Clearing Hurdles

Ashley Bethel has cleared a number of hurdles the last four years. Tonight, she will encounter a few more.

Bethel, a senior track and field standout at Mission Viejo High, will compete in the 100-meter high hurdles and long jump at the Masters Meet at Cerritos College. If she places among the top five, she qualifies for her fourth appearance at the state track and field championships June 5-6 at Cerritos.

She has come a long way since 1994, when at age 14 and already a two-time national youth pentathlon champion, she was hit by a golf ball and eventually lost her right eye.

She had been training on the track at Saddleback College when a golf ball flew over a protective barrier at the school’s driving range, which is adjacent to the track, and struck her right eye ball, rupturing it.

Many believed her promising athletic career--she had long jumped 19 feet 7 1/4 inches as a 13-year-old--would be cut short.

It was also thought that the subsequent lack of depth perception would hinder her in the long jump and high jump.

“It did at first,” Bethel said, “but after awhile and after doing it so long, you get used to it. Long jump, yeah, there was a problem. High jump was a problem. But hurdles, that was just natural. . . . three steps and then hurdle.”

As a freshman, Bethel finished third at the state finals in the 100 hurdles in 14.19 seconds. She has yet to equal some of the personal bests she set that year, partly because she is training to be a nationally recognized heptathlete and partly because she believed she had something to prove back then. Heptathlon is not contested on the high school level.

“I got a lot of media coverage because of my accident, because of my eye,” she said. “I had to make sure that I could prove myself, make sure they knew that I was worthy of getting the coverage.

“Ever since it has kind of worn off and I think I need to get my desire back. I think I’d lost that edge, so I think I’m slowly getting that back my senior year, which is good.”

For the first time in her high school career, Bethel failed to advance out of Saturday’s Southern Section championships in the high jump, where she finished sixth in Division II--tied for ninth overall--with a mark of 5-4. Her father and coach, Skip Bethel, believes that will help her in the long jump and hurdles tonight.

“The last three years she’s been qualifying in all three events,” he said. “By the time she gets through running back and forth, one of them has suffered by the time she’s gotten to state. Nine times out of 10 it was the high jump.”

Bethel’s prep career had been injury-free until she hurt her knee in February while participating in the long jump at the National Indoor Championships in Boston. The injury, to the cartilage on the inside of her kneecap, is still not completely healed.

“It’s been an ongoing thing with health problems in our family,” said Bethel, whose mother, Abby, underwent open heart surgery in 1997, and whose father has suffered from diabetes and heart ailments since 1990.

“We’ve got tons of help from family. We have great family and great friends that live around here and were able to help a lot and help us get through it all.”

Family support also was key for Bethel because it took her awhile to get used to her prosthetic eyeball. “I think for me, because I was a teenager, it was a lot more about what I was going to look like,” she said. “When I first got it done, when I first got my eye taken out, I had scar tissue on the membrane and I couldn’t move this prosthetic, so I looked cross-eyed. Now that I’ve grown up I’ve realized that it’s not that important.”

Bethel shocked her teammates at a volleyball party her sophomore year, when she took her glass eye out of its socket for all to see. “I don’t mind doing stuff like that, it’s part of me now,” she said.

“Sometimes I just leave it anywhere and my dad goes crazy because it’s not very cheap. I leave it out and I have to go look for it in the morning. Before I go to school I’m running through the house looking for it.”

A settlement from the accident puts Bethel in the rare position of being a student-athlete with a savings account, enabling her to concentrate on her goal of competing in the heptathlon in the Olympics. She currently has the country’s top heptathlon mark among high school-aged girls.

“It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be a long, long, hard process,” she said. “I’m willing to work hard to do it because it’s been my goal for the longest time, so I think I can do it in 2000.”

This fall, Bethel will attend Louisiana State and be trained by the Tigers’ heptathlete coach, Irvine Shakesnyder.

“He’s got two or three other heptathletes there who are really going to make it interesting for her,” Skip Bethel said.

Ashley’s current training regimen leaves little time for anything else. She trains year-round in the shotput, javelin and 800 meters--events she doesn’t compete in on the high school level.

“Overall, for the seven events that she does, she does them excellent,” her father said. “If she was to fall back on just doing the long jump and the high jump and the triple jump, like most of the kids are doing, she’d be way out there.”

Skip Bethel said his daughter is willing to sacrifice success at the state level in favor of the wider recognition she receives as a heptathlete.

“The state championship is fine, but it’s more important for us and for her to be recognized nationwide,” he said. “We’ve got a couple good athletes here [in California], but if you go nationwide, everybody there is super.”

Skip Bethel wishes more junior heptathlon competitions were held locally. There is one Saturday at Mt. San Antonio College, but his daughter has other plans.

“I was hoping we could get her in that,” Skip said, “but that’s the night of the prom, so she’s going to go to the prom instead.”