Maggie Awards Camp: Four Gritty Vaulters Picked by Louisville Coach Brooke Rasnick
Coach Brooke Rasnick and her staff ran Day Camp #2 at the University of Louisville, July 10-12, 2026. Four campers left with Maggie Awards. Image courtesy of the University of Louisville pole vault camp.
LOUISVILLE, KY — Brooke Rasnick has coached a national champion and six ACC champions at Louisville, where her vaulters have earned 12 All-America honors. When Gabriela Leon won the 2022 NCAA outdoor title, Rasnick became the second woman in history to coach a Division I national champion pole vaulter. At her last vault camp of the summer, she picked four young vaulters, handed each one a Maggie Award, and put in writing what earned it.
The Maggie Awards Camp emblem, adapted from the cover art of Maggie Vaults Over the Moon, illustrated by Young Ju Kim.
Haylee Batman of Cimarron, Kansas. Emma Kelly of Huntington, West Virginia. Carson Holtvogt of Piqua, Ohio. Delilah Kilbride of Bloomington, Indiana. Four names, chosen by an eye that has been right many, many times before.
The Maggie Award goes to the athlete a coach wants back next summer. It names what a results sheet cannot hold: grit, coachability, teamwork and sportsmanship. Rasnick made the picks. She tells us why.
Haylee Batman, Cimarron, Kansas
Cimarron sits in the southwest corner of Kansas, four hours west of Wichita, deep in wheat country. Rasnick made the connection herself.
"Haylee is a hard working Kansas athlete, just like Maggie. She made big improvements at camp and has a bright future ahead of her with the mentality she showed us."
Maggie Steele is a Kansas farm girl. The novel that carries her name follows the hardest year of her life, and the pole vault is what she reaches for inside it, with no track team behind her and a hayloft for a runway. Every award handed out at this camp is named for her. In Batman, Rasnick saw her.
Emma Kelly of Huntington, West Virginia, center, with Louisville pole vault coach Brooke Rasnick, right, and a member of the Louisville staff, left, at the University of Louisville pole vault camp in July 2026. Kelly arrived at camp new to the event. Photo courtesy of the University of Louisville pole vault staff.
Emma Kelly, Huntington, West Virginia
The staff rolled out the dodgeballs and found out who Emma Kelly is.
"Emma has excelled in multiple sports and is new to the pole vault. You could see the dog in her when we brought out the dodgeballs. She attacked camp with a great attitude, mental toughness and took full advantage of her time with us. When she gets more reps on the vault runway, she'll be a force."
Kelly came to Louisville with no vault background and plenty of everything else, which is the most common way anybody arrives at this event. Maggie takes her first jump the same way, on a childhood spent swinging from the climbing ropes in her family's hayloft. On her first real vault in the novel, she thinks: "A thousand rope swings had prepared me for this moment." Kelly showed up already carrying hers.
Carson Holtvogt of Piqua, Ohio, left, holds his copy of Maggie Vaults Over the Moon with a camp staff member at the University of Louisville in July 2026. Photo courtesy of the University of Louisville pole vault staff.
Not pictured are Maggie Award winners Haylee Batman of Cimarron, Kansas, and Delilah Kilbride of Bloomington, Indiana.
Carson Holtvogt, Piqua, Ohio
Every camp has one kid the staff points at when they need to show the others what it looks like. In Louisville it was Carson Holtvogt.
"Carson was fully engaged, extremely coachable and a joy to be around. He set a great example to everyone at camp with his intentionality, work ethic, and coachability. He is going to make a positive impact on anyone who gets to be a part of his pole vault journey in the future."
Coachability is the whole plot of Maggie's story. The instruction she hears most often in the book is one word: Listen. She takes the correction, walks back to her mark, and tries again. Holtvogt is the only boy among the four, which is how the award works. Nothing about the trait depends on which section of the meet an athlete enters.
Delilah Kilbride, Bloomington, Indiana
Changing a vault is slow work with nothing pretty about it. Delilah Kilbride spent the camp doing it.
"Delilah was diligent throughout camp in making changes to her vault. She was intentional on every rep. She had a great attitude while accepting feedback and using it to her advantage."
The hayloft chapters run on the same fuel. Maggie clears a height, raises the bar six inches, gets told to do everything exactly the way she just did it, then comes back the next morning and adjusts. The PR that lands on a results sheet in May gets built in reps at camp.
What Every Winner Takes Home
Maggie Vaults Over the Moon, second edition, Grain Valley Publishing, 2021. The novel is also available as an audiobook narrated by Tavia Gilbert.
Every winner takes home a copy of Maggie Vaults Over the Moon. Kirkus Reviews called it "a fine YA novel about perseverance in sports and in life." The second edition carries a foreword by Olympic gold medalist Katerina Stefanidi and chapter discussion questions by Dr. Melissa I. White, a mental performance consultant and former vaulter.
Read Maggie's Story
Four campers carried the novel home from Louisville in July. Maggie Steele is the Kansas farm girl the award is named for, and she starts with no track team behind her and a hayloft for a runway.
Order Maggie Vaults Over the Moon →
Listen to the audiobook, narrated by Tavia Gilbert →
The Coach Who Picked Them
Brooke Rasnick grew up in El Dorado, Kansas, vaulted at Wichita State, and now runs the pole vault at the University of Louisville. She read Maggie Vaults Over the Moon and recognized the geography before she recognized anything else.
Brooke Rasnick, assistant coach for pole vault at the University of Louisville. Photo courtesy of the University of Louisville.
She wore Wichita State's black and gold from 2005 to 2009, winning the 2005 Missouri Valley Conference pole vault title, qualifying twice for NCAAs, and setting the school outdoor record at 13-9.25 in 2008. She still holds it. In 2009 the Missouri Valley Conference named her its NCAA Woman of the Year and gave her the Dr. Charlotte West Scholar-Athlete Award, the conference's top honor for academics, athletics and leadership.
After college she coached at Oregon and Kent State, joined Louisville in 2013, and turned its pole vault into a national power, coaching Gabriela Leon to the 2022 NCAA outdoor title, the program's first. She returned to the Louisville staff in 2023. She now coaches All-American Ashley Callahan, who holds the program record, and Olympic silver medalist Sandi Morris, who trains with her.
That résumé is why her eye counts. A Kansas vaulter who reached Division I podiums knows what a book about this event gets right, what it leaves out, and what her 14-year-old self needed to read.
Her first appearance in this space came in an earlier post on the storybook vaulter and the coach who lived her dream, on how the two of them, one real and one invented, finally met.
Sharing the Runway with Champions
After the camp closed, Rasnick took athletes from the Louisville group to the USA Championships and coached them there. Morris won her tenth national title. Gabi Leon finished fourth. Ashley Callahan finished sixth.
Bring the Maggie Awards to Your Runway
Rasnick did this at her camp. Do it at yours.
The Maggie Awards Set is ten copies of the novel for $200. Give them to the vaulters you want back next summer, the ones who earned it the way these four did. You know your athletes. You pick.
Photograph the moment and send us the picture. It takes two minutes on a phone. Grain Valley Publishing features your club here on the blog and on social, then sends you the link to share with your parents and your AD.
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See how the Maggie Awards work, and order a set →
Congratulations to Emma Kelly, Carson Holtvogt, Haylee Batman, and Delilah Kilbride. Thanks to Coach Brooke Rasnick and the University of Louisville pole vault staff.