An interview with Bryan Carrel, member of the pole vault subcommittee (F08.67).

By Donovan Swift

Feb 27, 2026

We love watching sports to see athletes push the boundaries of the human body and discover what’s possible. Technology has helped raise that ceiling even higher and has changed many sports in the last hundred years, from springier shoes for runners to lighter tennis rackets. With fiberglass poles, pole vaulters can now launch themselves over six meters high, and while all sports come with risk, this is especially true for sports that involve the potential for 20-foot falls. That’s why ASTM International’s pole vault subcommittee (F08.67), part of the committee on sports equipment, playing surfaces, and facilities (F08), continues to develop and revise standards that help improve the safety of pole vaulters, covering everything from box collars (F2949) to landing systems (F1162). I spoke with subcommittee member Bryan Carrel about a current revision to the standard specification for pole vault box collars (F2949) and other developments. 

Every sport comes with risk, but what are some safety considerations specific to pole vaulting? 

Pole vaulting has been going on for a very long time. There are many different aspects to improving safety: the pits have gotten larger; the size of the landing system has changed. There’s an ASTM standard (F1162) up for renewal that relates to the actual landing systems. The landing system has increased in size as athletes have been steadily jumping higher and higher, though our standard applies to high school and college athletes. 

Another safety challenge is that to do the event, you have to be able to put the pole in the plant box. And there’s no real way to pad that area. You have to be able to run through there and the pole has to be able to go into the box. But the box area itself was identified as having hard edges. We call them the anvil edges, at the top of the box. It was steel and concrete and so the idea emerged to have something to pad those edges. 

READ MORE: New Pole Vaulting Safety Standard

There’s one specific event that really leapfrogged the efforts in that area. There was a young man from Penn State, Kevin Dare, who had a tragic accident at the Big Ten indoor championships in 2002. He fell in that area and lost his life. Box collars predated that event and were available for maybe 10 to 15 years prior to that accident. So that event made people look at the product and ask: How can we make it perform better? That’s what drove the development of the standard specification for pole vault box collars (F2949). The idea was to create some structure, as well as safety and testing requirements for box collars, to reduce the impact of athletes falling in that area.

What’s the goal of the current F2949 revision and what adjustments are being made to the standard?

The revision to the box collar standard mostly revolves around the testing requirements for head injury criterion (HIC) and fall impact (g-max). We were informed when this came up for renewal that other organizations would like to see us fall in line with the 1,000 HIC level. The g-max has never been a problem. Everybody’s collars have always been able to nail that. So we needed to bring the HIC down from 1,050 to 1,000. [To give an idea of the numerical scale, an HIC value of <400 indicates a low risk of significant injury; <1000 indicates a high likelihood.]

One aspect that affects both of those is drop height. The higher you fall from, the bigger the impact. So, I gathered all the information for every male and female athlete at the NCAA and junior college-level over a five-year period to come up with the average height that all pole vaulters in these categories reach. The average drop height number we got was around 3.8 meters. So, we used that information to make sure the impact on the box collars would meet the HIC requirements with that drop height in mind. 

There are many different aspects to improving pole vaulting safety.

Are there any other revisions or new standards in the works?

I mentioned there’s another standard (F1162) that’s up for renewal and it has to do with the landing system and HIC and g-max values, as well. It’s also up for renewal to make sure HIC and g-max values are in line with the requirements I mentioned. 

The landing system is something that’s used every single jump. The box collar is there in case something happens. The landing system grew in size to increase safety. You have more padded area, which is always better than less, whereas the box collar was addressing a specific area that had been unprotected. 

The box collar is a bit of a firebrand requirement. When the box collar became mandated at the high school and college levels, there were a lot of strong voices in opposition to it. But here we are, many years down the road from when that standard was written, and it’s so commonplace now. And it certainly hasn’t affected performance. If anything, this year, the men’s pole vault at the college level is probably the highest it’s ever been. My son is a pole vaulter, so beyond working for one of the manufacturers, I have a personal stake in making sure performance isn’t affected.

I imagine most standards are geared toward safety, but there’s always going to be the balance of not hindering performance. Are there any standards that are purely for performance or are they all for safety?

That’s kind of a hard question to answer because track and field is about time, distance, height, and it’s about consistency over decades. The vault box, the shape of the vault box, the depth of the vault box, the angles of it: It’s been the same for so long. So standards may make what’s already commonplace a requirement, but we don’t want standards to drastically change anything, performance-wise. We want to know that when someone runs a 100-meter dash, we can go back in time and compare that to every 100-meter dash from the past.

FOR YOU: Standards at the Summer Olympics

Technology changes things. Spikes have gotten better. The track surfaces have gotten better. Poles used to be steel and aluminum, and now they’re fiberglass or composites. These are all advancements that have improved performance, but usually the improvement is incremental. So with standards, we generally want to focus on safety without affecting the performance of the event. 

Can you describe your career background and how you became involved with ASTM?

My career is kind of crazy. I joined the Marines out of high school, and when I got out of the military, I enrolled at Indiana State University and pole vaulted for them. I got a teaching degree, did my student teaching, but realized I enjoyed coaching more than I did teaching. So I decided to pursue a coaching career.

During my first semester at ISU, I got called back to the Marines for the Gulf War, so I had to drop out of school, and I returned the following year. I ended up coaching at Indiana State for 10 or 11 years. We had an amazing team. We had a good deal of success with the vault and became kind of a pole vault school. 

Then I accepted a job with Gill Athletics and left coaching. But in the process of coming to Gill, one of the coaches at the University of Illinois reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to coach our pole vaulters? They’re yours.’ So for 20 years I was a full-time volunteer pole vault coach at the University of Illinois. At both Indiana State and Illinois, I was fortunate enough to start their first women’s vault groups. The NCAA added the event for women in 1998.

Then an engineer here at Gill, Jeff Watry, saw the benefit of joining ASTM. Jan Johnson had an influence on that, too. Jan was one of the founding members of the pole vault subcommittee. My life has revolved around pole vaulting, so when Jeff left Gill, I was the logical person to step in. I’ve just been interested in it ever since. ●

Donovan Swift is managing editor of Standardization News.

Bryan Carrel is a member of the pole vault subcommittee (F08.67), part of the committee on sports equipment, playing surfaces, and facilities (F08). He has coached collegiate pole vaulting for over 35 years and currently works at Gill Athletics. He is also the founder and head coach of PV Junkies, a non-profit jumps club that has helped athletes of all ages for over 25 years.