Just place in the pole vault event 10 days after he took fourth at the NCAA Outdoor National Championships at the University of Oregon, Sealy High School alumnus Clayton Fritsch returned to the pacific northwest to jump for a spot on the United States Olympic team ahead of the 2020 Tokyo games.

The field of 24 competed on dueling runways where the top 12 moved onto the finals. Fritsch cleared the second height on his first attempt and the first and third heights on his second attempt to move into a tie for 13th overall with Cole Walsh. However, three failed attempts at 18’ 6.5” (5.65m) kept Fritsch on the outside looking in, just one spot away from advancing to the finals against Olympic competition.

Although he just missed out on moving on, Fritsch said he took away plenty of lessons from rubbing elbows with not only perennial Olympians, but also former collegiate competitors turned pro.

“It was definitely cool to see the big names come back like Sam Kendricks, who just won a world championship a year ago, and now we’re jumping against him,” Fritsch said in a June 21 interview. “It was also cool because I got to see a couple of those older guys that I jumped with in college my freshman/sophomore year like Chris Nilsen. I hadn’t seen him in a while, got to jump with him (at the Pan-American Games) in Peru and getting to see him and catch up with him a little bit was super cool and it was even cooler that he actually won it.”

The biggest thing Fritsch said he learned was not so much technical moves to help him jump higher but more tendencies and thought processes that help him lock in.

“It was more picking up a feeling of just having fun. Those guys go out there and they’re just all chit chatting away and cracking jokes,” Fritsch said. “I was thinking about them and that’s like really enjoying the moment there, I figured that’s pretty cool and something I might try and pick up this last year of jumping with Sam, going to these smaller meets but just having fun.”

The member of Sealy High School’s Class of 2017 was granted an extra spring eligibility after the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of last year’s spring season but with his major already wrapped up, Fritsch decided to add a minor that will keep him busy until he competes again next spring.

“I’m a construction management major and then this minor I would be adding is for industrial safety so some of those classes overlapped and I could use some of those toward my minor where I only had to take 12 credits the next two semesters and it really wasn’t too much of a workload,” Fritsch said.

It ends up working out well that he’ll have more time on the vault after what was a lessthan-ideal finish at trials in his eyes.

“It was a crazy season but the biggest thing I’m looking forward to is next year. Coming in 13th out of 12 that make it to the finals, that doesn’t necessarily sit right with me or coach (Cutter Bernhard) so it’s good to get that fuel back like, ‘OK, we need to go back to work, we need to get back to the lab to figure something out to get back to jumping those bigger bars and being on top,’” Fritsch said. “It’s been good so far, both me and coach were a little bummed out but we’ve already talked the next day about ‘Let’s look at next year already and line things out for summer, we’ve got this much of a break and can get back to it here then let’s focus on these categories that we may have lacked this year and go to work on those and eventually get back to what we want to be again.’” Where he previously has been includes two medal-winning performances in as many international competitions (the NACAC Championships in addition to the Pan-Am Games) and four All-American honors on the collegiate circuit. Before then, he was a Sealy Tiger and is still proud of his stripes.

“Every time you come up here – and especially in Eugene, they have a track background that everybody knows – everyone is kind of asking where you are from and you get to talking and, ‘We’re from Texas, the Houston-Sealy area,’ and it’s always cool to get that name out there,” Fritsch said. “We’ll walk into a restaurant, they’ll see Sam Houston and recognize Texas or Huntsville, so it’s kind of cool to see we’re getting the name out there. This random guy I walked by, he was like, ‘Hey man, congratulations on everything,’ and it was kind of cool that just random people out there recognize you and it’s cool that they’re noticing a small-town kid.” Although his Olympic dreams are still not over, in the back of Fritsch’s mind remains that minuscule percentage of young student-athletes who make the professional ranks.

“It’s always kind of been one of those from elementary school where everybody’s like, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” Fritsch posed. “Every body says, ‘I want to be the professional football player,’ and they say, ‘Well, it’s only 0.01%,’ that insanely-low percentage that makes it but that has always been in my head that I want to be part of that percentage just to say I did it and just to have that experience under my belt.”