Houston Klug said he's enjoyed the balance he has gotten from competing in a team sport like basketball and then in an individual event like the high jump for North Medford.

Moving from one sports season to another is a natural trend for almost every high school athlete, but that doesn’t make it any easier sometimes.

For athletes like North Medford’s Houston Klug, there’s a matter of being still caught up in what might have been during his final boys basketball season, and all the great things potentially still to come this spring in track and field.

Klug recently traded in his basketball shoes for track spikes after having sprung himself up the high jump leaderboard last year.

Klug is still almost a newcomer to the track and field circuit and is more known for some of his acrobatic exploits in basketball.

Before last spring, he was a relative stranger to track and field after having only competed in a few events during his elementary years that didn’t show the full scope of the sport.

After some friends talked him into joining the team, he quickly saw the difference between playing on a team in basketball versus a more laid back solo sport.

“I really learned how fun it was and just competing in it was a blast,” said Klug about his first impressions of the new sport, “it’s a little different from basketball, how everybody’s cheering for everybody — like even your opponents are — and that was really cool.”

It doesn’t take much imagination when seeing Klug roam the basketball floor that you see the makings of a strong high jumper with his dunks on the drive or when he looks like a pogo stick when he jumps around the low block to convert an alley-oop lob.

The 6-foot-3 forward used that athleticism to finish No. 2 on the school’s single-season scoring list this past winter, scoring 502 points for the Black Tornado to finish second only to Kaison Faust (604).

Black Tornado high jump coach Mario Filippi did not know much about Klug except that he could jump after he was shown some of his basketball highlights.

“I had heard rumors of him,” said Filippi with a laugh. “I hadn’t gone to basketball games myself but I was told that he could jump.”

And when the coach saw Klug come out for track and field last year, it was just a matter of mastering the unusual techniques of the high jump, along with gaining more flexibility in his back to quickly sail over the bar.

“It’s a very unnatural movement, you can’t really relate this to another sport that you do,” said Filippi. “He is really inflexible in his back, which makes that back arch really hard for him.”

One of the ways that Klug has quickly adjusted to the approach and jump in the field event revolves around how he shoots a basketball.

“With your shooting form, your follow through and everything that goes into the technique of shooting the ball is similar to the flop technique of going over the bar,” he said.

But instead of the ball being shot in the air, it is Klug’s body that is airborne and the results were fantastic with him easily clearing the 6-foot mark and winning six meets in his first season.

His high school season ended with a second-place finish at the Class 6A state championships, and Klug went on to place 16th at the Nike Outdoor Nationals.

“It was really fun to just watch it happen really quickly that he was competing at this level,” Filippi said about his quick ascent. “We knew he would win almost every meet that we go to, and now it’s just about fine-tuning that top end to really squeeze out those last couple inches.”

All of that was accomplished in a short span and only shows that Klug is just scratching the surface.

“It’s three months long, but it is so short in how much you get to work with an athlete every day,” said Filippi of the spring season. “It’s left mainly up to the athlete to increase their vertical and he’s motivated to do that. It looks like he’s jumping better this year than he was last year, and he was already jumping phenomenally.”

Added Klug: “I can just really jump but, yeah, it’s tough. It’s something I’ve got to work on, getting my hips stronger and stuff and getting more flexible.”

The immediate success in the sport was definitely unexpected and still has not fully set in for Klug with his natural leaping ability.

“I’m still kind of at a loss of words and thoughts about it,” said the senior. “I never really thought of doing it in high school and then finally got a couple of friends to convince me to come out and I’m glad they did because I did break some barriers.”

“It was just really cool that I could do that in my first year,” he added. “It really meant a lot to me that I could see other people were proud of me and I was also very proud of myself.”

One of those broken barriers was the clearance of 6-7 during the Southwest Conference championships last May. That leap is just three inches shy of tying the North Medford record of 6-10, which has been held by Josh Pecktol since 2009. Pecktol also played basketball back in those days and was known for his rebounding ability.

Even with his biggest competitor — Sheldon’s Terek Logan — moving to Florida prior to this season, Klug is more focused on his own performance than anything else. He quickly understood that in track and field that the athlete controls their own destiny with their performance.

The concept of not chasing the higher score in basketball to playing against yourself is something that Klug welcomes. The freedom to breakdown his individual performance and seek his own self improvement in the details is something that he enjoys.

“I love progress and seeing small improvements,” said Klug. “It can be anything, like getting some better lift in practice or just getting my feet over a little more or getting a new personal record.”

And the passion found for high jump in the back half of his high school career is something that he is glad that he found, hoping that it will open more doors for him in college.

“Whichever school I go to, it’s this and basketball,” he said. “If I go anywhere for basketball, I’m definitely going to try out track. And if I go anywhere for track, I’ll try basketball, so hopefully I can do both.”