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- Year:
- 1983-1985
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- Sports Played:
- Men's Track and Field Athlete
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- Induction Year:
- 2014
Bio
Sheldon Blockberger has spent most of his life in the world of track and field, and that has continued long after his athletic career ended. Following a pair of CIF championships in the long jump and triple jump, Blockberger made his way to OCC, where he quickly made a name for himself at the community college level. As a freshman, he won the Southern California title in the long jump with a mark of 25-feet, 2-inches. Thirty years later, Blockberger’s 25-2 is still the school record. In the triple jump, Blockberger set another school mark of 49–7½, which was later broken by Kienan Briggs in 2003. As a sophomore, Blockberger won his second SoCal title in the long jump (24–2½), finished second in the triple jump and high jump, and took third in the javelin.
Wanting to be more than just a jumper, Blockberger competed in the decathlon at Coast and after a third-place performance at the state meet as a freshman, he was a favorite for a state title as a sophomore. At the state meet in 1985, Blockberger dominated the two-day event and scored 7,361 points, which is the second-highest total in the 44-year history of the decathlon. That mark is still No. 1 in the OCC rankings, topping his own previous-best of 6,959 at the Southern California Meet. His impressive performance enabled Blockberger to be named OCC’s Male Athlete of the Year for 1984–85 and he continued his athletic and academic careers at Louisiana State University, where he won the 1986 Southeastern Conference championship in the decathlon with a conference-record score of 7,737 points.
In 1987, he was the SEC pentathlon champion with a world-record 4,453 points and upon his graduation, Blockburger had seven LSU multi-event school records. After LSU, Blockburger was a U.S. national decathlon runner-up in 1989 with 8,248 points and in 1990, he was a bronze medalist with 8,301 points. Following his athletic career, Blockburger has coached collegiate track and field at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for nine years and as an assistant coach at the University of Arizona. Included in his long line of successful athletes during his coaching tenure is Brigetta Barrett, the 2012 Olympic silver medalist in the women’s high jump.
