallyburton ’22, a DA pole vaulter who would go on to win back-to-back state titles in 2021 and 2022; Hallyburton’s now a junior on the Colgate University track and field team. All that Laros saw, however, was an airborne student-athlete soaring over a bar. Wow, Laros thought. That’s so cool. Most schools, including DA, do not have a pole vault pit at their practice facilities. Where, Laros wondered, did Hallyburton even practice? She recommended Pole Vault Carolina, a local collective of pole vaulters and multi-event athletes in training, and Laros joined the club in August of her sophomore year. Nine months later, she was state champion with a winning jump of 11 feet — a little more than twice her current height of 5’5”.
Her coaches at Pole Vault Carolina saw what her uncles saw: a talented gymnast who could become a talented pole vaulter. The “kips” that Laros would practice in gymnastics — folding at the hips and quickly pushing forward to swing on uneven bars — are the same she practices while training for pole vaulting. Her coaches will encourage her to think, and move, like a gymnast. That’s the physical part. The mental part is its own balance beam.
A pole vault attempt takes, on average, a little less than eight seconds, from the time the athlete takes their first step to the moment they crash-land on the mat below the bar. The choreography in between, however, is every bit as intricate as the gymnastics floor routines in which Laros once competed. “You’re thinking about being fast,” Laros says. “You’re thinking about being strong.” Her internal checklist befits a NASA launch:
- OK. Right hand on top and left hand below, each about a forearm’s length apart on the pole.
- Seven steps with my left foot before I vault.
- Run tall.
- Run fast.
- Keep your knees up.
- Get your arms up in the air before you jump.
- You’re airborne. Swing hard with your body so you don’t stop and fall into the metal box where the pole catches.
- Turn and go over the bar, but don’t forget to push the pole hard toward the runway so it doesn’t knock off the bar.
Perfection is elusive, if impossible. That is, for Laros, the point.
“There’s always something,” Laros says, “to chase after.”
The chase, for now, is a third straight state title. But the chase is never linear. During her indoor season this winter, Laros endured a two-month spell of failed attempts and lackluster results. She would chide herself when, say, Adrian and Ann would drive all the way to an indoor meet in Winston-Salem only for Ali to stumble in competition. “It’s just having to wrestle with the standard that I’m at,” she says. “I can’t be disappointing myself and those around me.” She snapped out of it at a recent meet when she jumped 11’6” — six inches more than her winning attempts at the 2023 and 2024 state championships — and reached the same height a day later.
The chase is also never individual. Laros has found a community outside of school at Pole Vault Carolina, where she trains three days a week. She represents DA at indoor track and field events even when the school’s team is in its offseason. And her state titles, she says, belong as much to the school as they belong to her. “When I did gymnastics, I was pretty individualized,” Laros says. “I [was] winning for myself. Now, I’m winning for a team. For DA. I really appreciate how all the work I put into something paid off.
“I’m doing it for more than just myself. I’m doing it more for DA.”
The chase, inevitably, wends homeward. South Africa hasn’t left Laros. She still refers to ground beef as “mince,” a revelation that amused her friends during a recent lunch period at the Upper School. Bathing suits are still “swimming costumes.” And she has embraced the pole vault, in all of its idiosyncratic wonder, for the same reasons she clambered up Table Mountain and hiked through Tokai Forest and played touch rugby on the beaches of Cape Town, laughing and chasing her older brothers and father as they experienced what it meant, truly, to find joy in the games they played.
“I love the sport,” Laros says.