Andy Taylor was coaching varsity girls basketball at Grand Blanc High School when he spotted potential in a junior varsity player named Gwen Wentland-Mikinski.
Just not as a basketball player. Definitely not as a basketball player.
“I was kind of a failure in basketball,” she said.
Perhaps, but Taylor also coached track and field at Grand Blanc. Even on the basketball court, Taylor detected glimpses of athletic ability that could translate nicely into that sport.
“He watched me ride the bench as a JV athlete for a couple years,” she said. “I could touch the rim; that was probably my only talent. I would grab the rim, things like that. He’s like, ‘You’re not very good at basketball, but you should come out for track.’”
Doing so would mean giving up soccer, a sport she played growing up, because both sports take place in the spring at the high school level.
“I came to a fork in the road,” she said. “I had to make a decision. I said, ‘You know, I’m going to do something different, see how this goes.’”
It went quite well, which is putting it mildly.
Wentland-Mikinski became one of the best high jumpers in Michigan high school history, was an All-American at Kansas State University and competed in five U.S. Olympic Trials from 1992-2008.
She came up short of qualifying for the Olympics as a competitor, but achieved that dream as a coach in 2012. Wentland-Mikinski competed as a high jumper longer than most athletes, even though she began coaching at Kansas State and for a year at California-Irvine shortly after her college career ended.
“I just thought, ‘You know, you’ve got this really small window of opportunity left,’” she said. “I wanted to keep going. I moved back to train with Cliff Rovelto at Kansas State. That worked to my benefit, because I ended up finishing second at the U.S. championships that year. I made the world champion team in 2003, won the U.S. championship indoors following the birth of my daughter in 2004. Clearly, I wasn’t done. I had a little more gas in the tank.
“I was into my 30s by the time I retired. There’s always a very fine line as to when it call it quits. You don’t want to hang in so long that people are saying, ‘Why is she still out there?’ As long as I was competitive and making a run at national championships and in the hunt for top-three performances, I tried to stay with it as long as I could.”
Her first track and field meet came as a freshman at Grand Blanc in 1987. She cleared 4 feet, 10 inches that day and barely missed qualifying for the state meet at regionals.
“I had horrible form,” she said. “Like a baby deer, I was just trying stuff, but I had a proclivity towards it. I knew if I set my mind to it, if I had another year, I could get really good.”
Once Wentland-Mikinski got the hang of things, she took second in the state with a jump of 5-4 in 1988, won at 5-7 in 1989 and won at 5-10 in 1990. Her jump as a senior is still the state meet record for Class A or Division 1 and was six inches higher than runner-up Yeshimbra Gray of Carman-Ainsworth.
Before moving on to college, she jumped 6 feet at the 1990 CANUSA Games to set a Michigan high school record that still stands.
Where did that talent come from?
“My gramma on my dad’s side used to say her husband, my grandfather who I really didn’t get to know very much because he died early, they used to call him Leaping Leonard,” she said. “Quite possibly, the leaping came from him.” Her high school performances attracted the attention of major college programs, but Kansas State wasn’t high on her list.
“That was kind of a lucky mistake,” she said.
She took visits to LSU, North Carolina and Tennessee before being persuaded by Rovelto to travel to Manhattan, Kan., to check out K-State. Wentland-Mikinski had a national letter of intent in hand to sign with North Carolina when she backed out at the last minute with no guarantee the other offers were still available.
“I went from being one of the top recruits in the country to having nowhere to go to school, because I told North Carolina ‘no.’ Kansas State found out at a track meet that I declined to go there. Coach Rovelto called me and said, ‘I heard you’re not going to North Carolina; where are you going to school?’ I said, ‘If the offer still stands, I’d like to go to Kansas State.’” At Kansas State, Wentland-Mikinski became the greatest high jumper in school history. She won one outdoor and two indoor NCAA championships, was an eight-time All-American and set the school indoor (6-5) and outdoor (6-4.5) records in 1995. Both records were broken by Akela Jones in 2016.
Wentland-Mikinski was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2006.
