Neil Howard III

Taconic Hills CSD, East Chatham, NY, c/o 2024
AthleticNET Bio

Decathlons take a versatile athlete. Throws, jumps, sprints, vaults….you need to have it all. Well, Neil Howard has that and then some. Not only can he do decathlon, but he competes in many sports for his school. There is soccer, and golf in the fall; skiing, swimming, basketball and indoor track in the winter; and outdoor track in the spring. 

Of all those sports, he’s been competing the longest in skiing. He started ski racing when he was six and has amassed quite a collection of trophies in the slalom and GS.  

In track, he started with the sprints and long jump  when he was seven. His core and leg strength from skiing made him explosive and able to compete well in those events.  Hurdles, the 400, mile and pole vault  came after that.

As he added more events, he was also growing. He went from 5-03, 120lb frame as a seventh grader to his current 6-0, 165 lbs.

As a multi eventer, he wasn’t successful initially. In the nine year old age group, he finished seventh in the pentathlon at USATF JO Nationals with 647 points. As he aged, he tried the pentathlon and had more success. The first year he finished 2,032 and then the following year, his sixth grade year, he won the event with 2,453. 

“That's when I really started to focus a little bit more on multis throughout the summer. I did take a step away through ages 13-14. I got back into it when I was in the 15-16 age group for the decathlon. And the first decathlon I ever did, I went out and won the National at USA TF nationals[6,316].”

His father, Neil, coached him in the pole vault and his sister coached him in the hurdles. The other events he learned from watching YouTube videos.

Pole vault has been an event where he has excelled. He started in the seventh grade and jumped 10-02.5. In the ninth grade he was up to  13-03 and this past year he went 16-0 and won the NY Federation championships(15-09). The event has proved to help him in other events, he opines. 

“One thing it teaches you is body control. So much of pole vault is body control. That can carry over into other events, which gives me a little bit of an edge in certain things. The pole vault has always been that one factor that sets me apart in the dec because not many decathletes can pole vault.”

His track training during the week involves some speed endurance training of 300 meter repeats on one day, 110 meter hurdle drills each day, and on light running days, some pole vault with full approaches and/or technical drills.  The weeks leading up to a competition, he’ll do some throwing events, but doesn’t do much more than that.

The speed endurance training is for the longer 400m hurdles and 400 meter sprint races. During the school track season he focused on the 400m hurdles where he won the NY Federation Championship in 52.41. His best in the 100m is 11.30, 200m, 22.05, and 400m is 48.49. He’s still retained some of his mile abilities, running 4:30.23 in the 1,500m.

This past season he didn’t swim to focus on basketball during the winter season. He was the only person on his boy’s swim team a couple of years ago and swam bests of 23.35 for the 50m free and  52.13 for the 100m free and intends to swim this upcoming season.

In basketball he nursed a twisted ankle. He plays small forward and his leaping ability and agility allows him to be active in the post area. He’s able to dunk, but it hasn’t quite transferred over to the high jump in track. A fact that is a source of joking in his household.

“My parents always made fun of me because in basketball my vertical is so high. There's a couple pictures that photographers have gotten of me jumping and it's just huge, but then I can't translate it to high jump. It's the two feet versus the one foot jump. It's pretty funny. But my parents joke with me. They're like ‘you can dunk, but you can't high jump 5-08?’”

The ankle sprain ended up causing problems in track. The overcompensation caused patellar tendonitis that led to problems with his take off in the high jump. 

Because of the tendonitis, at Nike Outdoor Nationals, he was limited in the high jump to 5-05 clearance. However, on the first day he set two personal bests in the 100m (11.30) and the 400m(48.49) and moved from tenth to fifth place in total points. On the second day, he finished second in the first event, the 110m hurdles to move up one place and then set a personal best of 119-07.5 to finish seventh place in the discus. That knocked him back to fifth place. Then, he vaulted himself into the lead with a towering 15-09 clearance in the pole vault to move into first place in the total scoring. A fourth place finish in the javelin with a personal best of 155-08.75 left him 32 points behind favorite Aiden Carter of Brentwood, TN. In the final event, he beat Carter by 35 seconds to earn the victory. The mark was the third best in NSAF National meet history and the best decathlon score this year.

This upcoming season, he’ll focus on the pentathlon at Nike Indoor Nationals and possibly the 400 meters where he’d like to get faster. Outdoors, he’ll have another shot at the decathlon. He’s high jumped 6-00 this past year and he’d like to get that height or higher in a decathlon.