SHE’S JUMPING FOR JOY : Serra’s Lynn Patrick Says Other Concerns Will Have to Wait

Lynn Patrick can jump, that’s for sure.

Watch Patrick, wearing her flashy red track shoes, run toward the high jump bar. Gracefully, even at 6-feet tall, she cuts left at the last moment and begins to rise.

Her right arm reaches over the top, and her sleek frame fluidly follows. She arches her back, almost bending in half, it seems, and quickly slips her long legs over the undisturbed bar.

Her red shoes are the last to clear.

Last year, as a sophomore, Patrick high jumped better than any high school girl in California.

At Serra High School, the kids know about Lynn Patrick.

“There’s the famous Lynn Patrick,” they yell.

Patrick laughs. It embarrasses her when somebody asks about her flashy shoes. A friend gave them to her, and they’re comfortable.

It embarrasses her even more when someone even hints that she might be famous.

She won the state high jump championship last year, clearing 5-feet 10-inches on her final jump. That’s the highest she has ever gone.

A nice accomplishment, but Patrick would prefer that fame park down at the end of the road.

Lynn Patrick has other things to do.

Watch Patrick jump from sport to sport. When she was a freshman at Serra three years ago, she wanted to be a star in soccer and softball. But since she has been at Serra, she has played volleyball and basketball and high jumped.

She was on her way to softball tryouts when she noticed the track at Serra High. She had played softball since she was seven, but the tryouts would have to wait.

“It looked like it would be more fun to do track,” Patrick said. “I gave it a try and I’ve loved it ever since.”

Around a high jump pit, she has turned into quite a performer. She jumped 5-8 as a freshman.

“She went beyond everything we expected that first year,” said Lynn Page, Patrick’s coach at Serra.

Around a net, though, she has been the same way.

Watch her jump up to spike a volleyball.

She’s so good that Terry Liskevych, who coaches the United States women’s national team, invited her to attend a national team camp at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., this summer.

She had been a starter, and maybe even the best player, on the area’s most successful and widely recognized club volleyball team--the San Diego Volleyball Club--for six weeks this winter.

She had gained enough recognition for Liskevych to have noticed, and she had played well enough for people to start thinking she had a shot at making the national team one day.

The best high school players in the nation will try out just to be invited to Liskevych’s camp. Lynn Patrick was handed a ticket.

Watch Patrick surprise a lot of people by turning down the offer.

In February, she jumped the track--or, more specifically, jumped to track. She quit the club volleyball team to concentrate on her high jumping.

Watch how many people jumped down her throat to tell her she had done the wrong thing.

“She probably has more potential in volleyball than she does in track,” said John Cook, the San Diego Volleyball Club coach. “If she had stayed with it, she could have picked anywhere she wanted to go. With track, she just doesn’t have the same opportunities.”

Cook is not bitter, but he has had a hard time understanding. When Patrick left, he tried everything he could to work things out so that she could both jump and play volleyball.

But nothing worked. Patrick made her decision and has stuck by it.

“Everybody was telling me what to do and what was best for me, but they didn’t realize that I had to do what’s best for me,” she said. “I’m still very young, and I’ll have plenty of chances to do whatever I want.

“If volleyball is it, I’ll make that decision. But right now, I’m having fun high jumping, and I want to see how far I can go with that. I don’t want to close any doors. I want to keep all of my options available.”

Still some feel maybe Patrick closed out her chance to be a volleyball star. But she said she’ll continue to play at Serra High next season. It’s just that the club was becoming too much for her to handle with everything else.

“The thing is, no college coaches even look at high school volleyball,” Cook said. “The competition in club volleyball is so much better.”

But Patrick believes that if she’s so good, the option to go back will always be available.

“She’s a very bright kid,” Page said. “She’s not confused at all. She knows she wants to try a lot of different things before she settles on something.”

Said Patrick: “I know I’m doing the right thing. I talked a lot with my parents and my sister. They said I should do what makes me happy.”

Her mother, Carol, is a guidance counselor at Mesa College, and her sister, Lisa, is a freshman at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“All the advice they’ve given me is that I have to do what makes Lynn Patrick happy, not what will make someone else happy,” Patrick said. “I knew I would be hurting some people if I quit volleyball, but I also felt it was unfair for me to just put in a half-effort.

“That’s what I was doing with track and volleyball at the same time. I want to put my all into something, and right now, that’s high jumping.”

Lynn Patrick also likes to dream about jumping.

Every day, she comes home and stares at a picture on her wall of Bulgaria’s Stefka Kostadinova, the world-record holder in the high jump.

Patrick says she’d jump at the chance to compete in the Olympics.

“I always dream about it,” she said.

Right now, that dream--as a high jumper, at least--is way off. Kostadinova’s world record is 6-10, more than a foot higher than Patrick has ever gone.

But she’s only 17.

“The thing about her is that she works so hard,” Page said. “People think everything just comes natural to her, but that’s not true. Most track kids, you have to push them and tell them what to do. Lynn just shows up to practice and starts doing it.”

Friday, Patrick jumped a county-best 5-9 to win the City Eastern League championship and secure her spot as the favorite in Saturday’s state preliminaries at Balboa Stadium. The week after, on May 28, she’ll probably be favored in the state finals, too. Karyn Armstrong of Torrey Pines and Christy Kurras of Poway should be her closest challengers, but neither has cleared higher than 5-8 this year.

“I feel the pressure of trying to repeat as state champion,” Patrick said, “but I always have to keep in mind that I’m jumping for me.”