Scott Moake’s new reality
Dustan Copeland | Sports Writer
Scott Moake stands out in a crowd. He’s 6-foot-7, which makes him hard to miss. However, what makes him stand out more than anything else is his natural athleticism.
At Mountain View High School, Moake was a standout basketball player, playing center and forward. Track was something that he did on the side. He says that it was actually a fallback, as he originally intended to play basketball. When he went to college, however, it emerged as his main sport.
In Moake’s freshman year, he threw the javelin and jumped.
“I jumped my freshman year without scholarship or anything,” Moake says. “When I came back from my mission, they had a scholarship for me. I love it now, because it’s like a personal challenge for me without it being necessarily in a team setting. I like trying to beat myself every meet.”
After his freshman year, he served an LDS mission in Brazil. It can be challenging for an athlete to return to top-shape after a mission. Moake understood this, and after injuring his back, he made the decision to redshirt his sophomore season.
“It was kind of hard to get back to it. I lost a lot of my vertical, and I had to work my way back up.”
His coaches chose to keep him at high jump, which has proven to be great for Moake. He recently set the school’s high jump record, posting a 2.11 meters, or a 6-foot-11, jump. In December, he earned WAC Athlete Of The Week honors.
“That was a goal I set last year around Christmas time,” Moake recalls. “My family and I all make predictions for the year. One of my predictions was that I was going to break a school record for high jump. I ended up getting that barely before Christmas came. It feels good, obviously, to break the school records and get some accolades in that sense. But, it’s not necessarily just about that. It’s about trying to get better.”
Despite the individual accolades, Moake still acknowledges the importance of teamwork and is just about as much of a team player as one can get in an individual sport.
“It’s just the start of the season and we’re already seeing a lot of records being broken. Before the year even started, the coaches were telling us this is one of the better recruiting classes we’ve had. It’s kind of a bit more expectations for us as far as competing with bigger schools and what not. It’s crazy because the new year starts and half the team’s new and you don’t really know everybody. But, just getting to know who each person is on the team as the season continues on, it’s great to learn how great of an athlete everyone is.”
Moake went on to say that one of the great things about having such great athletes on the team is challenging each other.
The season is not over. The Wolverines still have a few meets left, including some of their toughest competition. But, with athletes that stand out like Moake, they can go into these meets with confidence.
