Zoey Hrabe, The Star’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year, jumps high and aims higher

The Barstow School’s track and field team doesn’t have a pole vault coach, nor a mat for its vaulters. But it at least has poles.

Zoey Hrabe says it’s a modest, perhaps forgotten, collection — mostly for athletes without poles of their own. One in that collection is purple, a bit shorter than the rest. Quite old by now, too.

That pole belongs to Hrabe, The Star’s 2024 Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

It’s a Lady Rocket pole made in 2006, the year Hrabe was born. She’s taken it to every high school meet. She’s used it for all her warmups. She said it was made for her — “my little purple pole.”

“Barstow had it for years and just didn’t know about it until I started pole vaulting,” Hrabe said. “They were like, ‘Oh, she might need a pole, so let’s go look for one.’”

Hrabe is something of a fixture on Barstow’s track and field squad. Her junior year saw a slew of awards, including but certainly not limited to a first place all-conference finish in the pole vault, second at the state track competition and academic all-state honors for track and field.

This was all, of course, after Hrabe’s sophomore year, the year she was crowned state champion in girls tennis.

Not even counting the all-conference 4x100 and 4x200 relays she and her team have placed in since she was a freshman, Hrabe’s high school athletics career is undeniably impressive.

Especially given the fact that she started pole vaulting — the sport she’ll continue at Occidental College — just two years ago.

‘The most loyal person’

According to her mother, Stacie Hrabe, strength is innate to her daughter’s character. This, Stacie saw early when Zoey was matched to the family by an adoption agency in China.

“In her picture, she’s sitting straight up in her chair, and all the other babies were slumped over,” Stacie said. “I could tell she was super strong, physically, right from the beginning.”

When Stacie saw Zoey in person for the first time, she noticed a full head of hair and a tiny body, weighing less than 20 pounds. And at 14 months, somehow, the baby could walk. She walked right up to Stacie’s knees.

“But the first time I held her,” Stacie said, “she was terrified of us. It was heartbreaking.”

In her first four months after being adopted, Hrabe wouldn’t cry, and didn’t really speak either. Her mother taught her sign language, from which Hrabe gained a “huge signing vocabulary” while her adoptive parents figured out how to best raise her.

“It takes her a while to let her guard down, but once she does, she’s the most loyal person. Watching her grow up, she always was (loyal),” Stacie said. “But I’ll never forget when they handed her to me — the weight of her in my arms and how she felt. She was absolutely perfect in that first night.”

It was perhaps Zoey Hrabe’s aptitude for sign language, and even her loyalty, that served as a precursor to the type of person she would grow up to be: driven, curious and still grounded in the people and places she’s called home.

This was especially true for Hrabe in her time at Barstow. She’s won awards recognizing her achievements in both the sciences and humanities, having participated in summer medical programs at Georgetown and Wake Forest, not to mention joining the National Chinese Honor Society and winning an award at the University of Central Missouri Film Festival for Best Use of Chinese Language at the Advanced Level.

“I first started learning (Chinese) when I was around 10,” Hrabe said. “I wanted to take Spanish, but my mom was like, ‘No, I think you’ll really appreciate knowing Chinese when you grow up,’ and I think that’s true.”

At Barstow, she was co-President of the Asian American Pacific Islander Club, where she helped promote Asian-American culture and community through sharing food, educational programming and starting a mahjong club.

Next fall, when she starts at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Hrabe thinks she’ll double major in Chinese and biology, with the goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon.

So far, she’s met every challenge head-on.

‘Just one more bar’

One time, Hrabe stole her sister’s inhaler.

It was the day of the state track meet, and Hrabe wasn’t feeling well. She had a 103-degree fever.

Stacie, who’d actually worked toward a coach certification to accompany Hrabe at her high school competitions, told Hrabe it would be OK if she didn’t jump.

“But it was state,” Hrabe said. “That’s what the whole season had been leading up to, so in my mind scratching was not an option at all.”

Between every jump, Hrabe would take a puff of the inhaler. It was “brutal.”

“I just told myself, ‘You’re gonna try your best and whatever happens happens,’” Hrabe said. “’Get at least opening height. Then after opening height, just one more bar, and then one more bar.’”

Her landing point

When asked what she wants people to know about her, Hrabe responded that she’s “grateful.”

Grateful for her friends, the community she’s found in pole vaulting, for her family and for her mother — “the perfect gymnastics mom, the perfect tennis mom, the perfect track mom.”

These days, Hrabe has been spending time with her friends and family before heading to California in the fall. She’s also gotten into doing her nails.

“I think I’m gonna take it to college with me,” she said. “So I can, like, hopefully make more friends. And maybe make a little bit of money.”

Someday, Hrabe might find herself at the steps of an Occidental lecture hall, another pole vault mat, an operating room, maybe an airport terminal on a long-awaited visit to China.

Regardless, there will be a community behind her — one that has looked after Hrabe as she’s cared for it in kind, too. Surely that community will be proud of wherever she lands next.

Hrabe, after all, is the type to have earned it.