Track and field: Bareni jumps into life at UNT

[Harry]

Shahaf Bareni was walking through North Texas’ campus on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon last year when panic set in.

Bareni grew up in Israel and served in the military for two years, just like all the other girls in the country were required to do as teenagers. There were plenty of times she had to run for cover when the warning sirens went off in a part of the world where military conflict has raged for years, including once when rockets hit close to her home in Golan Heights, a plateau that sits in a disputed area between Israel and southwest Syria.

It wasn’t until her first Wednesday afternoon in Denton that one of UNT’s top field event specialists found out they have sirens around the campus at UNT, too.

They just are used for a totally different purpose — warning people of severe weather, which wasn’t the case that day.

“When I was in Israel, that siren meant something totally different,” Bareni said. “In 2005, during the second Lebanon war, rockets fell really close to my house. We had to stay at home all day and sometimes go to the shelters.”

These days life is a little less hectic for Bareni, a sophomore who enters the NCAA West Regional today in Austin ranked second in her flight of the high jump with a qualifying mark of 1.81 meters (5 feet 11 1/4

inches).

Bareni will advance to the national meet in Des Moines, Iowa, if she can finish in the top 24.

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