Anywhere and Everywhere. Especially the Top of the Podium
Harris can be found all across campus, meeting people and breaking records
Mike Brohard
You can find him everywhere. He could be talking to just about anyone.
If there’s a sporting event, he’s there. If he’s between classes, he’s chatting with somebody. Could be a person he already knows, or a fellow student he’s just met. He knows the hidden gems of the campus, the great spots to catch some sun or get ahead with his schoolwork.
If you don’t know Eldridge Harris, it may be a sign you need to get out more.
“Yeah. I feel like he definitely makes his rounds around campus,” said Anika Johnson, a swimmer and a former roommate. “A lot of people know who he is, and he’s very quick to even if you don’t know him, he’ll just say hello to you whenever he’s out and about.
“He’s super friendly and outgoing. He’s very interested in talking to everyone, and I think that’s a special quality you don’t see in a lot of people. He wants to engage in others and get to know them, which is really cool. You can tell he’s invested in the conversation.”
If he’s alone, he won’t be for long. He may head to a basketball game, but he’ll find somebody he knows; it would be nearly impossible for him to go someplace on campus with more than 50 people and not know one of them.
Or he could head to a tennis match, and if he doesn’t know somebody, he’ll find somebody to strike a conversation with just to get to know them. Ryan Baily, his pole vault coach with the Colorado State track team, calls him the classic social butterfly.
So adept at meeting people is Harris, he makes his current roommate, Lexie Keller, feel like an introvert.
“There’s no one more social that him. I thought I was the social person, then I met Eldridge and I was like, ‘oh my gosh,’” she said. “He can make friends with anyone. We’ll be walking on campus in between classes, and in that 10-minute period, he’ll find five people he knows. People are just yelling, ‘oh Eldridge, hi!’ That’s been the fun part of living with him. Being in my fifth year, I thought I might be more separated from everyone, but he’s bringing me back in. He’s made me closer with the team because of how friendly he is and how many friends he has.
“I would say I’m pretty extroverted. I’ve always been like that. He’s definitely a step further than that, and I think people would agree.”
Another place you’ll find Eldridge is atop the podium. It’s another one of his favorite spots.
He just won his first indoor Mountain West championship, where he cleared 16-10.75, a title which helped the men defend their team crown. The height stands third best in school history.
That backed the Mountain West outdoor championship he won a year prior when he cleared 17-0.25 to establish the school record, eclipsing a record which had stood for 12 seasons. When he arrived in Fort Collins, this is what they expected. Baily was on sabbatical at the time, but still around, and he spoke with Chris Helwick, who was volunteering at the time, as well as assistant J.J. Riese. Their initial reaction to the arrival of the kid from Roswell, Ga., they’d never seen – he was recruited off video during the pandemic – was telling: “They were like, ‘ah damn, he’s an athlete,’” Baily said.
Knowing he was going to return to the staff, Baily inquired with Helwick about the new kid he’d work with soon. He wanted to know how good he could be, and Helwick said he was a 17-foot vaulter for sure, but he was just a baby. Baily trusted the assessment since Helwick was a 17-foot vaulter himself. He knows what that type of talent looks like.
They all also knew there was work to undertake, because the first part was definitely true; Harris was in in the infant stage.
“It’s a weird story,” Harris starts.
He had been a swimmer growing up, through his sophomore year in high school. Then he took up track (he was a sprinter) and at the end of his junior year, his team won regionals but it was close because they didn’t have a vaulter. So, his coaches approached the athlete with an adventurous spirit.
“I saw them do it while we were at that meet, and I was like, that’s something I have to try; I have to do it,” Harris said. “It just worked out. I ended up getting pretty good at it that year and I just loved it.
“You don’t go very high at first; maybe 6 feet. I guarantee I wasn’t going as high as some of our high jumpers go the first time. You build your way up, slowly but surely you get up there, and the higher you go, the better it feels with the excitement of you going over a bar and falling down. It never changes.”
Some people watch the pole vault and immediately think there’s a disconnect in the mind somewhere. It’s a long run down a ramp while trying to hold and control a pole twice your size, then stick it in the ground and thrust yourself upward, only to have to fall back down. And hit a pad.
Others see it and remember picking up their first Superman comic book and wishing they could fly. For Harris, that’s the hook.
“I think it was the flying through the air part. It’s really cool to throw yourself up in the air,” he said. “I saw somebody do it and I was like I have to be the one up there. The best part is coming down. That feeling when you feel yourself go over a bar and you know you’re not touching it before you’re about to fall … Nothing matches that feeling.”
He gets to experience it a lot. In his two seasons, he’s placed first and second at the indoor championships, fourth and first outdoor. Heading into the conference championships in Albuquerque, N.M., in February, he was filled to the brim with confidence.
When the cards are on the table and the pot is maxed, Harris doesn’t bluff.
What’s cool with Eldridge, when he is ready, he can make special things happen. When it counts the most, he’ll always be ready.Ryan Baily
“I think the week leading into conference we had a running but serious joke: It’s conference week, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to win,” Harris said. “I think that’s the confidence we’ve been working on the past year and a half. At no point did I think this could go wrong. That whole week, going into the day, I’m toing to make every bar I need to to win, and then it doesn’t matter.”
Baily attributes Harris’ big-meet success to a trait he carries that few other athletes he’s worked with have. He calls it nitrous. And like the chemical in the outside world, it must be handled with care with an athlete.
The way Baily sees it, some athletes are gifted with speed and explosiveness which puts more strain on the muscles, so they need more time to recover from a workout. If they train real hard in a week, it might take four to five days, even a week, to fully recover and be ready to go again.
This is Harris. Then there’s his roommate, Keller, a three-time multi All-American who will run through walls in training seven days a week, sometimes twice a day.
She didn’t understand it at first, but then she witnessed it firsthand. Still, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t remind him who reigns supreme in the house when she gets the chance.
“He’s powerful. With his event, it’s so explosive and quick and he’s a very explosive athlete, he may have a few really good training days and then the needs to recover from them,” Keller said. “It’s different to see that. It’s hard to understand as a multi because it’s very different than what we do. I think it’s cool that Baily has figured that out with him, and Eldridge knows enough about himself to know what works best for him.
“I’ve just tossed jokes at him, like, dude, man up. I mean I didn’t understand that concept, and then hearing it from Baily and seeing the progress he made once those adjustments were made changed my mind. But at first, I said that to Eldridge. It’s nice to know I’m the tougher athlete in the house.”
The trait was one of the first things Baily and Harris had to learn to work with in the beginning, but it was just one of multiple steps to get him to the height where he currently sails, with plans of raising the bar much higher as the 2023 outdoor season approaches this weekend with the Spank Blasing Invitational in Pueblo.
For a young man who can walk up to anybody at any time and strike a conversation, he did have some hesitation when it came to pole vault at time. The main one was the fear of being successful, odd as it sounds.
They both point to the same meet last outdoor season where the biggest of his hurdles were cleared. Any little nuisance could be seen as a wall by Harris. On this day in Fresno, Calif., it was calf cramp, which he did experience often.
Harris complained and expressed doubts. Baily told him not to vault. Harris wanted to, though. Baily suggested a four-step approach. Crazy, but why not? Just to train. Then he went up in the stands to let Harris figure it out.
While everyone else competed at a full run, Harris used the shortened approach and a pole to match to post his second best mark of the season.
“He tried a four-(step approach), which he hadn’t done in a meet and goes almost 16 feet on four lefts. That’s insane,” Baily said. “That’s eight steps total. That’s not far. Everybody is back there and he’s right by the box, but that meet really set the stage for him for A, how good he was because he could do it on a four, and B, he overcame something. He didn’t have to give up on it. He overcame some pain and some issues because he had a hard time overcoming things. Like if his shoes weren’t tied right. That meet was awesome.”
The meet opened up Harris’ eyes to all sorts of possibilities in the event for him. Most of all, it gave him the internal confidence he needed to match what Baily had been telling him all along. The coach tells his athletes all the time, it’s a Catch-22: you either need to believe to post a good mark or they need the reverse.
Baily isn’t sure exactly which way it happened. All he knows is the omelet is made. But it was a familiar tale for Keller. It was Baily the year prior who told her there weren’t five multis better than her. She didn’t believe him. Until it became fact.
Having her as a sounding board has proved tremendous for Harris’ climb.
“Getting to see her trophies hanging out in the house all the time, it’s like that’s where I want to be, that’s where I should be at this point,” Harris said. “I feel like she’s had the same approach I did. At the beginning of this year, Baily told me I’m giving you the same talk I gave Lexie last year. You have to believe you’re a first-team All-American from the beginning of the year. You just have to show it for yourself.”
What the indoor meet showed Harris and Baily was Harris was ready to move forward. He had the meet won, but instead of moving the bar first to beat the school record, Harris went straight for an NCAA qualifying mark. He missed it in big part because he was blowing through poles which couldn’t contain the energy he was creating.
“He puts so much energy with speed and takeoff, so you’re jumping big, sprinting fast, the pole doesn’t recoil in time,” Baily said. “You have to get it to vertical, too fast, past vertical, launch too far and can’t get over the bar.
“What’s cool with Eldridge, when he is ready, he can make special things happen. When it counts the most, he’ll always be ready. That’s what you want in an athlete. He’s always stepped up at conference. The last two championships have been superb. In fact, he blew through massive poles at conference. He would have gone much higher, but unfortunately, we didn’t’ have poles big enough and neither did anyone at the facility.
“So, he’s also really expensive. We just had to order two more.”
As the outdoor season progresses, they’ll use that nitrous – Baily said he’s seen it Hunter Price, Janay DeLoach and currently Allam Bushara – and channel it to clear the next hurdle, which is consistency.
Harris, now fully vested in all of it, is set to take off. Outdoor, there is no cap sailing into a clear, blue sky.
“Going into this year, it’s the same approach,” he said. “You have to be confident; you have to know you’re going to be a conference champ and you have to know you’re going to get through regionals and just keep going at the year and be confident your year can be as good as it can be, that you’re as good as you’re meant to be.
“I don’t even know what the ceiling could be for the season. It could be making it to NCAAs or being a first-team All-American, but I’m really excited.”
Part of the reason Baily feels so confident is who Harris is as a person. He’s grounded. Pole vault, while extremely important, is not his whole life. He has friends on the team and away from the track.
He has a life which can pull him away when the sport feels all encompassing. Such as the time when the Rams were at Air Force for an indoor meet last year. They couldn’t find Harris, because he was watching Johnson and another roommate at the time, Emma Breslin, swim in another part of the facility.
“I remember that last year. I just looked up in the stands and I saw Eldridge, and I was like, wait, don’t you have a meet?” Johnson said. “That was sweet. He’s just so caring and supporting of all of his friends and his teammates.
“I feel like a lot of people say college is the time when you make all of these great friends in your life, and he’s definitely out there doing that.”
Harris wasn’t going to miss the race. There are a lot of teams on campus which won’t fill a facility when they compete, but it doesn’t mean the pursuit isn’t as important to them as it is to those who see the stands packed.
Part of being a friend is being there when it’s important to them. Besides, he’s learned so much from those he has met who have given him a different perspective on what they all experience in their own unique way.
“I think it’s bad to just be stuck around one group of people all the time. It keeps you in one perspective, and I feel you can get stuck in the middle of your own sport,” he said. “It’s cool to understand how other teams and other people thing. I live with Lexie, so I get to see how she lives and how she thinks and approaches everything. Last year, I got to see the swimmers and how they wake up at the crack of dawn every day, and they’re up and at it all day. I have the utmost respect for that because I could never do that in college. I think it’s cool, to see the different perspectives everyone has on success and how different lifestyles can also work toward making you successful.”
Which is why Harris is quick to engage in conversation, even with a stranger. He may do it as a student, or as a dining-hall worker at the Rams Horn. He grew up in Georgia all is life, which is why he wanted to leave. He wasn’t a fan of the culture, nor the heat or humidity.
In Colorado, he could see mountains and snow and explore all of it. At a university with more than 30,000 students, somebody had a story to tell. In fact, all of them. He’s learned a lot about those on campus and even the community, and just as important, a bit about himself.
“I think I’ve gotten so much more out of it. I couldn’t have imagined coming on to a campus and being able to walk around and just talk to anyone on the campus,” he said. “I would say I was a social person before coming here, but coming in knowing no one, I made it a big point to put myself out there. Not to be liked, but to have a presence and at this point, it’s coming naturally, where I can approach any situation and just talk. I don’t think there’s many other people who can walk around campus at any point of the day and walk into three people they know and have a casual conversation. I think that’s just awesome. I mean, where else are you going to find that?”
Still, there are times Harris needs to be by himself. He’s found the perfect spot on campus, one few know about, because most of the time when he’s there, he’s all by himself. It’s rare, but it’s needed.
It is atop a building, a place where on a sunny day he can bury himself in his schoolwork in silence. At other times, it’s a place to take in the views of campus, reflect on his thoughts or get carried away in the clouds he’s chasing from the end of a pole.