Highlands grad Cassidy Davis leaps to prominence during freshman track and field season at Slippery Rock

Cassidy Davis, a freshman on the Slippery Rock women’s track and field team, has a lot in common with her event coach, Tabitha Bemis.

Like Bemis, she is competing for a PSAC school (Bemis was a standout at Edinboro). She also is competing in one of the same events — long jump — as her mentor. And both have gymnastics backgrounds, which lent to their prowess as jumpers.

Above all, Bemis is confident that, before Davis is through, she can have another similarity: being an NCAA championship qualifier.

Bemis, a Quaker Valley grad, holds six school records at Edinboro (indoor long jump, triple jump, 60-meter hurdles; outdoor long jump, triple jump, 100 hurdles) and qualified for the NCAA championships in indoor and outdoor. She can see the same kind of potential in Davis, a Highlands grad.

“She’s just very explosive,” Bemis said. “Right off the bat we could see that. … She’s got explosion like no one I’ve ever seen. I don’t think she even realizes how good she is yet.”

Davis competes in the long jump and high jump for The Rock. After a solid indoor season that saw her place eighth in the long jump (5.41 meters/17 feet, 9 inches) at the PSAC championships, she served notice immediately that she would be one to watch during outdoor season.

Slippery Rock’s first outdoor meet of the spring was in Charlotte, N.C., for the 49er Classic, and Davis won the unseeded flight of the high jump with a height of 1.62 meters (5-33⁄4) and placed sixth in the long jump at 5.42 meters (17-91⁄2). In the long jump, she was beaten by five Division I athletes.

“I was a little nervous at first on both high and long jump, but after the first jump, then I was fine,” said Davis, who didn’t take up track and field until her junior year at Highlands.

As quickly as Davis got out of the gate in outdoor season, there was a lot of work that went into it beforehand. Despite the natural gifts that impressed Bemis so much, Davis still was raw, getting by mostly on her athletic ability. So she and Bemis went to work on improving form, making those little adjustments that add precious fractions of inches.

Bemis calls it “deconstruct to reconstruct.” They started from the ground up, tweaking Davis’ running mechanics. Her approach to the high jump bar, in particular, required a makeover.

Of course, as Bemis knows from her own gymnastics DNA, even subtle movements such as not pointing her toes during her run-ups and landings in the long jump needed to be reprogrammed.

“My form … I really didn’t have any at all when I came here,” said Davis, able to giggle about it now.

Added Bemis: “I’ve been able to relate a lot of things to gymnastics. … I think that has helped us achieve a lot of the technical stuff. But she’s very body-aware when you can put her in the right positions.

“We’ve started to see some breakthroughs, but it really took that whole indoor season to kind of figure things out.”

Davis already has hit PSAC outdoor qualifying marks in the high and long jumps, and she has had a number of eye-catching results.

Besides her showing at Charlotte, she also won the high jump at the Slippery Rock Dave Labor Invitational and placed second and third in the long and high jumps, respectively, at the recent Westminster Invitational.

Her long jump mark of 5.42 meters is tied for 13th in the PSAC — Slippery Rock, in fact, has five of the conference’s top 13 long jumpers (Samantha Gilbert, third; Aleks Brozeski, fifth; Baylee Blauser, tied for eighth; Lydia Latimer, tied for 11th; and Davis) — and her high jump of 1.62 meters ranks seventh.

“When I first came here, my marks weren’t that good,” Davis said, “but as my technique started to form better, I was doing better. More consistent.”

That consistency, particularly for a freshman, is a sign that bigger marks are just around the corner, Bemis said. The PSAC championships begin May 3, and Davis is on a trajectory to wind up on the medal stand in both of her events.

Bemis also said she believes Davis is capable of hitting the NCAA provisional marks in both events before the season is over. Davis has been battling a nagging back injury recently, so she and Bemis have been careful about the training regimen.

Regardless of what happens the rest of this season, Bemis knows Davis has just begun to tap into her immense potential.

“She has all the tools to go on to win a conference championship in both events, really,” Bemis said. “She’s also got the tools to be a national qualifier. It’s one thing to have the tools. It’s another thing to execute, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get there.

“To see her have as much success as she has had in her freshman year tells me she can continue to grow and improve as the years go on.”

Davis, meanwhile, is keeping her progress in perspective. She doesn’t have specific numbers in mind in terms of what distances she aspires to reach. She just wants to keep improving.

“To keep getting better than my PR before,” she said about her goals. “Basically like a competition against myself.”