Watching Her Step : Occidental’s Hard-Luck Heptathlete Gives Nationals Another Try

When Molly Moore stepped on a sewing needle while walking barefoot across her apartment carpet last week, she felt the familiar bad luck cycle kicking in.

“I pulled it out, blood started to trickle and it hit me--here goes another year,” she said.

Moore, 22, is a senior at Occidental College who competes in the heptathlon and high jump. She has a season-high heptathlon total of 4,292 points and has qualified for the NCAA Division III track and field championships, which take place this week at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., for a fourth time. But on each previous occasion, she has stumbled.

Maybe that is why she anguished over returning to the team this fall. She had taken a year off school to work and had not run much in the interim.

“I thought, ‘Molly, it’s been a whole year deciding if you’re going to run or not and now you have to decide within the next hour,’ ” said Moore, who attended Loara High in Anaheim. “I knew if I went to the first day I would do the whole thing.”

Practice started at 4 p.m., and Moore was not there.

At 5, she walked out on the track and started jogging around.

“I didn’t think about it anymore,” she said. “I just started up again.”

At 5 feet, 9 inches and with light green eyes and dark brown hair, Moore looks more like a model than a medalist. But running has come naturally to her.

Doing well at the national championships is the hurdle she has yet to cross, however. In her freshman year she bruised a heel in the high jump and limped through the next five events of the seven-event heptathlon. Things looked better her sophomore year until three scratches in the long jump effectively eliminated her from contention.

As she stood at the end of the long jump runway in her junior season, she cried from the pressure. She was in third place after the first day of competition and one good jump would move her into first, but she already had two scratches.

She regained her composure, walked to the end of the runway and started her approach. She neared the pit and concentrated on her takeoff.

“It was a wonderful jump,” she said. “I landed and saw Coach (Bill) Harvey jumping up and down and it was legal.”

In her exuberance, Moore stood in the pit, turned and walked back across the sand, thereby nullifying her effort.

“I looked back and they were measuring from the edge of the pit,” said Moore, who still looks pained when recounting the incident. “I felt like an absolute failure. I thought, ‘Poor me. Bad things always happen to me and I’m doomed to fail.’ ”

Moore, who has a 3.2 grade-point average as a religious studies major, is active in her church and often draws upon her religion for confidence.

Her parents, who have attended nearly every meet in which Moore has competed since she was in eighth grade, also constitute a stabilizing force for her on and off the track. But she says their presence used to bother her.

“They’d want to talk to me and I’d be high jumping and my dad would stand up and yell, ‘How high is the bar?’ ” she said. “In the back of my mind, I was glad they were there but it was an added pressure I didn’t need to deal with at the moment.”

Then Tim and Mary Moore, who moved from Anaheim to Bakersfield when Molly started at Occidental, missed one of their daughter’s meets this season.

“I felt like I could see the empty spot in the stands,” she said.

This summer, Moore will move in with her parents and plans to attend California State Bakersfield to pursue a master’s in teaching in the fall. Track will not fall by the wayside, though. She would like to coach at a high school or run for Athletes in Action, a Christian-oriented amateur track club based in Irvine.

But for now, she wants to break the championships jinx.