During the months before the conference Richie Mercado had been gathering individual opinions of coaches throughout the USA, Europe and some other countries on the biomechanics of the pole vault and coaching strategies of coaches. He was aiming to identify model technical parameters from coaches and scientists as well as to identify coaches' concepts of vital component parts and their interaction while coaching athletes of different stages. He showed that the answers fell within three different groups: the first group showed problems finding their way through the huge amount of available information on the pole vault resulting in problems to find the evident. The second group tries to generate a "holistic view" of the vault, resulting in formulas like "continuous chain model". The third group avoids dealing with this information and seems mainly performance oriented ("Don't care about the details, jump high!"). Richie then showed many typical coaches responses, giving a good overview on the current thinking of pole vault coaches.
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