As you head east on Grant Road near Mountain Avenue on Monday and Thursday evenings, you’ll spot something soaring through the air in the backyard of a midtown home.
While zipping down the road, it can be hard to tell exactly what you’re seeing.
No, it’s not a bird, a plane or Superman, as the saying goes. But what’s happening can only be described as superhuman.
In the backyard of a home on East Edison Street, around 15 Tucson track and field athletes take turns sprinting down a runway, hoisting a tall pole into a boxed area and launching themselves into the air over a raised bar before finally landing on a large padded mat in a vault pit.
These athletes are practicing a sport that can be traced back to ancient times — pole vault.
After making their jump, each vaulter receives feedback from Roy Willits, Jr., a former pole vaulter, and Jennifer Croissant, a former track and field coach and current professor at the University of Arizona, as the two sit in lawn chairs carefully analyzing each launch from the center of the yard.
Ironwood Ridge High School’s Maise Addison makes a vault while working out at Pole Pilots, the pole vaulting club in the backyard of Tucsonans Jennifer Croissant and Roy Willits Jr., on Feb. 13, 2025.
The couple are the organizers of Pole Pilots Track Club, a nonprofit that has helped local athletes sharpen their pole vault skills for more than 25 years, right from their backyard.
“There’s nothing else like it,” Willits said. “I mean, where else do you take off and get launched, fly in the air and land on this big pillow? It’s just fun watching people do this and learn.”
Willits, who can be spotted iPad in hand, is no stranger to pole vaulting.
In the mid-’70s, Willits became the first Tucsonan to clear 15 feet while pole vaulting for Catalina High School. He held the city record for 20 years until Dominic Johnson, a three-time Olympian and current assistant pole vault coach at UA, broke it.
Pole vaulting pipeline
Willits founded Pole Pilots in 1995 from the backyard of his northwest Tucson home, which he quickly outgrew.
Coach Jennifer Croissant, right, offers a critique for a vaulter as she and her husband Roy Willits Jr., work with a dozen or so area pole vaulters at Pole Pilots on Feb. 13, 2025. The couple have two pits behind their mid-town home that are actually two backyards. They bought the neighboring home to expand the runways to near regulation length.
By 1999, Willits and his wife, Croissant, moved to their current location in midtown and expanded their pole vault club in the backyard by buying the house next door, too, which allowed them to expand the runways to regulation length.
They’ve been there ever since working one-on-one with local high school and college athletes from across Southern Arizona.
Many of their trainees have gone on to become high school state champions, NJCAA All-Americans and track and field coaches or assistants.
One of those previous program participants is Caitlin Clancy, an engineer for a medical software company, who used to pole vault at Canyon Del Oro High School.
During high school, she worked with Willits and Croissant throughout summer break and the offseason to improve her pole vault skills before returning to school.
Her time with Pole Pilots paid off as she received a scholarship to the University of Tulsa, where she pole vaulted all four years of college.
Her Pole Pilots journey helped her get to where she is today, she says. Not just from an athletic perspective, but also from the friends she made in the program, many of whom she is still friends with today.
“Roy and Jen, first of all, just absolutely love the sport and are so excited about the sport and it just made all of us really excited about it,” Clancy said. “And their technique is really good and it can be a dangerous sport, but the way that they train and the way that they continue to train with their athletes, they teach us this amazing technique that lets us get really good, but also keeps us confident and safe because we know that we can trust them and what they’ve taught us to keep us jumping really high.
“(The program) is a really cool balance of being this kind of intimidating sport to get started in, but because their technique and their training is so good and supportive, we were able to learn and get better and then also have this whole network of friends across the city that we could train with.”
Clancy now volunteers as a coach with Pole Pilots and has helped out with CDO track and field home meets over the last several years.
“It’s such an important piece of our community,” she said. “A lot of high schools don’t have a pole vault coach and so Pole Pilots is in central Tucson, it’s where kids from all over the city and beyond can come and train, even if their high school doesn’t have the funding to support a pole vault coach and pole vault pits and poles and all of the things needed to make it a safe and productive environment.
“And so for that reason, I think it’s such an amazing asset to the community, just in terms of bringing everyone together, making sure it’s a safe environment and giving different athletes from other schools this community of other athletes who are really excited about pole vault. So, hopefully it’s something that can keep on providing this amazing pole vault training for Tucson.”
Community launching pad
Willits and Croissant are dedicated to keeping Pole Pilots accessible to all, especially student-athletes who wouldn’t have the opportunity to pole vault otherwise.
Richie Dalton, from Salpointe Catholic High School, tapes up a pole during one of the bi-weekly sessions at Pole Pilots.
A Pole Pilots membership is reasonably priced compared to similar programs in other areas such as Phoenix. Joining the program costs a one-time lifetime membership fee of $50, plus an annual fee of $100 for first-time members or $50 for returning members after Jan. 1.
Those interested in pole vaulting can attend one of their beginner-friendly sessions on the first and third Monday of each month. The first practice is free.
Since they are donation-based, all donations made to the nonprofit go right back to the program, including toward pole vaulting equipment and annual upgrades to their outdoor facility.
“We are really committed to keeping it low cost and we cannot afford expensive facility rental fees,” Croissant said. “There are complications of trying to use a school (as a facility) and the equipment is not very portable, and, in fact, it’s really hard on the pits to be dragged in and out. So, giving it, giving us a permanent facility was what needed to happen.”
The couple estimates they’ve worked with nearly 300 track and field athletes since its inception in the mid-90s.
They currently work closely with the Pima Community College track and field team and volunteer coach Jesus “Chuy” Salazar, who drives from his home in Casa Grande multiple times a week to coach.
“It’s hard to put into words the charity that they give to the community,” Salazar said. “With their knowledge, their facility, their equipment … They’ve given so much to so many people. … I’ve been very blessed to have this connection with these people and I wouldn’t be the man that I am nor the coach that I am today without them.”
Someone from the team you’ll find at the Pole Pilots’ weekly practice and conditioning sessions is PCC sophomore and Ironwood Ridge alum Morgan Pepe.
Pepe comes from a gymnastics background and calls the sport her one true love, but due to multiple mental blocks and numerous injuries, she left the sport.
Pima Community College vaulter Morgan Pepe finds the right pole while looking through the available inventory at a session for Pole Pilots in Tucson on Feb. 13, 2025.
Leaving gymnastics left something empty inside her. That’s when she discovered pole vaulting from a friend.
“It’s the closest I can get to gymnastics,” she said. “I like that it still challenges me and that I can use my air awareness and my core, arm and back muscles.”
She started attending Pole Pilots in 2022 and credits the program for her progress over the last couple of years.
“When I first started, they taught me everything I know,” she said. “And not many people get to 10-7 in their first year of competing. I owe all of that to them.”
Last year, she came in second at the NJCAA Div. 1 National Championships and set a personal record of 3.82m in pole vault.
This season, Pepe is ranked No. 2 in pole vault for Div. 1 in the NJCAA, according to Athletic.net.
During her time with Pole Pilots, Pepe says the coaches and athletes have become like another family to her.
Throughout the weekly sessions, it’s not unusual to see the pole vaulters joking with one another, she says, or Croissant giving out snacks or Willits sitting under the patio heater — things that typical families do.
This is exactly what Croissant and Willits aimed for when creating their permanent facility over 20 years ago — a place to practice, improve and most of all, have fun, with each other and the sport itself.
Eventually, the couple can see themselves passing the program along to another pole vault-loving coach in the future. But since the program is housed, well, at their house, it’s a little more challenging to just hand it off.
“We need to figure out how to have restroom access that isn’t just wandering into our house,” Croissant said jokingly.
But that’s a future problem for Croissant and Willits. For now, their focus remains on their athletes and the sport that brought them together in the first place: pole vault.
“We’re really, really, proud of our athletes and they do well at state and set school records and all that fun stuff,” Croissant said. “But, right now, we’re in a phase that we’re really most proud of the fact that they come back and give back to the sport, whether that’s coaching at CDO or Ironwood Ridge or wherever they’re landing. … We’re here for the kids and for the sport because we love the sport and the community of the sport.”
