With Injured Hamstring Healed, Yendork Is Again Jumping for Joy

Juliana Yendork of Walnut had reason to smile after picking up her award as the top high school girl in the field events at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays last Saturday afternoon. She had won the girls’ invitational long jump with a leap of 18 feet 10 3/4 inches, after having won the triple jump Friday night with a mark of 41-10 1/2, which broke her own meet record.

And projecting future efforts made her even happier.

For weeks before the Mt. SAC meet, Yendork had been hampered by a right hamstring injury, which caused her to miss several meets and practice time. Now she can look ahead.

“My injury really set me back,” Yendork said. “If I had not gotten hurt, I would be (triple) jumping 44 feet right now.”

Yendork, a junior, is already well known locally. Among her accomplishments:

--1989 state titles in the long jump and triple jump.

--A national indoor record in the triple jump of 42-5 1/2, set at the national interscholastic championships in Syracuse last month.

--The sophomore national triple jump record of 42-6 3/4, which made her the No. 3 all-time prep performer.

However, Yendork’s greatest feat might have been competing in the long jump in the 1988 Seoul Olympics for her native country, Ghana, when she was 15.

Yendork left Ghana when she was 6 and lived in Houston until 1985, when her father, Charles, took a job as men’s and women’s track coach at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Tex.

“Once I started competing, we would send updates on my performances back to Ghana,” Yendork said. “Because they knew about my dad and were kept up to date on me, they sent for me to compete in the African Games in Algiers.”

Yendork made the most of that opportunity by winning the long jump with a then-personal best leap of 18-8 1/2, which opened the door for her to make the Ghana Olympic team.

“When I went to Seoul, I was excited more or less just to be there,” Yendork said. “My mind was not into the competition because I was so young. I wasn’t thinking about my future then.”

She failed to qualify for the finals in the long jump, finishing 16th in the preliminaries.

After the Olympics, Charles Yendork realized that Juliana had outstripped her competition and needed a better place to train, so he resigned from Paul Quinn and checked with friends about moving to California.

“It was a high-risk move for me to leave a full-time job to come out here,” he said. “But the situation was much better for her here.”

Yendork found work as assistant track coach at Walnut High--he has since moved to coach the jumpers at Mt. SAC--and Juliana, who had set a national Junior Olympic triple jump record at 40-10 while living in Waco, quickly made her presence felt, becoming one of the country’s best jumpers last spring.

“I did not have any real problems adjusting to our move out here,” Yendork said, who became a U.S. citizen in December. “I was able to start training more seriously on my technique and emphasize on the little things.”

With her father as her coach, Yendork improved her triple jump by nearly two feet last season. Now she has set her sights on the national prep record of 42-10 1/2.

“Every year I have been able to improve by two feet on my triple jump, but my injury slowed me down so far this season,” said Yendork, who also is a fine sprinter. “But now I am almost 100% and my goal is reach 45 feet and to compete in the World Junior championships.”

Last Friday night, standout sprinter Inger Miller of Pasadena Muir announced her decision to attend USC next fall, following in the footsteps of her father, Dr. Lennox Miller, who was a sprint star at USC and won Olympic silver and bronze medals in the 100-meter dash in 1968 and 1972.

“My father and I went over the pros and cons of every school I was considering,” said Miller, whose final college choices were USC, California, Brown and Texas. “It came down that I wanted a small-school situation.”