Kylor Aguilar was born to pole vault.
Both his mom and dad were pole-vaulters, so there was little doubt when he was growing up, that he would jump too.
“My mom and dad both jumped at ACU, and my mom jumped professionally after college,” he said. “I grew up at the track. I planned on jumping because that is what we did.”
What Kylor could not have known back then was the very special year he would have as a senior at Wylie. Kylor won the Class 5A State Championship in pole vaulting and prior to that he set a personal record, a school record and a region record at the Regional Meet.
“It was exciting,” he said. “It was great to finally get to jump as high as I knew I could, getting to see it all come together.”
The road to state was a little bumpy for Kylor. Thanks to the jumpstart he got from his parents, Kylor dominated Junior High Pole Vaulting competitions.
“I won every meet in junior high by several feet,” he said. “It is a very tough technical event. I had a leg up on everyone else because I had been around it so long?”
His freshman year at Wylie, he qualified for the state meet and brought home a silver medal. But then Kylor suffered an injury before his sophomore year.
“It was pretty tough,” he said. “I got in a Jet Ski accident on Labor Day weekend and broke my foot.”
He recovered by track season, but knee injuries began to plaque him. He tried to push through, but he wasn’t the same, and he certainly could not improve.
“I just wasn’t able to train at all,” he said. “Because of that no training, I ended up pulling my hamstring at district and then again at regionals. That was tough.”
His injury-filled sophomore season was followed by a junior year that was cancelled because of COVID. But Kylor said that was a mixed blessing.
“It kind of played in my favor because I wasn’t healthy yet,” he said. “It was good and bad. I did have to miss out on a season, but it gave me that time to heal.”
His senior season, Kylor was finally able to compete the way he knew he could. The results were what he had hoped for since his freshman year – a state championship.
Kylor will be headed to Harding University in Arkansas next year where he will study Civil Engineering and pole vault. He said what happens after college is still to be determined. He is not likely to continue jumping after college, he said.
“It kind of depends on how I am doing in college,” he said. “I would have to be jumping really well.”
Regardless, he loves the sport and the challenges it brings.
“It’s a very difficult sport,” he said. “It’s challenging. There’s not much like it. It’s exciting. You are getting launched up into the air by a bendy stick. There’s a lot to the mental side of it too. It happens very quickly.”
And he is especially grateful that everything came together for him to perform at his best during his final high school season.
“I was finally able to get that training in, and I was healthy,” he said. “That was exciting to see. It was something I knew I could do.”
By Candy Reagan