Chenango Forks Track and Field
Hall of Fame

Graduated:
School Record in Triple Jump
Second in Long Jump

SUS Champion: Long Jump (1974), Triple Jump (1974)
SUS Team Champion: 1972
State Meet: Triple Jump (1974)

When you think of a Horizontal Jumper in Track and Field,
adjectives that probably would never cross your mind would
be “rugged” or “bruising,” but those are the exact words the
Press and Sun Bulletin used to describe one of our very best
Horizontal Jumpers in School History, Nick Cola.

Nick was an absolute football standout.  At 6 feet 2 inches and 190 pounds, he looked every bit the part of the All League, rough, smashmouth Fullback that he was.  He displayed that aggressive style when he tried to be a hurdler in his first year of Track, but would more often than not just barrel his way through the barriers.  After breaking so many hurdles and getting so many bruises, Coach Thomas Pirsonius in an act of desperation (and to save money on replacement hurdles), put a hurdle in the Long Jump pit and had Cola get a running start to simply work on getting over the hurdle.  But without having a second hurdle to come down for, on Nick’s first attempt he soared through the air so long that it was clear he had been practicing the wrong event.  

With most everything else in athletics Nick was about brute force, but with his jumping he was smooth and precise.  As a sophomore at the beginning of the season, Nick was jumping 37 feet in the Triple Jump and 17 feet in the Long Jump.  But each week, each year, he just kept getting better and better, so that by his senior season, Nick qualified for the State Meet in the Triple Jump with a leap of 42 feet 4 inches, which is still our School Record to this day.  

Cola made All Conference in both the Triple and Long Jumps, becoming the only Forker in history to achieve that distinction.  In the last long Long Jump of his high school career, Nick leaped 19 feet 10 and a half inches, which was our second best in School History for twenty four years and is still our fifth farthest of All Time.  Cola went to play Division II football for the Fighting Falcons of Fairmont State in West Virginia, and the one year he ran collegiate track, he was able to break twenty feet in the Long Jump.