Coached by a master improviser, Vashti Cunningham is raising the bar

Jere Longman, New York Times News Service

Tuesday, July 5, 2016 | 2 a.m.

EUGENE, Ore. — Randall Cunningham, the former cutting-edge NFL quarterback, is now a soft-spoken minister and coach of a high-jumping prodigy, who happens to be his daughter, Vashti Cunningham. On Sunday, she qualified for the Rio Olympics a month after graduating from high school.

“I’ve got a little Buddy in me,” Randall Cunningham, 53, said, smiling, referring to Buddy Ryan, his combative coach with the Philadelphia Eagles, who died last week. “The determination, the focus, don’t take any prisoners.”

Only 18, Vashti Cunningham is the reigning indoor world champion. She is also tied for the highest jump internationally this year, with a leap of 6 feet 6 1/4 inches. She finished second Sunday at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials with a jump of 6-5 1/2. Tall and long-limbed, she seemed to hover above the bar like a tilde above a Spanish ñ.

“She’s just really lithe and elastic and just very natural,” said Amy Acuff, a five-time Olympian.

The next step in Cunningham’s ascendant and newly professional career is the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro next month. Her father sees no reason she could not win a gold medal.

“There’s no other way to train people,” said Randall Cunningham, who also coaches football at Silverado High School in Las Vegas and is the founder of Remnant Ministries there. “You give them a vision, and they have to keep it in sight.”

As a quarterback, Randall Cunningham was a master of improvisation and the unconventional. And so he is as a coach. He has his daughter binge-watching video of her rivals as if the clips were a Netflix series. She picks and chooses from their jumping styles, and learns something about their personalities, too.

From Ruth Beitia of Spain, a two-time European champion, Vashti Cunningham learned the value of being calm and joyful and celebrating the simple elation of floating over a bar.

For the qualifying round of the Olympic trials on Friday, she sprinkled her face with glitter and joked about her inability to refrain from social media and “act like you’re older.”

“I think I’m so laid-back and chill because I have not been here before,” Vashti Cunningham said. “I don’t know what it’s like for the nerves to hit me.”

She trains only four times a week and does leg lifts but no squats in her weight training, seeing no need to bulk up and seeking to avoid knee and ankle injuries that have, in Acuff’s words, left many high-jumping careers littered on the freeway leading to the Olympics.

“We’re not six-day-a-week people,” Randall Cunningham said. “It is one thing to push your body hard. It’s another thing to know how to rest your body, how to recover.”

Before the trials, he simulated the meet during training, pretending to be a public-address announcer, saying that the other favorites had cleared a particular height, then adding, “Vashti Cunningham, you’re up.”

Her response, she said, was a verbal eye roll.

“Dad, please leave me alone,” she said.

As a father, Randall Cunningham wants his daughter to be a normal teenager. As a coach and former elite athlete, he implores her to aspire to victory in every competition.

The high-jump bar is viewed as an opponent, not merely an impediment. When the bar is set high, above her 6-foot-1 height, she sometimes approaches it and stares it down as it were a boxing opponent at a weigh-in.

The idea is to conquer the jump with her mind before she does with her body.

“It’s kind of a confrontation between me and the bar, like I’m going to look at it and realize I can conquer it and I can destroy it, basically,” she said. “I go up and stare it down and realize that if my head can go over it, my body can go over it.”

Until high school, she preferred volleyball to track. But the Cunninghams are a high-jumping family.

Randall Cunningham jumped 6-9 in high school in Santa Barbara, California, and might have gone higher but for a degenerative bone condition in his right knee. His son, Randall II, won the 2016 NCAA outdoor championship as a sophomore at Southern California and also qualified for the Olympic trials.

It would be a fascinating contest, Vashti Cunningham said, to see who could jump higher, her father or her mother, Felicity de Jager, a retired ballerina who performed for the Dance Theater of Harlem.

“I go to her when I need to relax and keep calm,” Vashti Cunningham said. “My dad is always going to be work, work, work, and she’s a person who’s going to be like, ‘OK, you’re still a real human.'”

Last summer, after she set a national high school record, her father bought her a white Mercedes S550 as a reward. (“It’s used, don’t tell her,” he said, laughing. “I ironed the seats to make them look brand new.”)

In March, she won the U.S. indoor championships with a personal best of 6-6 1/4, a world junior record.

A week later, she won the world indoor title with a jump of 6-5, beating some of the international competitors whom she had previously seen only on videotape. At least indoors, where there was no wind or heat or tens of thousands of spectators to contend with, she was now the equal of her celluloid rivals.

“It was kind of just an eye-opener for me that I can be great as well,” she said.

Weeks before her senior prom at Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, she turned professional and signed a contract with Nike. The competition in college would probably not be sufficiently challenging, she said. Now it is on to Rio, which will be her first major outdoor international competition.

“Me and my dad are similar athletes,” she said. “I want to win everything I do. I’ll be thankful if I go and don’t win, but there’s always that fire in me that needs to win and wants to win.”