OLYMPICS: Together, again

Weeks family gathers in Rio

By Donna Lampkin Stephens
Cabot Star-Herald

The Weeks twins are reunited this week in Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics.

Tori Weeks joined her parents, Brent and Amy, for the weekend flight to Brazil. The Cabot family arrived Sunday in time to see Tori's eight-minutes-older twin sister Lexi compete in the pole vault preliminaries this morning. The finals are set for Friday night.

"We're rooting for Team Lexi," Brent Weeks said last week.

This summer marked the first time the twins hadn't competed together.

"Obviously, I want to be there with her, but I'm not resentful of anything," Tori said last week. "I just want to be there with her. I'm not going to have the same experience she is, but being there and seeing all the best athletes in the world — for me just to go there, to experience the meet, just getting to watch it, is a big deal."

Brent Weeks reiterated Tori's attitude.

"She said, 'I don't want to beat her; I want to be with her,' which makes me get teary-eyed," he said. "She doesn't want to have the limelight. She wants to have the limelight with Lexi. It's been bittersweet."

The twins pushed each other throughout high school. Tori won the Class 7A state meet as a sophomore. Lexi took the Meet of Champs title. As a junior, Lexi won both. During their senior year, Tori set the national high school indoor record at 14 feet, 4 inches; Lexi hit 14-7 1-4 for the national outdoor record.

"In their senior year, Lexi set the indoor national record early on, but Tori came back and broke that record and beat it by 3-4 inch," said Morry Sanders, who has coached the twins since they were 13 at his Arkansas Vault Club in Black Springs. "Tori would get ahead a little while, then Lexi would come back. That's the way they were from the time they were sophomores on, leapfrogging each other. You knew once one got ahead, it wasn't going to last very long.

"It's a perfect storm, a perfect situation. These two girls are best friends and do everything together. They're super-competitive, but they thrive off each other. I want one of them to pull ahead because I know the other one is going to jump up with her real soon."

The trend from high school continued during their freshman year as Lexi won SEC and NCAA indoor and outdoor titles. Indoors, Tori was third in the SEC and sixth nationally; outdoors, she finished second in the SEC and 15th nationally.

Both are All-Americans.

"They had unbelievable freshman years," Sanders said. "Lexi was the first female to ever win both indoor and outdoor championships in the same year. Everybody right now is focused on Lexi, but Tori had a phenomenal year. Most freshmen don't have a year near what she did.

"It just so happens her sister is Lexi Weeks."

Lexi said the situation was sometimes difficult.

"Us being twins, everyone compares us," she said. "People will ask, 'Why isn't Tori doing as well as Lexi?' You need to realize she's a freshman and was sixth at indoor nationals and second at SEC.

"Besides me, she's the best freshman in the country."

Sanders said their careers had always been "the Lexi-and-Tori show."

"They were competitive, but as long as the only one who beat them was their sister, they were OK with that," he said. "Now they're at the next level, it's not always going to be that situation. There are so many great athletes, it's just not going to happen like it always used to."

The original qualifying standard for the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials was 14-5 1-4. Tori hit that early in the indoor season and matched her personal record twice more outdoors. Lexi went 14-9 in her first collegiate meet.

So for a while, they expected to compete together at the Trials.

"But so many females met that (14-5 1-4) qualifying standard, they upped it to 14-9," Sanders said. "Lexi had already jumped that, and Tori just didn't get it."

After the NCAA meet, Lexi stayed in Fayetteville to train with Sandi Morris, the American record holder and former Razorback; Tori returned to Cabot.

So the Trials marked Lexi's first meet without her sister.

"It was different," Lexi said. "It helped a lot having Sandi there to fill that role. It was nice because I'm so used to having somebody there."

She surprised many when she qualified for the final spot on the American team with a PR 15-5. Jen Suhr, the defending Olympic champion, went 15-9; Morris cleared 15-7.

"Going into the trials, I expected her to do well but not to place," Tori said. "But she's just one of those people who always surprises me."

Brent Weeks said his daughters — CHS co-salutatorians with 4.26 GPAs and UA 4.0 chemistry majors — were both "incredibly disciplined."

"My oldest son made a comment one time that they are the most interesting people we know," he said. "They map out every minute of their day. They just have everything down to the minute organized. Go to their apartment in Fayetteville — everything is perfect."

Not many people expected Lexi to qualify for the Olympics this time, and not many expect her to finish among the top three in Rio.

"I don't think she's planning to medal," Brent Weeks said. "We're not expecting her to. But there's a football saying, 'Any given Sunday.' Oh, Lord, if she medals — that'll be too much. We may not come home."

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette River Valley/Ozarks: Conway has hall-of-fame coaching staff

Conway has hall-of-fame coaching staff

Donna Lampkin Stephens/Contributing WriterPublished 12:00 a.m.http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/aug/11/conway-has-hall-fame-coaching-staff/?f=rivervalley

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PHOTO BY: William Harvey

Former Conway Wampus Cats football coach and athletic director Dennis Fulmer looks at a photo of his 1968 Conway High School coaching staff after realizing they have all been inducted into halls of fame. Those hall-of-famers include Johnny Simmons, Ernie Miller, Joe Fred Young and Bernie Cox.

CONWAY — Dennis Fulmer of Conway was going through some old photos when a group shot of his 1968 Conway High School football coaching staff struck him.

All five in the photo — Fulmer and his four assistants — had gone on to be inducted into at least one hall of fame each.

“I just saw that picture, and I remembered what a good staff it was, all the good staff meetings we had, how everybody got along,” Fulmer said. “It’s a highlight to have that good a coaching staff. You don’t realize how good a staff that was until you get away from it.”

That staff included some of the legends of Arkansas high school football coaching:

Fulmer, now 81, was the Wampus Cat head coach from 1967-70 before becoming the first full-time athletic director in the school’s history. He has been inducted into the University of Central Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Track and Field Hall of Fame.

Joe Fred Young, 73, was offensive coordinator. After a distinguished coaching career at Fort Smith Northside, he is a member of the Arkansas High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame and the UCA Sports Hall of Fame.

Ernie Miller, 74, was defensive coordinator. He has been inducted into the UCA Sports Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Track and Field Hall of Fame.

Bernie Cox, 72, coached offensive backs and special teams. He went on to a 35-year tenure at the helm of Little Rock Central High School and is a member of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame and the Harding University Athletic Hall of Fame.

Johnny Simmons, 73, coached defensive backs and special teams and is a member of the UCA Sports Hall of Fame.

A year after the Wampus Cats went 10-1 (losing only to North

Little Rock) and were named the No. 1 team in Class AA, the 1968 squad finished 10-2.

“I got to select them, but I pretty well knew them,” Fulmer said of his coaches. “I knew Joe Fred most of his life, and Bernie was my quarterback at Jacksonville, and I knew him quite well. I knew Ernie from when he was in college [at UCA].

“They were capable coaches. I knew they could coach, and I allowed them to coach. Bernie told me one time, ‘This is the first time I’ve got to coach.’ I trusted them that much. They were that dependable, and I knew they could do the job.”

While the staff eventually moved on — Fulmer became Conway athletic director before going into private business; Young succeeded him as head coach for a year and later took Cox with him to Little Rock Central; Simmons went on to a 45-year career in banking, real estate and insurance; and Miller retired after 38 years in school-equipment sales — all five recall their common Conway experience fondly.

“Those four years meant everything in the world to me,” Cox said. “That four years there and the three years I was with Joe Fred [as an assistant] at Central set me up for whatever I’ve been able to do. The four years at Conway gave me the background I needed, and I needed it badly.

“The kids were so good to coach, and they were disciplined. That was a good community with good people, and those four guys, they took care of me.”

Cox said he believed he was too young to take the reins at Central when Young left there after three seasons for a position on Frank Broyles’ University of Arkansas staff in December 1974, but over the next 35 years, Cox led the Tigers to state titles in ’75, ’78, ’80, ’81, ’86, 2003 and ’04 — and a record of 271-93-8.

He said he played quarterback for Fulmer at Jacksonville from his freshman through senior seasons.

“[Fulmer] was one of the reasons I went into coaching,” Cox said. “I had graduated from Harding in 1966 and was coaching at Searcy when he had an opening and called me, and boy, I jumped on that. The staff over there — Joe Fred and Johnny and Coach Fulmer and Ernie and C.D. Taylor (another Hall of Famer who was the Wampus Cats’ basketball coach) — was so good, and I learned a lot about kids and coaching and football the four years I was there.

“It was the hardest thing in the world for me to leave after four years and go to Little Rock with Joe Fred. That was a wonderful, wonderful period of my coaching life. And I still have a love in my heart for Conway. I’m still for Conway in everything they do, athletically and as a community.”

Young joked that he “had to choke Bernie to get him out of Conway.”

After Central, Young coached two years under Broyles, then decided to return to high school coaching. He spent four years at Fayetteville before landing at Northside, where he took the Grizzlies to eight state championship games during his 1981-98 tenure and won the title in 1987.

“I learned everything from Dennis,” Young said. “The thing I got most from him was how to deal with people and with kids. He was absolutely marvelous.

“All the time I worked with him — five years — never, ever, ever did we have a cross word. I can’t remember him ever having a cross word with any of the coaches, and that was an inspiration to me. I always tried to do the same thing when I became a head coach. I wanted to make sure the coaches worked together, enjoyed each other and got along.

“It makes everything so much more enjoyable when you have people get along. That’s the way I looked at him then and how I look at him now. He was my hero.”

With Young’s move to Central, Miller succeeded him as Wampus Cat head coach for three seasons before going on to earn a doctorate from UA, then entering sales.

But his experience with Fulmer’s staff followed Miller throughout his career.

“They were all my friends,” he said. “It was nice to surround yourself with good people. We worked together real well. I always thought I would get back to coaching, maybe track on the college level, but another opportunity came along, and I retired from that after 38 years.

“But I always said selling was like coaching — you go out and try to win that order because of your competitive nature.”

Simmons coached just one more year after the ’68 season. Instead of taking a position as head coach and athletic director at Clarksville, he veered into business.

“Lord, that was the best staff,” he remembered. “What I liked about Dennis was he let you express your ideas, and if you had a good one, he was all for it.”

Simmons said that during his final year, the Wampus Cats were helped by quarterback Mike New.

“I could see a lot of our success was based on him, but he was going to graduate, and my next quarterback was going to be Tommy Courtway (now president of the University of Central Arkansas),” Simmons said. “Tommy’s a great guy and a great president, but he wasn’t a Mike New.”

Lessons learned?

“In football, playing and coaching, you can’t get too high or too low,” Simmons said. “You can’t let success go to your head because the next week you may get your butt beat. And if you lose a couple in a row, it’s not the end of the world. You just keep plugging along.”

Fulmer said he remained in touch with all four coaches.

“It was just a bond that coaches and friends have,” he said. “It was a time back then when the world was a little bit slower. We all taught a full load of classes. I was doing what I wanted to do all my life.”

6:51 pm - August 08, 2016

OLYMPICS: Rio down, bound for Weeks, family

Lexi Weeks at the beach in Brazil. (Twitter/@lexianne)

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By Donna Lampkin Stephens

Cabot Star-Herald

Lexi Weeks is representing the United States in the pole vault in Rio de Janeiro next week, and her hometown of Cabot has turned out to do its part.

Roughly 165 donors — almost all with some tie to the city — came together recently to raise $15,706 to help send Weeks’ parents, Brent and Amy; and her twin sister, fellow pole vaulter Tori, to Brazil to watch their Olympian compete in person.

The family will leave Saturday and arrive in Rio on Sunday. The pole vault prelims are Tuesday, Aug. 16; the finals will be Friday, Aug. 19. They will head home the next day.

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for the whole family, but the generosity of their neighbors may have been the most emotional part.

Dwight Daugherty, who teaches AP physics and chemistry at Cabot High School — where he taught all five Weeks children, including the twins’ three older brothers — contacted Brent Weeks shortly after Lexi unexpectedly qualified for the U.S. team.

“He said they wanted to start a Go Fund Me-type site, and I said, ‘I don’t know if I can accept that kind of money,’” Brent Weeks said. “We were looking at $20,000-25,000. He said, ‘You have to. The community is going to want to do it. People want to participate.

“So I called my best friend, Paul Osborne (from Cabot), and told him what was going on. He said, ‘You have to accept it; people would be insulted if you didn’t, and this way everybody can have a piece of it.

“‘Get over your pride and do it.’”

So Brent Weeks called Daugherty the next day with the OK.

But Daugherty had already started the process through a YouCaring website, which he said featured lower administrative costs. Based on an early estimate by a travel agent, the original goal was $20,000, but the family insisted on economizing as much as possible, so the goal was revised down to $15,000.

It took just seven days and six hours to reach the goal.

“We ended up with $15,706 before I could get it shut off,” Daugherty said.

The Weeks family say they have been touched beyond words by their neighbors’ generosity.

“If it weren’t for that, there’s no way my sister and my parents would be able to make the trip,” Lexi Weeks said. “It’s so overwhelming how generous our community was. We were blown away. It’s just so crazy to have the community come behind us and support us in that way.”

Added Brent: “We are completely humbled and overwhelmed with emotion. People in Cabot are just good people. It’s a good community to raise a family. We want the people to know we are very, very grateful for what they’ve given us. We are stunned by it.”

Daugherty recalled Brent Weeks’ initial hesitation.

“He still feels very uncomfortable taking charity, but he said there was no way they could afford to go with three people,” Daugherty said. “He said they’d been saving for 2020 in Tokyo just in case, but this was a bit of a surprise.

“They’ve been very, very gracious. Brent said, ‘You give me the cheapest airfare and the cheapest motel in the safest part of town.’”

Daugherty said that hotel, where the three will stay in one room with three twin beds, wound up costing $600 per night.

Daugherty, who said he took the lead in the fundraising project after seeing the idea from a post on a local website, also checked with the University of Arkansas NCAA compliance office. Lexi and Tori will head to Fayetteville to start their sophomore year shortly after their return from Rio.

“The NCAA said anything they don’t spend has to be returned or go to a charity, and most people give to another charity,” Daugherty said. “So we listed our local scholarship fund here at the school, the Cabot Scholarship Foundation. From that, we funded $110,000 last year in local scholarships, mostly academic. The teachers and employees have a payroll deduction plan, and we give almost $20,000 out of our paychecks every year.”

So any leftover money will go there.

A booth in front of Walmart on a Saturday collected almost $700. McDonald’s donated $2,000. Dr. James Hertzog, a local optometrist, made a matching pledge of up to $1,000, “but he only had to match $660 because I cut it off once we made our goal,” Daugherty said.

An early donation of $500 came from one of Daugherty’s former students, Jarrod Burns, now an engineer in Texas.

“He doesn’t even know the Weeks family, but he wants to support the citizens here,” Daugherty said. “We had several other $500 donations, and that just stunned me. I was expecting donations of $20 or $30.”

Lexi had gotten her passport earlier this year in preparation for a different international meet, but after the fundraiser, the rest of the family had theirs expedited.

“We are going as cheaply as we can go,” Brent Weeks said. “Think how humbling this is — people gave us money they could’ve spent on groceries. People gave money that probably a lot of them didn’t have. You can’t go on a fancy vacation with that. We are taking minimal clothes and going cheap because this is not our money.”

Lexi won SEC and NCAA indoor and outdoor pole vault titles as a freshman, but her parents didn’t go to the Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore., in June.

“We talked about it, but we thought it was basically a practice meet — a chance to get on a national stage and vault,” Brent Weeks said. “If you think your daughter’s got a good chance, you book in advance. If you don’t think she’s got a chance, you work 80 hours a week and you don’t go.”

Instead, he and Amy watched the Trials at their son Tyler and daughter-in-law April’s home.

“Amy never thought she would make it, and I thought there was a very slim chance she would qualify,” Brent said. “When she won that (third and final qualifying) spot, we were just beside ourselves. There was just a lot of screaming, lots of crying, absolutely crazy. Then we sat there looking at each other just dumbfounded. Amy went out and took a walk. We just could not believe it.

“We came home afterward and just sat down and looked at each other.”

Last week, the family watched the opening ceremonies from Rio. They recorded the evening, and Brent said they were able to catch a glimpse of their girl.

“I’ve got a screen grab of that,” he said.

In a text from Rio on Sunday, Lexi called the opening ceremonies “amazing.”

“Something I’ll never forget,” she said. “It was a very long day, with lots of sitting and lots of standing, but walking out into the stadium was incredible, something every athlete dreams of. Then the lighting of the torch and the fireworks at the end were magical!!!”

She said that Team USA was training at a naval base away from the Olympic Village in preparing for its competition.

“It’s very nice,” she said of the facility. “I did a short run practice last night and just a workout this morning, but we will be training out there up until we compete.”

The pole vault competition will certainly be followed in Cabot and all over Arkansas. Daugherty said Cabot High School would have televisions set up for a watch party

With so much bad news in the headlines recently, people have gravitated to this story.

Daugherty summed up the attraction.

“This family is a great family, and those two little girls — they’ve got five wonderful kids, but Lexi and Tori are both incredible athletes and incredible people. My daughter said one time, ‘You know, you’d like to dislike them — they’re beautiful, smart, athletic — but you can’t because they’re too nice.’”

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7:03 pm - August 01, 2016

OLYMPICS: Weeks packing her bug spray for Rio

Tori and Lexi Weeks are identical twins and pole vaulters at the University of Arkansas. The Cabot natives are getting ready this week for the Olympics as Lexi Weeks qualified for the United States team, while sister Tori will be in the stands watching. (Walt Beazley/University of Arkansas)

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By Donna Lampkin Stephens

Cabot Star-Herald

Cabot’s Lexi Weeks is on her way to Rio.

Weeks, 19, the Arkansas Razorback pole vaulter who qualified for the 2016 Olympic Games, and former Razorback Sandi Morris, another first-time Olympian, were to fly Tuesday to Houston for more team processing before joining many other American Olympians for the flight to Brazil.

Weeks went a career-best 15 feet, 5 inches at the United States Olympic Trials last month in Eugene, Ore., to qualify third for the three-woman American team that will compete in Rio de Janeiro. Jen Suhr, the defending Olympic champion, qualified atop the American squad.

Opening ceremonies are Friday. Pole vault prelims will be Aug. 16 with the finals Aug. 19.

“I don’t know a whole lot of what to expect,” Weeks said from Fayetteville last week. “We’ll train at the Naval facility or something like that, track and field and maybe swimming. We’ll see how it goes when we get there. We’ll train until the prelims. We won’t do a whole lot of hard workouts, just get some shakeouts and a little bit of pole vaulting.”

Arkansas vault coach Bryan Compton will join Weeks and Morris, who have trained together in Fayetteville all year.

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for Weeks, who won the Southeastern Conference and NCAA Indoor and Outdoor titles as an Arkansas freshman but who said she never dreamed she’d spend the rest of her summer in Rio.

“I’m so excited,” she said. “Going into (the Trials) I didn’t expect to make the team. I guess I figured if I had the meet of my life I might make it, but there were three girls (Suhr, Morris and Demi Payne) ranked ahead of me, and I knew if they were going to have their day, there was no way for me. Demi didn’t have the day she was hoping to have. She’d jumped 16 feet last indoor season.”

But Payne, who had the third-best mark in the country this year (16 feet, 3-4 inch), failed to qualify for the finals.

Then, Weeks said, she saw a slight opening.

“Right away, I was like, ‘If I have my day, maybe,’ but at the same time, it was not just those three,” she said. “There were several others with experience. But Sandi had been telling me for months, ‘You never know; if someone has a bad day,’ and after the prelims she told me, ‘You really have a shot.’ I was like, ‘We’ll just see.’

“Then fast-forward to the finals, when I was making each bar and getting more and more confident.”

Weeks cleared 14-5 1-4, 14-9, 15-1 and 15-3 — each on her first try — to secure her spot on the team. She missed on her first attempt at 15-5 but cleared the personal record on her second.

The secret to her success at storied Hayward Field?

“Honestly, I think it was the atmosphere,” she said. “I’d never been in a meet where the stands were so packed, and the crowd would roar on every jump. There was so much adrenaline.”

She said Hayward Field had been full for the NCAA Outdoor Championships in June, but for the Olympic Trials, four more grandstands were brought in “so there were stands surrounding the track, not just the home and visitor’s side.”

“It was just crazy,” she said. “The whole experience was just awesome. The environment was so cool.”

She said that after she cleared 15-3, it dawned on her that might have been enough. She, Morris and Suhr turned out to be the only ones to make that height.

“Watching the other girls take their first, second and third attempts — it’s kind of a hard sport to watch,” Weeks said. “Watching girls I’m friends with — you want them to do good, but at the same time, every miss puts me closer to making the team. When the last one went out and I realized I’d made the team, Sandi and I just hugged each other. I was bawling; it was so surreal to me, and so unexpected.”

She said she purposely went into the Trials with no pressure on herself.

“There was no point,” she said. “I’d already had a great season, and this was icing on the cake. I was nervous because I’d never pole vaulted in front of that many people, but there was so much excitement. At nationals, I was expected to win and get points for my team. That was a lot harder. I think I was able to perform so well at the Trials because I was there to have fun.”

In a year, she has improved her PR from 14-7 1-2 (the outdoor national high school record) to 15-5. She went 14-9 in her first collegiate meet to secure the Olympic-qualifying standard. Two meets later, she went 15-1, then it was 15-2 1-4 at Indoor nationals, then 15-2 3-4 at a home outdoor meet.

“Especially at 15 feet and above, every little centimeter counts so much,” she said.

Weeks is making her first trip out of the country a big one. She said she hoped to be able to watch some of the other Olympic sports while she’s there.

“Sandi and I were talking the other day at practice about that, and she mentioned beach volleyball,” Weeks said. “That would be so cool. I’ve loved watching that.”

And she isn’t worried about any of the Olympic controversies that have been all over the news.

“With Zika, I’ll wear a lot of bug spray,” she said. “I feel like they’ve, hopefully, taken a lot of measures to kill the mosquitos. One of the other Olympians, (former Razorback) Omar McLeod, was telling me that our rooms weren’t ready.

“But I’m just thankful to be there,” she said. “I hope they have it figured out by the time I get there. But to be an Olympian is such an honor in itself; whatever happens, I’ll make do."