Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State assistant track coach Jeff Ross, whose specialty is the high jump, saw a future star in Cierra Lively when no one else did.
The Hillsboro High School product was just happy to clear 5 feet, 1 inch when she joined the Raiders four years ago.
“I saw her as being a 6-foot jumper the first day we started practicing. It was just a matter of her putting in the work and how she would develop,” said Ross, who was a 7-foot high-jumper himself and a two-time national high school champion in the 1980s at Lakota.
“She’s doing everything she needs to do to be that 6-foot-plus jumper.”
Lively — who has the skill and the build at a slender 5-foot-8 — won the Horizon League outdoor high jump last spring with a leap of 1.69 meters (5 feet, 6.5 inches). And she did even better at the HL outdoor championships a couple of weeks ago.
She found herself in a tense duel with Milwaukee’s Olivia VanZeeland with both clearing 1.75 meters. But Lively had more misses to that point, which meant the Panther star would prevail if neither could cover 1.78 (5 feet, 10 inches).
