BRIGHTON — Becka Lethorn enjoys carving her own path, whether it’s in the sport of track and field or in her future career.
She does a little of everything for Charyl Stockwell’s track and field team, but her specialty is pole vault.
It’s the event in which she has become a four-time regional champion and is gunning for her third all-state performance in the MHSAA Division 3 finals on Saturday, May 30, at Kent City High School.
She will be one of 20 vaulters competing in Division 3, which will be a much larger field than she typically sees. At many of her meets, she is one of only a handful of girls doing pole vault. Often, the other girls are her own teammates, as many small schools don’t have coaches who can teach pole vault.
“I wouldn’t say pole vault is scary,” she said. “It’s something a lot of people don’t get to enjoy or try. If your school has pole vault, you should try it. It’s kind of like bragging rights, because not a lot of people do it.”
Not a lot of women become welders either, but that’s the career path Lethorn has been pursuing since she started taking college courses at Washtenaw Community College her junior year.
Only 5.8% of welders are females, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but Lethorn sees plenty of women in her college program. One of the women is Mikala Sposito, a 21-year-old from Dexter who will be the first female to represent the United States in welding at the WorldSkills Competition to be held Sept. 22-27 in China.
“Is it kind of rare for a girl to be in trades and stuff like that?” Lethorn asked. “Yes. But I think it’s become a lot more popular. Girls want to get out there and they want to try that stuff. I think they should.”
Just as Lethorn gets into her own world listening to music on headphones before she competes in pole vault, she is able to shut out everything else when she’s welding. She plans to focus on pipeline welding as a career.
“Welding is my passion,” she said. “I don’t even know how to explain how much I love welding. I could sit in a welding booth all day and just weld.”
Her first class was a MIG (Metal Inert Gas) welding class, which is considered an entry point to the craft.
“It was just sheet metal, little repairs, little frame repairs,” she said. “Even that, I just loved it. It was my own little thing, my own little world when I was under that hood. If you and that art. You’re making something nobody else is going to make.”
Because of her career choice, Lethorn won’t be competing in track and field in college, making the state meet her final competition in the sport.
She is fortunate to be heading back to the Division 3 finals in pole vault, because she was unable to compete in the event until two weeks before regionals. Lethorn shattered her right wrist doing slopestyle snowboard jumps during the winter and had to let the injury heal for 12 weeks.
It could have been worse. She landed on her head and was knocked out.
“It was a really hard comeback, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to snowboard ever again,” said Lethorn, who competes on Pinckney’s boardercross team. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to pole vault or do any of the things I really love, because my right hand is my dominant hand.”
Lethorn sprinted and did long jump at the beginning of the season, then cleared nine feet in her first pole vault competition on May 1 to win the Onsted Booster Invitational. She has won all five meets in which she’s vaulted, achieving the early qualifier for the Division 3 finals by clearing 10 feet May 9 at the Lutheran Westland Warrior Invitational.
“I was super scared, because even now if I put a lot of pressure or weight on my wrist, I could damage it and it would restart the entire process,” she said.
Lethorn started vaulting as a freshman through the encouragement of her parents. Her father was a college pole vaulter and her mother was a college gymnast.
“They were both really good athletes,” she said. “They’ve always pushed me to be in sports, no mater what, no matter how I feel about it. Looking back on it now, I really appreciate the way they pushed me to do certain things, to be in certain sports, even if I wasn’t feeling it that day.
“It made me come through in certain things. If I have things I don’t want to do in actual real-life situations, I’ve just got to do it anyway. Sometimes spots really made me realize sometimes you’ve got to do something you really don’t want to do.”
Contact Bill Khan at wkhan@livingstondaily.com. Follow him on X @BillKhan
This article originally appeared on Livingston Daily: Charyl Stockwell pole vaulter carves own path in track, career goals
Reporting by Bill Khan, Livingston Daily / Livingston Daily
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
