Laguna Hills’ Morrison Leaps From Ballet Barre to High Jump Bar

At first, her approach to the bar was awkward. She didn’t know what to do with her feet. As she neared the bar for takeoff, she would instinctively turn her foot into the bar.

Darci Morrison of Laguna Hills was learning to high jump, but to succeed she had to forget years of ballet training.

When she was a freshman, Morrison wandered over to the high jump pit at Laguna Hills High School and her transformation from dancer to high jumper began. She traded point shoes for spiked shoes and hours at the ballet bar for hours at the high jump bar.

“I know I must have looked pretty stupid,” said Morrison, a junior who has since developed into one of Orange County’s best high jumpers.

“There’s a girl I know who has been dancing for years and I told her to go out for track and field. The second I saw her running, I knew I looked like her when I first jumped because she was running with her feet all turned out.”

Morrison, who will compete in the Sunkist Invitational indoor track and field meet Saturday at the Sports Arena, left behind dreams of being a professional dancer to devote more time to a sport she barely knew about two years ago.

“She’s still very young,” Laguna Hills Coach John Stonebarger said. “But she has done a lot. She really can control her body and that has to come from dance. You have to develop it in other kids and she already has it.”

At 5 feet 11, Morrison cuts an imposing figure. It would be difficult not to notice her. Jennifer Thomas, who coaches distance runners at Laguna Hills, sure did.

“She was in my freshman English class and she was just all legs so I suggested she come out for the team,” Thomas said. “She was so flexible and tall, she was our No. 1 high jumper the first time she jumped.”

During her freshman year, Morrison split time between track and field practices and ballet sessions. Her ballet teachers, who were priming her for a professional career, didn’t approve of her new hobby.

“I had to tell my ballet teacher, I couldn’t come on Thursdays or Saturdays and sometimes Tuesdays,” she said. “He didn’t like the idea at all. The teachers put a lot of pressure on me, asking me, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ When you are that advanced, they really think you are going for it.

“For a while, I wanted to be a professional dancer, but then you get into high school and meet new friends and get into new clubs. . . . Ballet wasn’t that important anymore.”

Eloise Morrison, Darci’s mother, had been taking her daughter to ballet lessons since Darci was 5, but she had doubts that a professional career really awaited Darci.

Besides, she believed Darci had grown tired of ballet, which sometimes required classes six days a week.

“Her whole world was dancing until she started high jumping,” Eloise said. “The jumping clicked and she was so well prepared for it because of her dancing.”

There was another reason Darci gave up dancing, though--she was simply too tall. Standing 5-10 as a freshman, Morrison didn’t fit the standard for a petite ballerina. The summer before her sophomore year, the Pacific Northwest Ballet School in Seattle, which she had attended for two consecutive years, turned down Morrison for a scholarship to its summer classes.

“She did not get the scholarship because she was too tall,” Eloise said. “I thought it would devastate her, but it didn’t because she was so excited about track and field. It just kind of worked out as the dance career faded, the high jump career came in.”

Being tall is an advantage in the high jump. Germany’s Heike Henkel, one the world’s top women’s jumpers, is a quarter of an inch taller than Morrison, for example. And being tall certainly hasn’t hurt Morrison, who jumped 5-7 3/4 last season and qualified for the State meet. Stonebarger and Thomas said Morrison made a breakthrough when she scaled that height at a dual meet against Laguna Beach last season.

“It’s been a real learning situation for both Darci and me,” Stonebarger said. “She’s just at the point where she understands how good she can be. It’s been two years of getting across to her that a 5-8 jump is a big jump.”

Thomas, who has encouraged Morrison to set goals and has helped her start a weight-training program, said Morrison is beginning to realize she needs to put the same effort into high jumping as she did into dancing.

“She said with dance she had learned to focus and be real intense on a day-to-day basis, and with high jumping it seemed too easy and she didn’t have to work hard enough for it,” Thomas said.

Morrison still yearns to dance. She takes ballet classes occasionally, but avoids getting too involved because she knows she needs to spend more time high jumping to reach her goals of a 6-foot jump and a college scholarship.

“When we sat down in December to set her goals, she really didn’t know how to set goals,” Thomas said. “She asked me, ‘What’s possible and what should I shoot for?’ She has the intensity that’s needed. She’s done it before in dance, and I think she’ll be able to channel it into high jumping because there’s so much more she can do.”

Sunkist Notes

The meet begins at 12:10 p.m. . . . The girls’ high jump field includes Darci Morrison of Laguna Hills, Tracy Broughton of Irvine, Wendy Brown of Woodbridge and Carrie Hoagland of Canyon. . . . The girls’ two-mile run features Carrie Garritson of Sunny Hills, Barbara Boisvert and Amber Parkinson of Orange Lutheran and Katy Eklof of Costa Mesa. Garritson, a sophomore who was sixth at the Kinney national cross-country championships, has a 3,200-meter best of 10 minutes 39.17 seconds. Boisvert was third and Parkinson fourth at the CIF State Division IV cross-country meet. Parkinson has run 10:38.80 for 3,200. Eklof was the Division II runner-up at the State cross-country meet. . . . Elinor Tolson, fourth in the 100-meter low hurdles at the State meet last spring, will run the 50-meter hurdles. . . . Aaron Taub of Foothill and Tony Davis of Saddleback are entered in the boys’ 500. . . . Chris Lynch of Laguna Hills, who led the Hawks to the State Division III cross-country title, will run in the boys’ two-mile event.