By MARK MOSCHETTI
Seattle Pacific Sports Information
 
SEATTLE – Seventh grade.
 
No question, it's one of life's most challenging times. You're trying to figure out who you are … how you fit in … where you belong.
 
Many kids that age try to latch on with the "in crowd."
 
 

Scout Cai was a seventh-grader once. Same challenges. But instead of gravitating toward the "in crowd," during her days at Colfax Junior High School …
 
… she became part of the up-and-over crowd.
 
Up and over a pole vault bar, that is.
 
"My friends were doing it. And it was like, 'I don't want feel left out,'" Cai recalled of her introduction to the athletic pursuit with which she now has become synonymous. "So I did it with them.
 
"It definitely took some time – I think eighth grade was when I realized I was pretty decent at it," she said. "I just rode with it in high school, and here I am in college."
 
Here she is in college – specifically at Seattle Pacific. And she has ridden with the pole vault all the way to yet another NCAA Division II national championship meet.
 
This one is in Allendale, Michigan, just outside of Grand Rapids. It is there where Cai will conclude her career on Thursday afternoon inside Grand Valley State Track & Field Stadium, joining 16 other vaulters in pursuit of a place on the podium.
 
Competition begins at 2:45 p.m. Pacific time. Just 20 minutes prior to that, fellow Falcons senior Dania Holmberg will run in the preliminaries of the 1500 meters, with her sights set on a spot in Saturday's finals.
 
For Cai, though, it's all about Thursday. Once they start, they'll keep going until only one of them will have vaulted higher than all the rest.
 
In her case, another one or two 13-foot bars – like the 13-2½ or the 13-3 that she cleared just minutes apart in Spokane on April 30 – would leave Cai flying high into the next chapter of her life.
 
"I'm gonna embrace it for sure," she replied when asked ff she's trying not to think about it being her final day of competition. "I'm coming off a meet at GNAC where I didn't do as well as I wanted. I'm hoping that this meet, I can at least get close to my PR."
 
HER FAVORITE SPORT? ALL OF 'EM
Pick a sport – any sport – and chances are Scout Cai has done it.
 
And done it very well.
 
Volleyball? Check. She was part of three consecutive Washington Class 2B (small school) state championship teams at Colfax High School in Eastern Washington.
 
Basketball? Check. Cai played on the Colfax team that won the state title in 2014. She said that deep into her high school years, "I thought I was always going to do basketball in college."
 
Swimming? Check. At one time, Cai's youth team coach suggested that perhaps she should pursue that sport at the college level. To this day, her favorite athlete is five-time U.S. Olympic gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky.
 
Gymnastics? Cross country? Soccer? Softball?
 
Check. Check. Check. And check.

 

Track and field?
 
Check.
 
Certainly, she had plenty of good reasons for that choice: Three consecutive state pole vault titles. Back-to-back high jump titles. Silver medals in the 100- and 200-meter dashes (one in the former, two in the latter). Even a top-eight finish in the shot put.
 
Altogether, Cai had 13 state placements in the top 8, including those five championships.

"I had some early heads-up about how talented Scout was," Falcons head coach and program director Karl Lerum said. "We knew how special she was in high school. And she certainly has had some moments here that justified that."

As has been true with some other athletes over the years who became Falcons, Cai was not familiar with SPU as she pondered where to attend college.
 
 "I'd heard about Seattle Pacific, but I never thought I would go there," she said. "But I'm happy I came here."
 
Naturally, so is Lerum.
 
"Scout had a lot of options in terms of sports and institutions," he said. "It was my understanding early on that she was interested in a little bit smaller school, and I think that was somewhat based on where she comes from. (Colfax, 60 miles south of Spokane, has a population of approximately 2,900.) That made it interesting for her to have smaller classroom sizes and know her professors, as well as know her coaches a little bit more personally."
 
MASTERING THE MULTIS
With her multiple talents, it only made sense that Cai would pursue the multi events at SPU: the indoor pentathlon with five events (60-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, long jump, and 800 meters) all on one day, and the outdoor heptathlon, with seven events (100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200-meter dash, long jump, javelin, and 800 meters) spread over two.
 
Lerum, who has one of the best eyes for recruiting such athletes and one of the best track records for developing them into top-flight competitors, knew right away that Cai had some unique capabilities.
 
"State volleyball, state basketball – the number of titles she has won individually and as part of a team, it's pretty incredible," Lerum said. "We knew she was broadly talented. Every year, we have a handful of practices where Scout does something that nobody else can do. … She just has very special abilities."

 

From Cai's perspective, there was one thing, though.
 
"When I heard Karl tell me, 'You can do the heptathlon,' I was like, 'What's a heptathlon?'" she recalled. "I'd never heard of it."
 
By the end of her 2017 freshman season, she'd heard of it.
 
Cai actually started out with a pair of pentathlons, the second of which resulted in her winning the first of three consecutive Great Northwest Athletic Conference championships. About a month later, she did her first outdoor heptathlon, placing fifth at the Hornet Invitational in Sacramento, then finished the season with a second-place finish at GNAC.
 
The pent and the hep remained a big part of Cai's repertoire. As a sophomore in 2018, she placed an All-American fifth in the pentathlon and was ninth in the hep at NCAAs. She qualified for the pent again as a junior in 2019, then earned All-American status in the heptathlon that year by placing seventh at the outdoor nationals in sweltering Kingsville, Texas.
 
A PREFERENCE FOR THE POLE VAULT
But as much as she excelled in the multis, that never was Cai's sole focus. She has done seven of the 14 individual indoor events, and 10 of the 18 individual outdoor events.
 
Pole vault has been prime among them.  Cai claimed one GNAC indoor title (2018) and back-to-back GNAC outdoor titles (2019, 2021). Her All-American eighth-place finish at the 2019 NCAA outdoor meet went along with her All-American seventh place in the heptathlon.
 
But after everything was halted last spring by the pandemic, she went about eight months – from March through October – without actually being on a pole, until she returned to Seattle in November.
 
"I definitely felt rusty coming back into it," she said. "I had to take baby steps for sure. The poles I used were smaller, and I worked on my plant and my swing and all the technical and basic things about pole vaulting."
 
Cai eventually got back into using the regular poles that was had used prior to the covid shutdown. But there was one thing she didn't get back into.
 
That was the heptathlon. Pursuing both can be a significant physical strain, so Cai and Lerum decided that focusing on either the hep or the pole vault would be the best way forward.
 
It was Cai's call to make. And she picked the pole.
 
"I do miss the multis sometimes," she said. "But I think over the years, I did what I could in the multis. Pole vaulting is my favorite event, and focusing on that was more important to me than doing other events."
 
THE THRILL OF 13
When the 2021 season began on March 6 under cool but dry skies at the PLU Open, Cai cleared a career-best 12 feet, 11½ inches – oh-so-close to the 13-footer she'd been aiming at for her entire college career, but not quite there.
 
Cai kept entering meets, and kept winning, too – a streak of eight consecutive first-place finishes. But during that stretch, the closest she came to 13 after the PLU meet was 12-3½ on April 24 in the Peyton-Shotwell Invitational at the University of Puget Sound.

 

A week later, on April 30, Cai and the rest of the Falcons got a breath of fresh air, so to speak, After two months of seeing the same familiar teams in the same familiar meets at the same familiar venues, SPU traveled to Spokane for the Buc Scoring Invitational at Whitworth University.
 
Different teams, Different stadium. Practically perfect conditions – mid 70s, almost no wind to speak of. And whether it was track events or field events, the Falcons were noticeably energized, delivering performances that were season bests or, in many cases, personal bests.
 
Over at the pole vault pit, Cai passed on the first seven bars. She entered the competition at 11-9 and made it on her first try. The bar was raised to 12-2¾, and she made that one on her first try.
 
After passing on 12-8¾, Cai missed her initial attempt at 13-2½. But she made the second and was now in the GNAC record book, beating the 13-1¾ mark recorded Western Washington's Anna Paradee in 2017. They pushed the bar up a bit more to 13-3, and she got over that on the second attempt.
 
"I wasn't expecting it. Everything just clicked that day," said Cai, who had come over the previous day and stayed at home in Colfax. "The weather was perfect. I was more relaxed at that meet compared to other meets. I was like, 'I'm just going to vault today.' I think that's why I was more relaxed, because I wasn't expecting anything."
 
"I couldn't believe it. I think I felt like, 'Finally! I finally hit 13 feet.' "
 
Cai has worked closely with pole vault coach Pat Licari.
 
"I try not to question him because I know he's always right," she said with a laugh. "Sometimes, he'll go back to the basic stuff if I'm struggling. During meets, he knows what poles I need to use, so I depend on him a lot."
 
FOCUS SHIFTS TO FUTURE
The 23-year-old Cai, a soft-spoken sort whose first name is based on Scout Finch, the narrator of "To Kill a Mockingbird," already has been very busy working on what comes next after track.
 
Cai was one of five Falcon seniors in 2020 whose careers were supposed to wrap up last May. That was before the coronavirus shut down everything. The NCAA subsequently decided that all spring sports athletes could keep that year of eligibility and carry it into 2021 if they desired to do so.
 
 

"As soon as the season ended, I knew I wanted to use my eligibility," Cai said last April after that decision was announced. "Honestly, it fit right into my plans to take a gap year and get ready for PT (physical therapy) school. … I'm really glad things worked out."
 
That academic pursuit now will become front-and-center on her priority list. But she's also in search of some new activities.
 
"I'm trying to make my own home gym – it's good to have a good exercise background," said Cai, an exercise science major with a 3.71 grade-point average. "My sister Taylor is getting her motorcycle license, and I think I want to do that. And I'm still looking for other hobbies."
 
She no doubt will find some. But finding another Scout Cai won't be easy.
 
"Scout has had a very broad career in the amount of events she has done – and done them well," Lerum said. "A lot of good memories of Scout are thinking about the first time she did this, or the first time she did that, as well as different things she has qualified for at the national level or scored at the conference level."
 
"Scout is unlike any kid I've ever worked with," Lerum added. "I think she's very unique and special."
 
She's also someone who clearly figured out who she is … how she fit in …
 
… and where she belonged.