Raising the Bar

Ted Mucher doesn’t call himself a thrill seeker, but most afternoons, the Memorial High School senior is catapulting himself into the air using a 14-foot flexible pole. As a member of the MHS pole vaulting team, he remembers how he happened upon the track and field sport when he was at Spring Forest Middle School. 

“I was on the track team and our coach was like, ‘we need pole vaulters.’ I knew I wasn’t fast enough to do the running events and not strong enough to do the shotput and discus. So I said, ‘let me just try this’ and it turned out to go my way,” said Ted, who also plays varsity soccer for MHS.

Since then, Ted has been a two-time district champion in pole vaulting and a regional qualifier. An injury kept him out of competition for most of last year, but this year, he has reached a new personal record of 13 feet. He credits his success to all of his coaches, but one in particular is someone he sees during his own time: the highly sought-after, world-renowned pole vaulting coach, David Butler, at Rice University. 

Ted Mucher flies high on the pole vault and plans to continue jumping in college. (Photo: Jackson Yacob)

“He’s very different from any other coach I've ever had,” said Ted. “I could tell that he knew a lot by the way he was coaching me. So I just kept coming back week after week, year after year and then the work started showing and I won district in eighth grade.”

David Butler is called the Zen master of the pole vault. He has coached world-champion athletes and has mentored Olympic champions including the current world-record holder and gold medalist Mondo Duplantis. At the age of 70, his passion for the sport keeps him coming back to the pit... a giant blue mattress flanked by a steel shipping container full of equipment in a far corner of the track at Rice University. It’s where he has spent the last 24 years teaching his technique, 22 of those years as a volunteer assistant coach for Rice.

“This event will beat the crap out of you. You have to be a sprinter, a gymnast, a weightlifter, an acrobat all at the same time. The body is getting pressed and the other side of the body is getting stretched and there’s a lot of pounds of force on the jump off the ground and you’re carrying a pole that is five meters long and it's heavy,” said Coach Butler.

ABOVE AND BEYOND Coach David Butler with Rice University athlete Javier Alatorre at the conference championships in Birmingham, Ala.  (Photo: Courtesy of Rice Athletics)

Pole vaulting involves a highly complex and technical approach. Athletes must sprint down a runway, stick the pole precisely, and then use it to propel themselves and clear a bar while using contortionist moves, twisting and bending. Coach Butler sees it as beauty and artistry. He had an early appreciation for ballet, and took some dance classes in college. He started to understand dance sports athleticism and ended up minoring in dance in college. 

“I see any movement-oriented endeavor as a work of art. Let’s face it, we appreciate the beauty of Michael Jordan dunking. We take pictures of it and slow it down because this is something that’s beautiful and effortless. I think that when you have an athlete that goes to the top level, what they're doing is quite beautiful.”

Bottom right: Coach Butler, just back from speaking at an athletic conference in Pingtung, Taiwan, coaches Rice University pole vaulting champion Alex Slinkman, who is a National qualifier and holds a world ranking in pole vault. (Photo: Courtesy of Rice Athletics)

Ted’s mom, Dorina Mucher, described the uneasiness she felt when she learned her son wanted to try pole vaulting in middle school. 

“I'm a pediatrician, so I was a little apprehensive about having a middle school gym coach train my son in pole vaulting. It scared me to death, as you can imagine,” said Dorina. “I heard through the grapevine that there was a Rice coach that was holding training sessions on Sundays. And so we started going there on Sundays. And now he’s a senior and he is very competitive at the pole vault, and that's all because of Coach Butler.”

Coach Butler has produced more than 80 medal winners in conference, NCAA, and USA Champs, but he makes a living giving private lessons and loves teaching the “never ever” beginners. 

He is always teaching, consulting, mentoring, and cheering. And finally in 2020, he put it all down on paper. He wrote The Pole Vault: A Violent Ballet, 240 pages detailing “everything pole vault.” 

“In pole vaulting there has to be a certain violence in your mind that you're not going to back off and be afraid. And at the same time, you have to allow yourself to relax and not try, which is the essence of all sports,” said David.

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS Rice University senior Alex Slinkman is ranked top 10 in the NCAA. He holds a personal record of 18’6” in the pole vault. He is majoring in sports management at Rice and plans to stay with the sport professionally after graduation. (Photo: Courtesy of Rice Athletics)

Former student athlete, Ally Daum, graduated from Memorial High School in 2000 and Rice University in 2004. She is now an ER physician in Houston. She remembers wanting to learn the pole vault but was told in the late ’90s it was not a girls sport. Coach Butler was there escorting Ally and other high school teammates to the UIL board in Austin and successfully petitioned the board to create an equal girls event the following year. 

“He’s one of the best in the world. He's taught so many amazing athletes and helped pioneer techniques to improve pole vaulters’ heights and break their own PRs. People come to him from all over the world and he goes over the world teaching his techniques,” said Ally. 

Rice University senior, Alex Slinkman, is ranked in the world's top 100 for Men’s Pole Vaulting. He remembers being a nimble kid, always climbing things and pretending to be ninja-like. He met Coach Butler at a summer camp in his home state of Virginia. He approached Coach Butler and predicted he would pole vault for him at Rice one day. 

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS Rice University senior Alex Slinkman is ranked top 10 in the NCAA. He holds a personal record of 18’6” in the pole vault. He is majoring in sports management at Rice and plans to stay with the sport professionally after graduation. (Photo: Courtesy of Rice Athletics)

“He is responsible for all my success. He has helped me mature as a person, as an athlete, as an artist. And he has taught me to hone my skills to pursue what I want,” said Alex. “He has funneled my passion to where it actually produced results. He’s like my best friend.” 

Coach Butler is considered one of the top technical minds in the field with more than 50 years of coaching experience, but what he does for the students is above and beyond a glorious moment of flight. It is to make them better at problem solving and figuring out life for themselves and it starts with specific instructions for the summer.

“I don’t want them to jump in the summer. I want them to climb rocks, ride bicycles, swim and dive. Take ballet and do yoga,” said Coach Butler. “That’s because when they come back, and they start learning again, they can learn faster.” 

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS Rice University senior Alex Slinkman is ranked top 10 in the NCAA. He holds a personal record of 18’6” in the pole vault. He is majoring in sports management at Rice and plans to stay with the sport professionally after graduation. (Photo: Courtesy of Rice Athletics)

Ted Mucher says Coach Butler has been more than a pole vaulting coach to him – he is also a life coach. 

“He tells us, ‘I want you to mess up and find out what's wrong with it and correct it and then do what you can to fix it,’” said Ted. “I'm so glad I have a great coach like him in the area. Even if I don’t vault in college, I can just always still talk to him because he's such a good guy.”