This feature originally appeared in the 2024 Spring edition of the Cal Sports Quarterly. The Cal Athletics flagship magazine features long-form sports journalism at its finest and provides in-depth coverage of the scholar-athlete experience in Berkeley. Printed copies are mailed four times a year to Bear Backers who give annually at the Bear Club level (currently $600 or more). For more information on how you can receive a printed version of the Cal Sports Quarterly at home, send an email to CalAthleticsFund@berkeley.edu or call (510) 642-2427.
 
 
Pac-12 Champion.
 
It is a prestigious title, one that Skyler Magula had been dreaming about for quite some time.
 
"It's the main reason I came to Cal," he said. "I wanted to go to a Pac-12 school specifically, and I always felt like I could win a title."
 
The Golden Bears' top pole vaulter bears himself with an easy confidence gained only by someone who has been through quite a lot – or by the kind of person who purposefully and repeatedly falls from the height of a two-story building. Magula was one of California's top-ranked vaulters as a junior at Marina High School in Huntington Beach, receiving a good deal of attention from collegiate coaches after finishing fifth at the CIF State Championships. An eventual Pac-12 Championships appearance did not sound out of the question, despite his progress taking a step back in his senior year thanks to a chronic bleeding callus on his right hand.
 
Shocking, then, that the opportunity would not come for four years.
 
Arriving at Cal, Magula had hoped, would turn his competitive trajectory back around. His rapidly growing frame would take some getting used to, with Magula needing to relearn his run as he shot up from 6-foot-3 to 6-foot-5. Add that to a new campus environment and the academic rigors of UC Berkeley, and one could be forgiven for initially struggling.
 
Still, Magula felt encouraged by his progress as a freshman – he was jumping on longer poles and had surpassed his best mark from the previous year. Surely it would only be a matter of time before he set a new personal record. Ultimately, however, that would have to wait, as COVID-19 protocols dictated that the rest of his freshman season be shut down.
 
The next year, things took a turn for the worse. After clearing the first bar in his season opener, Magula's knee bent under him on the next attempt.
 
"I felt a slight pop," he said. "It wasn't until several hours afterward that I realized I couldn't put weight on my leg."
 
Magula, ever competitive, was able to continue his season after receiving treatment and moving to a much shorter run on his approach. It enabled his outdoor campaign to begin in solid fashion.
 
But then came the Arizona meet.
 
His memory of that competition is still fuzzy, but what he does remember is stumbling off the landing pit, ready to prepare for his next attempt. A concerned trainer had to inform him that the pole had slipped and hit him in the side of the head – hard.
 
"Apparently I was laying there for a while," he said. "I didn't even know what they were talking about."
Magula was pulled from that competition and put into concussion protocol. There would be no shot at the Pac-12 Championship this time around.
 
The next year started off brutally. All of Magula's setbacks to date had affected his confidence, which suffered exponentially with each consecutive meet and each failure to clear his opening bar.
 
Is this really what I should be doing?
 
Miss.
 
What if I get hurt again?
 
Miss.
 
After finishing the indoor season without a single recorded mark, Magula felt the need to change his approach in practice. By the time Cal's outdoor opener in Berkeley rolled around, he recalled feeling good about his warmups, which now included a long run once again.
 
Now, it was time to put his changes to the test.
 
After his first attempt – yet another miss – he switched to a different pole. On his next try, the new pole slipped out of his hands and popped high into the air as he left the ground, sending him into a backflip. He smacked face-first into the padded landing pit and the pole landed directly on the back of his head. Cal vertical jumps and multi-events coach Dan Lefever was at a loss.
 
"This whole time, I was doing anything and everything that I thought could help him," he said. "I didn't give up on him, I didn't ever criticize him or put additional pressure on him."
 
There would be no Pac-12 title that year, either. Magula's dream looked very, very far away.
 
It would be remiss to discuss Magula's eventual comeback without mentioning pole vaulting teammate Tyler Burns, who arrived on campus in the fall of 2021. The two became fast friends – a freshman on the rise and a junior down on his luck.
 
"Tyler really helped me find the fun in the sport, the love of the sport," Magula said. "That helped me restore a lot of my confidence."
 
In October of 2022, Burns encouraged Magula to enter a competition hosted by club team FogCity Flyers at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, just for fun. It was about as low pressure as a meet could get – no records would be kept, no barriers set.
 
And then, finally, a breakthrough.
 
Magula ended up jumping as high as the meet's standards could go (5.25m, or just under 17 feet, two inches). It was a new personal best – his first in 1,610 days.
 
He only had to wait 108 days until his next one, jumping 5.27m at Cal's 2023 season opener in Berkeley.

"Once I did that, I knew I would go (to the Pac-12 Championships)," he said. "At that point, it was just a matter of winning it."
 
By the time the Pac-12 Championships rolled around, Magula and Burns had established themselves as a formidable pair. To them, the only question was who would take first place and who would take second at each meet; they even had identical indoor and outdoor personal bests.
 
"We were talking about how we'd probably end up tying each other again at Pac-12s," Magula said.
 
Just as predicted, Magula and Burns matched each other, jump-for-jump, taking the same attempts and passing on the same marks as the bar was elevated higher and higher. To Magula, it felt just like a training session, despite what he described as the "hardest Pac-12 Championship ever" due to the depth and talent of the field.
 
His moment finally came when the standards were raised to 5.47m. Magula's second run at the box was picture-perfect, his body twisting up and over the bar with several inches to spare. Before even stepping down from the pit, he bowed his head and pointed to the sky with both hands. I've won.
 
That wasn't technically true yet – Burns still needed to finish his attempts at the same height, and Washington's Jacob Englar (who had opted to skip the 5.47m bar) still had a chance to surpass him. It didn't matter to Magula, who knew deep within himself how the competition would end.
 
He was right. Burns hit his limit, Englar's attempts at 5.52m fell short, and Magula was golden.
 
"It was a culmination of a lot of feelings," he said – the hope, the pain, the self-doubt, then the self-belief and joy that he had come to associate with the sport. "I was totally wiped out."
 
Magula placed 20th at that year's NCAA Championships with a mark of 5.30m (17 feet, 4.5 inches), far from the finish he had envisioned.
 
"I couldn't believe that I'd worked so hard throughout the whole season and that's how it ended – I'm out on 5.30m – a bar that I could make any day," he said. "It was tough. I think I was burnt out from such a long season. I was just running on fumes."
 
By now, though, he'd learned how to deal with disappointment.
 
"I knew I couldn't define the season by that one meet," Magula said. "The progress that I'd made as a pole vaulter was so much bigger than that, and it's serving as good motivation and fuel for this season."

Magula has big goals for this year. No Cal man has won an NCAA pole vault title since 1954 – he wants that. No Cal man has ever jumped over 19 feet – he wants that, too. The U.S. Olympic Trials are coming up – sure, why not?
 
"I'd like to finish in the top six at the Olympic Trials," Magula said. "A lot of things are possible in this sport."
 
He broke a 32-year-old indoor program record in Cal's first meet of 2024, sailing over the bar at 5.51m, aka 18 feet 1 inch, with ease. As he rose to his feet, he bowed his head and quickly gestured toward the ceiling with upturned palms – it was reminiscent of the moment that he knew he'd won the Pac-12 title.

His first one, that is. Magula repeated as conference champion four months later, somehow sporting an even larger grin than he had the previous May.
 
"Skyler is like a completely different athlete now," Lefever said. "You can't stop him. He still has tremendous upside – we're really starting to see what he can be capable of."
 
An NCAA title? Maybe.
 
Maybe more.