Track & Field: Super Slovenski Bros.

Peter is Steve and Dave’s father, as well as the cross-country and track-and-field coach at Bowdoin College. Steve and Dave are members of the Princeton track-and-field team: Dave is a freshman pole vaulter, and Steve is a senior pole vaulter and heptathlete. You could definitely say that track — and pole vaulting — is in their blood, especially as their uncle Paul was an All-American and an MIT women’s track coach, and their grandfather Walter coached track and field for 43 years at Bates College.

“I wasn’t surprised that either of them would take up the pole vault, but I had mixed feelings,” Peter said. “It’s an extreme sport, and a lot of the training in high school is isolated from other athletes. But [Steve, Dave and youngest brother Matt] work very well together, and they think up great things for training, such as unicycle jousting, rope swinging, pool vaulting, splitting wood with an axe, walking up stairs on hands and catching footballs off trampolines.”

The boys have always been acrobats. Peter reports that, from a young age, Steve and Dave climbed on tables, chairs and the family’s piano, eventually graduating to sledding off the garage roof. They enrolled in gymnastics programs, joined soccer and baseball leagues and even played squash, but the track bug bit both early.

“I was a little bit hyper as a kid, so I started running a mile around the block every day so I could go to sleep more easily, and that kind of got me into track,” Steve said.

Eventually, distance running grew tiresome for Steve, so as a sophomore in high school he decided to go into the family business of pole vaulting. Dave also started his track career as a distance runner, but he switched his focus to pole vaulting when he was in the sixth grade due to his asthma.

“I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t pole vault,” their mother, Dugan, said. “I’m too smart to pole vault.”

The Slovenskis’ club of pole vaulters includes the family’s youngest brother, Matt. Last weekend all the Slovenski men took off down the runway in various competitions. Dave led the charge with a vault of 16’ 10” and Steve was next at 14’ 9”. Matt jumped 13’ at his high school conference championship, and Peter cleared 10’ at a Bowdoin College track team competition.

“We vaulted 54’ 7” inches this weekend,” Peter said. “That’s a family record.”

Both Steve and Dave were recruited to pole vault at Princeton and say they are still enjoying the gymnastic element of their sport.

“[The transition to college track] was very different. I was coming from being coached by my dad in a D-III [Division III] track setting to the Division I track. The program’s a little more serious here,” Steve said.

Dave has found the transition to college track less shocking than Steve had, perhaps because his big brother is on the team.

“It’s been really easy. The big difference is really switching from D-III, [where there is] a lot of emphasis on us writing our workouts or me going to the track, deciding what to do and pretty much doing whatever I want to,” Dave said. “Having Steve here, it’s just like my freshman year of high school again, when he was a senior and we were working out together. It’s been a pretty nice transition.”

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Dave’s current dorm, 1938 Hall, is the same building Steve lived in his freshman year. Dave’s favorite thing about Princeton so far is living in a suite of seven, and Steve, who lived in an eight-person suite his freshman year, said he also enjoyed the experience.

“Starting out in a big suite is great, because there will be at least one or two people who you’ll stick with for the rest of college or at least you’ll get along with,” Steve said.

Steve is still close with some of his freshman-year suitemates, especially those he works with as part of the Colosseum Club, a group best known for sponsoring the annual dodgeball tournament. Dave is also a member of the Colosseum Club and notes that his father introduced the pair to the type of activities the club sponsors.

Peter runs a day camp in Maine each summer, for which Dave and Steve are now counselors. All counselors have to adopt superhero roles: Dave is “Math Man,” and Steve is “Rocky.” Math Man swings on ropes, walks on his hands, rides a unicycle and is good at math. Rocky is a good boxer, can limbo under a bar with only 16” clearance and plays the trumpet and the accordion.

Healthy competition seems to be at the heart of the Slovenski family, as evidenced by its yearly decathlon on Father’s Day.

“The boys asked me one year what I’d like for Father’s Day,” Peter explained. “I said, ‘I’d like to do a one-day decathlon.’ So every year, we have a one-day decathlon on Father’s Day. When it started in 1997, I could beat them at every event. Now I can only beat the youngest one in some of the throwing events.”

Whether Steve and Dave will stay in the family business and coach another generation of Slovenski pole vaulters is unclear, but it shouldn’t be ruled out. After all, the Slovenskis have kept it in the family this long.