Nebraska assistant track and field coach T.J. Pierce likens competing in the heptathlon to painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
“You start painting one end,†Pierce said, "and it takes so long that by the time you get done painting the other end, you turn around and start over again.â€
Jared Seay has lived that reality for nearly four years now, despite only high jumping in high school.
“I wasn’t even a big fan of track,†Seay said. “I was a big football guy. I quickly found out there was no way I could do both.â€
His coach at Iowa Central Community College, the late Denny Myers, then turned Seay into a decathlete against his will.
“I told him no, but he said he wasn’t taking no for an answer,†Seay said. “I didn’t want to pole vault, that’s the main thing. I just hadn’t done anything besides high jump, really.â€
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It turned out that Seay was pretty good at the heptathlon and decathlon.
He won an indoor national championship at Iowa Central in 2017 in the heptathlon. That national championship caught the eye of Pierce.
At the time, Nebraska had a school record-holder, Cody Walton, as a decathlete and Seay had some of the same marks that Walton was producing.
“I thought, 'Wow. Well, we should be able to coach him up a little bit,’†Pierce said.
It panned out.
Seay took second place in February's Big Ten Indoor Championships in the heptathlon.
“It’s the ultimate handyman job,†Pierce said. “You constantly show up with your pickup and your tool box and work on it every day.â€
The “handyman†work changes week to week, Seay said.
He set a personal best in the hurdles three meets in a row heading into Big Tens, so he stepped away from the event a little bit to work on others.
“As soon as we got to the meet and I hadn’t hurdled as much, you could tell,†Seay said. “I hit a few hurdles and it just wasn’t clean. You just have to keep doing everything to keep the rhythm.â€
Seay tries to stay even-keel throughout the whole process, and that won’t change at the NCAA Championships in Birmingham, Alabama, this weekend.
“When I went to nationals in junior college,†Seay said. “I just didn’t feel good enough to be there, then you start competing and you feel like you belong. NCAAs will probably be the same thing.â€
Seay said while it’s hard to keep honed in on every detail of every event, it’s reassuring to know if he doesn’t have a good performance on one event it doesn’t make or break his overall score.
“You’re always going to have an event that doesn’t go so well,†Seay said. “You may have a bad day on the vault and then PR in another event. Who knows?â€