When I was 5 years old if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would’ve insisted that I was going to be the Red Power Ranger…or a professional basketball player, one of the two.

But when I found out that power rangers really didn’t have the best health insurance I figured I’d have to fall back on my professional basketball career. Unfortunately, by the 7^th grade I realized the potential roadblocks to my masterplan, namely that I was 5’10” with a limb coordination that made me a borderline insurance liability to be on the team.

But I could jump.

And as spring rolled around I found that my aversion to tight pants and athletic supporters was just too much, I couldn’t bring myself to play baseball anymore, so I went out for the track team. 

The first day my coach handed me a pair of shorts that looked like they’d been shrunk in the wash, “Where’s the rest of them?” I asked? After an appropriate amount of teenage angst, I finally slipped on my short shorts and immediately knew I made the right decision. After years of being constrained by tight baseball pants the freedom I felt in these short shorts was an immediate game changer. While still riding the high of the fashion statement of the century I went over to the high jump station to see if I had what it took to be the next great….well to be honest I couldn’t think of a single famous high jumper.

It didn’t look promising at first.

While 12 year old John was sure there was going to be a transfer of skill from layup lines in basketball where a similar single foot take off was required, the Identical Elements Theory did not apply to this situation. The components of the skills and the context of the skills just weren’t similar enough to allow my layup line skills to transfer into a world class high jumper.  The curved run up and the 30 degree take off angle between the bar and the jumper’s foot required to successfully complete the jump were too foreign of skills for my body to apply the same strategy as I used for layup lines a few months prior. The components of the skill were too different, and without the ball in my hands the context felt all wrong too, so it was back to square one.