U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL : For Sommer, Timing Is Everything : Mother and High Jumper Works to Regain Winning Form

After all the commotion--after the medal ceremony, after the interviews and after the drug-testing--Coleen Sommer was going to telephone her daughter, if it was not too late in the evening.

Sommer, winner of the gold medal in the high jump at Duke University’s Wallace Wade Stadium here at the U.S. Olympic Festival Friday, is the mother of Jenna Sommer, who is just shy of 3 years old. Let it not be lost on anyone that Jenna will turn 4 in 1988, 8 in 1992, and so forth and so on.

Babies sometimes have a way of coming along at inopportune times; Jenna’s timing probably could rank with the most inopportune of them all.

Sommer won the Pan American Games in 1983, and placed fourth in the World Championships that year. But by 1984, she and her husband, Scott, were expecting a baby, a pregnancy so obviously unplanned that Sommer now simply laughs at the idea that it could have been otherwise.

Fittingly enough, Jenna, who now cavorts on the track while her mother works out, was born during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

It took a year after giving birth for Sommer’s body to return to top jumping form.

“Basically, with your body chemistry, and producing hormones, it takes a while to regroup,” said Sommer, who lived in Westminster from 1981-84 while training for the Olympics. “My joints and ligaments were too soft for a while.”

In 1985, she placed second in the U.S. Nationals, and was back near top form.

But last year, she missed another season, her second in three years, this one because of injuries (a strained back among them) suffered in a car accident in Chandler, Ariz., where she, Scott and Jenna now live.

This year, she is again approaching top form. She won the TAC national championship this summer in San Jose with a jump of 6-feet 5-inches, 1 3/4 inches shy of her personal best set in 1982. Here at the Olympic Festival, she won easily at 6-3, not missing a single attempt before earning the gold medal.

After the final competitors had failed at that height, she asked that the bar be raised to 6-6, a height she failed to succeed at in three attempts.

The next stop will be the Pan American games Aug. 3-17 in Indianapolis.

On that trip, Sommer said, Jenna will accompany her. Because she did not want to be away from her daughter any more than necessary, Sommer flew in Thursday and will leave today, a speedy cross-country trip. “She’s going with me,” Sommer said. “It’s not good to have Mommy away at night and have to call to say good night.”

Sommer hasn’t often stayed in one place for long. She was born in Gardena, but grew up in Buhl, Ida.--a town whose claim to fame, she says, is that it is close to where Evel Knievel made his famed attempt to jump the Snake River canyon. But she went to high school in Sparks, Nev., and then to college at Arizona State, where she finished her eligibility in 1981. She is still about a year away from a degree in education.

She and Scott, a carpenter, moved to Westminster because of a job opportunity for him. While there, she trained at Cal State Long Beach and Golden West College. In 1984, they moved to San Jose, and later, to Chandler, always following building booms.

Now, though, Sommer expects to stay in one place and to spend as much time as possible with Jenna.

Even though she’s doing well, she says she is “not real pleased” with her jumping, and would like to jump 6-6 or 6-7.

“I should have gotten that today,” she said.