THETFORD — First he noticed the bounce and the speed in Knute Linehan’s stride. Then Ian Weider saw the joy and the determination in the then-freshman’s whole approach to track and field.
“As good an athlete as Knute was even then, he was a better person,” Weider, who coached jumpers for his Thetford Academy alma mater during the 2017-2018 indoor season, recalled last week. “So friendly. He didn’t have any kind of ego.
“He always just wanted to get better.”
How much better? This spring, despite the coronavirus pandemic’s sinking of the 2020 outdoor season and the 2021 indoor campaign,Linehan broke Weider’s school record in the triple jump (41 feet, 9 inches to Weider’s 41 feet) and tied his predecessor’s mark of 6 feet in the high jump.
And should Linehan leap past his former mentor’s school mark of 22-3.5 in the long jump — the event in which Weider went on to win multiple America East Conference titles for the University of Vermont — during the Vermont Division III outdoor track championships this coming weekend? Well, Weider can only blame himself.
Again.
“I was mostly a sprinter at the start of that first indoor season,” Linehan, now a UVM-bound senior, recalled during a team practice last week. “Ian saw me and told me I should try jumping.”
Trying soon turned to a mix of revelry and revelation.
“Right from the start, I really enjoyed the jumping and landing part,” Linehan said. “And it was a different sort of competition than the track events. In the field events and especially the jumps, you’re more competing against yourself.”
After focusing on the long jump and the triple jump during his freshman year, Linehan as a sophomore added the high jump to his repertoire — after making some physical and mental adjustments.
“It took longer than even the pole vault (in which he is competing regularly this season),” Linehan said. “It took me a while to get the form down, running on a curve toward the bar and then flopping over it into the pit.”
His work paid off during the D-III outdoor state meet in 2019, where he cleared 5-10 — tying Weider’s record — to win the individual title. And with his third-place showings in the long and triple jumps, he contributed a total of 22 points to Thetford boys’ championship-winning team total.
At that point, the sky seemed like, well, the limit. After winning the high school-division high jump at the Dartmouth Relays the following January, Linehan and his Panther teammates were looking forward to another outdoor season — where Linehan also hoped to show college coaches what he had.
Then the outside world intruded.
“At the indoor state meet in February (where Linehan won the long jump and high-jumped to second), we were hearing about COVID-19 just getting started,” he recalled. “And after New Englands, everything shut down.”
Almost everything but Linehan’s determination: During the gap year from heck, he worked on the long jump and the triple jump at the Hanover High track when time and social distancing allowed.
And at home in Strafford, with supervision from his father — former multi-sport Hanover High athlete Jere Linehan — he trained with a mix of his own workouts and lessons that Thetford coaches Joel Breakstone and Emily Silver recommended to keep his jumping muscles and his timing in tune for the high jump and the pole vault.
At the first outdoor meet this season, Linehan cleared 6 feet in his first high jump for the school record. And during the few meets that COVID protocols allowed, he’s worked his way to the No. 1 ranking among D-III athletes in all three jumps and third in the pole vault.
“It’s been a long time since he’s done these events, which are a lot more technical than running,” Breakstone, Thetford’s field events coach, said before last week’s practice. “He’s picked up where he left off, with such grace.”
The Thetford boys will need Linehan’s intangibles as well as his numbers at the D-III meet to keep pace with a deep Windsor squad for the team title.
One Thetford graduate wouldn’t put it past Knute Linehan to do all of the above.
“I wish I’d had him as a teammate,” Weider said. “Any team could use a guy like Knu te.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dacorriveau@gmail.com.
Correction
Thetford Academy alumnus Ian Weider shares the school’s high-jump record of 6 feet with Knute Linehan and owns the TA long-jump record of 22 feet, 3.5 inches. An earlier version of this story listed incorrect distances for Weider’s records.