Wolf eats up competition
Greg BurghardtSteve Wolf has battled adversity his whole life.
The junior men’s track team member lost his father when he was in sixth grade, forcing him to deal with much more than a typical 13-year-old kid.
“You look at things a lot different after something like that happens. I got away with a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t have because of that,” Wolf said. “It made me grow up a little quicker, too.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Wolf’s mother fell victim to cancer right before exam week in the fall semester of this year.
“My mom told me not to let this change anything and that I had to stay in school,” Wolf said. “I knew I had to tough it out. I knew if I dropped out of school, or if I changed anything, that she wouldn’t want that and I couldn’t live with that.”
Not only did Wolf fight through all of that and come back to school, he didn’t leave his teammates out to dry either.
Just five months after his mother died, Wolf scored an impressive 24 points in the MAC Tournament this past weekend to help the Chippewas win their first MAC title in 31 years.
Wolf scored eight points in each event, in which he participated, the long jump, triple jump and high jump finishing second in each event.
“I can’t believe that I took second place in each event,” he said. “I was expecting to get fifth or sixth just based on what guys had done before this weekend, but a lot of those guys didn’t step up and I did.”
Wolf has a charismatic personality, which came out during the high jump competition.
“Right after people starting dropping out of competition and it was down to him (Tom Smialek of Akron) and I, I just started screaming after I cleared every bar, just to get in his head a little bit,” Wolf said. “I wasn’t feeling well and my calf was cramping up, so the only way I knew I could do well was to get pumped up, so I did what I had to.”
He is already hungry for more next season, not even a week after the team’s first taste of a championship.
“We’re going to have a really sweet team next year. We lost a lot of seniors this year, but so many guys stepped it up in the MAC meet that weren’t seniors, so we know we have so much potential,” Wolf said.
However, his season isn’t done yet. The regional finals are May 30 to 31 at Ohio State, where he will participate in the high jump and may take part in the long jump.
The top five places at regionals qualify for nationals in Sacramento, Calif. June 11.
Wolf’s high jump of 7 feet 1 inch was good enough for a fourth-place tie in the region, and a tie for 19th in the nation.
In the end, Wolf stared his trials and tribulations in the face, and jumped right over them.
