Vaulting Ambition: Shirk Signs with Duke

By Barry Sankey
Phoenixville News
Tuesday February 26, 2008

PHOENIXVILLE — Up, up and away.

Phoenixville’s Tony Shirk keeps soaring higher and higher in his specialty event in track and field, the pole vault.

The Phantom senior has a personal best of 15 feet, 6 inches and will seek to match or better that height at the Pennsyivania Indoor State Meet at Penn State University this weekend. Shirk is seeded first in the event since he is the lone pole vaulter to clear that height during the current season.

Shirk’s accomplishments in the pole vault for the past four years have established him as one of the premier student-athletes in the event around. And all of that hard work and perseverance have paid huge dividends.

On Tuesday afternoon, Shirk signed his national letter of intent to attend prestigious Division I Duke University in Durham, N.C., on a track and field scholarship.

Shirk, a 5-foot-11, 152-pounder, opted for Duke while also looking at Villanova, the University of New Mexico and the University of Pennsylvania. A top academic student who ranks 31st in a class of 250 students at Phoenixville, Shirk plans to major in biology with a possible minor in Spanish and hopes of becoming a medical doctor.

Shirk made his decision official in an afternoon briefing at the senior high school television studio. He was joined by his parents, Bill and Susie (Chillano) Shirk, Principal Richard Kaskey and Athletic Director Ray Jenkins in making the announcement public. Bill Shirk is the former head football coach at Phoenixville and is now principal at Upper Perkiomen High School after serving as an assistant principal at Spring-Ford High School. Mrs. Shirk is a nurse at Phoenixville Area Middle School.

In picking Duke, Tony Shirk passed up the opportunity to rejoin his former pole vaulting coach, Talen Singer, who is now an assistant coach at Villanova.

“Mr. Singer is a great coach, but overall Duke is the better fit for me academically and athletically,” Shirk said. “He (Singer) totally understood that it was the best decision for me.”

The pleasant weather in the southern portion of the country helped play a part in Shirk’s selection process. He will be competing in spring track outdoors, where heights are at their pick, as well as indoor track during the winter months.

“Duke is also known more for science and medical research,” Shirk said. “That is the field I want to go into. It is a better fit for me. I meshed well with the team and they have a great pole vaulting program.”

The director of track and field operations at Duke is Norm Ogilvie, who has 18 years of experience overall and 16 with the Blue Devils program. Assistant Coach Ryan Dall, who specializes in the pole vault, sprints and hurdles, is in his fifth season at the school that is known for its success in the pole vault as well as cross country.

The indoor pole vault record at Duke is 17-0.75 feet and was established by Brent Warner back in 2004. Warner also holds the school record outdoors at 17-2.75, which he performed in 2004 as well. Warner was the first Duke trackman to eclipse 17 feet, but since then, with Dall’s assistance, four more Blue Devils have soared to such great heights. In 2007, Ian Cassidy cleared 16-06.75 outdoors while competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Championships.

Dall is a graduate of the University of Miami, where he became a two-time Big East Conference champion in the pole vault while clearing 17 feet. He also finished fourth in the decathlon while attending Miami.

The automatic qualifying height for NCAAs is 18-0.5 while the NCAA provisional qualifier is 17-0.75. The IC4A qualifier is 15 feet, 9 inches.

“I have been doing the pole vault since the winter of ninth grade,” Shirk said. “Talen (Singer) started me in ninth grade and in the spring season I did a lot better. I was picking it up and started seeing improvement. Since then it has paid off.”

On top of his work at Phoenixville, Shirk travels to Allentown once a week to practice indoors at the Vertical Assault facility, where he is directed by coach Mike Lawryk, who is the National High School Coach of the Year in the pole vault.

“I train there year-round,” Shirk said. “It has helped a lot throughout my career.”

Duke is small in terms of enrollment with just 6,197 students. However, the campus is immaculate and sprawling, known as one of the top 10 colleges in the United States. Shirk said the university draws the majority of its students from New York, Pennsylvania, California and other western states besides hometown North Carolina.

“The campus is spread out and has Old Georgian style architecture,” Shirk said. “It is a pretty interesting place. It is awesome. It is a lot different from here. It is a good transition really.”

Shirk will also be close to other cities that house renowned Division I schools like Chapel Hill, home base for like the University of North Carolina; and Raleigh, home of North Carolina State University; as well as Winston-Salem, the site of Wake Forest University. The Blue Devils, of course, are rivals of the Tar Heels and Wolfpack along with the Demon Deacons.