Pole Vaulter Turned Motivational Speaker?

Matt Weirich a past track athlete from BYU has a positively strong motivational side to him

By: Ashley Smart

Herriman—Matt Weirich gave a mock press conference on February 28th, 2019 at Herriman
High School for a group of journalism students.

Weirich was asked many questions involving many topics throughout this press conference.
Some hitting on overcoming adversity, others on his transition from athlete to real-world, or him
being an athlete at Brigham Young University(BYU). Although these diverse questions were
asked, most answers found a way back to one broad topic: motivating others in some way.

Weirich was a college track athlete who had many accomplishments. He started out by following
in the steps of his brothers with trying out all sports until he found one he connected with. That
sport being pole vaulting. Weirich became so good that he was winning first place in his school,
and then state. He even went on to compete in other countries, “where track is a more noticed
sport,” commented Weirch.

Before Weirich’s college years and being on BYU’s track team had come to an end he decided to
serve an LDS mission. Little did he know that this experience would cause him to take a sharp,
unexpected turn in his life. He had an accident on this mission that changed what he thought
would be a professional pole vaulting career, to a paused end. He was told by doctors he would
never be able to pole vault again, and along with that there were many things he had to relearn.

At one point the BYU athlete found out he had short term memory loss. When asked if he ever
felt like giving up when relearning things he said “I didn’t really know I had short term memory.
In relearning I wanted to give up a thousand times. It’s no fun when you can’t remember the
simple things. I had been a 4.0 student. I knew I was smart, therefore I knew i couldn’t give up.”

After working hard he got back to where he was before the accident. Weirich was running pole
vault as hard as he could. “Training yourself to believe that you matter. What you do matters.
You won’t always be the best at something but what you do still matters” was his response when
the college athlete was asked if it was just the physical training that got him back to where he
started.

With all these motivational quotes or sayings from him, the former track star was asked if he
ever thought of becoming a motivational writer. To this he said, “I have thought about this, I’ve
tried to convince myself that I am too busy when I’m not. But yes, I’ve thought about it.”
Weirich also commented,“We don’t know what kind of difference we can make in someone
else’s life just by being present, just by smiling at them.” This is just one of many ways that
Weirich showed his motivational side. He showed the audience that he can use this side of him to
help others, empower others, support others, and show love for others.

So who knows, maybe one day we can look forward to a motivational book from this well
accomplished BYU pole vaulter.