How Addie Kash Turned Broken Path into Soaring Pole Vault Career | Journal-News
By Chris Vogt / Dayton Daily News
DAYTON — The path that carried Addie Kash to the top of Ohio's high school pole vaulting scene did not begin with a pole in her hands. It began on the run. Before she became Oakwood's state champion, before she set school and regional records and before Oregon State offered her the chance to compete in college while studying zoology, Kash was a runner from a running family — a smiling, pigtail-wearing kid who thought that was where her future lived. Pole vault was little more than a curiosity then, something she tried in seventh grade because a cousin did it and because it looked fun. Running was the plan. Pole vault was the side road. Then the plan broke. Literally. Kash was coming off a strong freshman cross country season, running near the front for Oakwood, when pain in her shin became something more serious. What seemed manageable turned into devastating news — a Grade 4 stress fracture severe enough that she was told she should not even be walking.
The injury cost her months. It took away her season, her momentum and, for a while, the joy she once carried so naturally. "It was a roller coaster, to say the least," Kash said. "I started out in seventh grade as a runner, and I come from a giant running family, so running was my favorite thing." That identity had always fit. It made sense. She knew what her future was supposed to look like. Then recovery complicated everything. When Kash tried to return to running, something felt different. The physical pain was one part of it. The emotional toll was another. The spark was gone. She had once been known as the joyful runner, the girl with the high pigtails and the smile that rarely left her face. After the fracture, she said, "it was just all gone." Her mother, Molly Kash, saw it too. "She's the most joyful person you will ever meet, but she lost that joy in running," Molly said. "She loved the track team and she was like, 'I don't want to leave the track team.'" That mattered. Kash still wanted to be on the team. She still wanted the belonging. She just needed something that fit the person she was becoming, not the athlete everyone thought she had to remain.
Pole vault offered a new lane, even if it came with uncertainty. Oakwood needed somebody to help make it possible. Molly, a lifelong runner and not a trained vaulter, stepped in because nobody else was going to do it. That decision changed everything. "At the beginning it was a bit of a struggle," Addie said of being coached by her mom. "But now that we have our rhythm, it's been the best thing ever." The early days were hardly glamorous. Kash said she was "not a good pole vaulter — like — at all." Molly laughed remembering just how raw it all looked. Yet there was something about it — the challenge, the unfamiliarity, the possibility — that slowly pulled Kash in. She reached regionals as a freshman and cleared 8 feet, 6 inches, a jump that now stands in her memory as the moment everything began to shift. That was where Roger Bowen, a longtime and highly respected Ohio vault coach at Miami East, entered the picture. Bowen invited Kash to come to camp in Piqua. She was hesitant. Pole vault still was not the dream. Running still had a claim on her heart. But she went. "She fell in love with it and she has not looked back," Molly said. What had started as a fallback began to look like a future. Years later, Kash can say something that once would have sounded ridiculous to her younger self. "I was devastated then," Kash said. "And now I'm like, that is the best thing to ever happen to me was fracturing my leg, which is weird to say." Weird, yes. Also true. Because the injury that seemed to steal her direction ended up giving her one she never would have found otherwise. The rise By the time Kash found her footing in pole vault, she was already deep into something bigger than results. She was learning a difficult event in a sport that can humble even the gifted. She was doing it alongside her mother, who was learning too. They studied, watched, listened and worked, building a foundation that was equal parts improvisation, trust and obsession. "I've never pole vaulted," Molly said. "I sat next to Roger Bowen for two years in the winters and listened to him coach kids and just tried to absorb as much as I could, and then I watched a whole lot of YouTube and Instagram reels." That is not the traditional blueprint for developing a state champion. Then again, very little about Kash's path has been traditional. Still, the numbers started climbing. Kash broke 11 feet as a sophomore and made it to the state meet, an accomplishment that would have sounded far-fetched when she first arrived at Bowen's camp. That state experience, though, did not end the way she wanted. It was cold. It was windy. It was not her day. She cleared one bar and was done. The disappointment lingered. So did the motivation. By her junior season, the growth became impossible to miss. She set Oakwood's school record at Eaton with a vault of 12-1. Then she kept going, winning district and regional titles and pushing the school and regional records to 12-8 at regionals. At state, she entered at 11 feet — the highest opening height of her career — and handled it. She cleared 11-6 cleanly too. Then came 12 feet, a height she had made many times before in practice. Only this time was the state meet. And only this time did it suddenly start slipping away.
Kash missed once. Then again. Now she was down to her final attempt, standing at the back of the runway, shaking, pole in hand, staring down a moment that could define the entire day. "I remember standing at the back of the runway because I knew going in I had a decent chance at winning it," Kash said. "But then I was like, I might not make even 12." She cleared it. The vault kept her alive and changed the meet. The next bar was 12-4, and Kash made that too. Only then did she begin to understand what might be happening. There is a photograph Molly treasures from that moment — mother and daughter sharing the kind of glance only people that close can share, one of them holding the emotion in, the other still trying to process it. Kash did not realize immediately that the title was hers. Her mother did. "She told me, I was like, 'What?'" Addie said. "It was crazy." Molly remembers it through a parent's lens, not just as a coach or observer but as someone who had watched every hard step leading into that final, improbable clearing at 12 feet. "It was just incredible," Molly said. "She has worked her tail off, and she has sacrificed so much, and to see that pay off, and to see how hard she works at it, it's just amazing." Those around Kash speak about the results because the results demand it. State champion. School-record holder. Regional-record holder. College signee. Yet the parts they return to most are the less measurable ones — the joy, the work ethic, the way she carries herself on the runway. Molly describes her daughter dancing in the back before jumps, smiling, loving every second of it. That image matters because it captures the full circle of the journey. The athlete who lost joy after injury found it again not by returning to what she had been, but by becoming something else. "I could not be more grateful for the people it gave me and the love I've gotten to see from my school community and the pole vault community in general," Kash said. "It gave me another family that I did not know I needed. But it kind of saved me in a way." That may be the truest way to explain her rise. The bars went higher, yes. So did everything else. The landing ahead Kash's final season at Oakwood is unfolding with the kind of perspective few seniors get to carry. She already has the championship. She already has the scholarship. She already has the proof that the dream, even if it changed shape, came true anyway. Now the question is what she wants the ending to feel like. The answer sounds a lot like the rest of her story — personal, hopeful and bigger than herself. A repeat state title is on the list. Kash does not hide from that. "That would be amazing," she said. Her focus, though, is not locked only on the top of the podium. Lately, she said, one of the most rewarding parts of this stage of her career has been working with younger athletes in the program, especially junior high girls who are drawn to the event but intimidated by it. "One main thing that I really want to work hard for these next couple months is setting the program up for success," Addie said. "It's a very intimidating sport, especially I think to a lot of young female athletes. So I really want to ensure that I continue to empower those young girls." That desire to leave something behind fits naturally with the kind of athlete Kash has become. Her story is not simply one of winning. It is one of redirection, of learning to trust a process that did not make sense at first, of embracing the route that nobody expected.
Even her college choice reflects that. Kash will continue her vault career at Oregon State, a destination she found not by chasing a famous track program first, but by chasing her academic passion. She wants to study zoology. That interest grew from a life filled with animals, from fostering rabbits with her mother, helping at shelters and becoming involved in wildlife rehabilitation. She wanted a school that could match both halves of her ambition — the athlete and the animal lover. "That's actually how I found Oregon State," Kash said. "I was just looking at who had zoology and then they showed up." Then she did the hard part. She emailed coaches. A lot of them. "I actually, funny story, emailed a crap ton of colleges," Kash said, laughing. "The first college I emailed was Oregon State." That first email turned into a visit. The visit turned into a feeling. The feeling turned into a future. Kash said the distance is both thrilling and frightening. Oregon is far from Oakwood. It is far from home, far from familiarity, far from the mother who became not just her coach but one of the central figures in this remarkable climb. Still, the decision felt right. "It is so scary that I'm going to be alone out there, but then also that's so exciting," Kash said. "Everyone on the team just seemed so supportive and I was like, OK, I can see myself here." Molly, who once watched her daughter cry through the pain and frustration of trying to come back as a runner, now watches her prepare to leave for a Division I program and a life she built out of reinvention. That transformation still stuns her at times. "Her goal was to go to a D-I school running," Molly said. "Then when she broke her leg and she lost the joy of it, I thought maybe you're not going to achieve that D-I dream. But then she mashed her way out." That phrase — mashed her way out — feels about right. Nothing about Kash's story has been neat. Nothing about it has been handed to her. She had to discover the sport. She had to endure the injury. She had to relearn joy. She had to risk loving something new. Now, in these last months of her high school career, she wants younger athletes to see what is possible in the middle of uncertainty. Her message is simple, even if the road to it was anything but. "Bad journeys can happen, but great outcomes can come from those," she said. That truth is stamped across every chapter of her career. It lives in the runner who became a vaulter. It lives in the injury that became an opening. It lives in the mother who learned a new sport because her daughter needed someone to stand there. It lives in the state title won on shaky legs and a final attempt. It lives in the teenager heading across the country to study zoology and keep vaulting. Kash's story, in the end, is not really about a bar set at 12 feet or 12-4 or 12-8. It is about what happens after life lowers one bar and asks whether you are willing to chase a higher one instead. Addie Kash did. And now she is flying.
