Joshua Awotunde competing at the Millrose Games earlier this season.
Fresh off of his first indoor PB since 2018–a 21.53m toss at an American Track League meet on February 12th–Joshua Awotunde feels ready to contend for a spot at the 2022 World Indoor Championships to be held in Belgrade from March 18th to 20th.
In order to make the Worlds squad, he will have to finish in the top two at the upcoming USATF Indoor Championships against a loaded field that includes world record holder Ryan Crouser, two-time World Championship finalist Darrell Hill, 2021 Olympian Payton Otterdahl, and University of Arizona stalwart Jordan Geist, who finished seventh in last year’s epic Olympic Trials final.
As far as Joshua is concerned, he is ready. A proponent of throwing the eighteen-pound ball in training, Joshua last week produced a practice PB of 20.04m with that implement–a good sign when you consider that last summer he threw the eighteen-pounder 19.95m not long before blasting a 21.84m bomb to take fifth at the Olympic Trials.
He followed that up by reaching twenty-two meters–the distance that separates medal contenders from pretenders in this golden era of putting–in Italy later in the summer. That breakthrough came at a meet in Padua that matched Joshua against a solid field including Tokyo finalist Zane Weir, former Italian champion Leonardo Fabbri, and 2015 World Championships bronze medalist O’Dayne Richards.
Before that meet, Richards gave Joshua a little pep talk. “Man,” he said, “I’ve seen you throw all year, and I know you’re a twenty-two meter guy. Just stay loose, be smooth and go fast!”
Joshua remembered those words after Weir took over the lead that night with a late-round toss of 21.63m. He says that he “does not like to lose,” and with one final attempt to answer, reminded himself to “put a little extra speed on it.”
The result was an even 22.00m for a meeting record and PB.
The next step will be making throws like that routine, a necessity for any American putter who wants to qualify for Olympic and World teams.
Joshua currently lives and trains in South Carolina with his college coach, Mike Sergent, who guided him through an outstanding collegiate career. After graduating in 2018, Joshua initially spent a year-and-a-half at the training center in Chula Vista, where he got to see how athletes like Ryan Crouser and Darrell Hill conduct themselves. Looking back, he says it was a great learning experience.
“I saw how steady Ryan was every day in practice, the way he hit the same positions every time. That’s why he’s the most consistent thrower ever. From Darrell, I learned tenacity in the ring. The way he develops speed while still maintaining positions is amazing.”
But Joshua had flourished under Sergent’s system while throwing for the Gamecocks, and in mid-2020 he decided to return to Columbia and reunite with his college mentor.
That decision has paid off, as he surpassed twenty-one meters in ten of twelve competitions in 2021.
He says that finishing in the top two in Spokane would allow him to realize a dream he’s had since high school. His parents immigrated from Nigeria in 1980, and Joshua holds dual citizenship, but his goal is to “represent this country and earn a world medal while wearing the red, white, and blue. Being a shot putter in the USA is not easy, but all these guys push me to reach new levels.”
There will be plenty of pushing going on this weekend, as a magnificent field of throwers vies for a spot in the top two.
The men’s shot is set to take place on Sunday at 2:00pm Pacific time.
Maggie Ewen of the U.S. reacts after winning the Shot Put Women events during the Weltklasse Zurich, Diamond League meeting at the Sechselaeuten Platz on Wednesday, September 8, 2021 in Zurich, Switzerland. (Weltklasse Zurich/Urs Jaudas)
This year, Maggie Ewen will be one of the few American athletes for whom making the Indoor World team will be significantly more challenging than qualifying for the Outdoor Worlds this summer.
That’s because Maggie, after a rough Olympic Trials where she finished in the dreaded number four spot, concluded the 2021 season by winning the Diamond League final in Zurich. Her reward–aside from a sweet-looking trophy and a bit of prize money–was an automatic bye into the 2022 Outdoor Worlds.
So, Maggie will be one of the few athletes chillin’ like a villain at the USATF Outdoor Championships this June. She will compete without pressure while what promises to be a ferociously strong field of putters does battle over the right to join her on the US squad at Worlds.
But that exemption does not apply to Indoor Worlds (to be held March 18th thru 20th in Belgrade) so Maggie will have to finish in the top two this coming weekend at the USATF Indoor Championships in Spokane if she wants to make the team.
Which she does. “Being frank,” she said recently, “with not making the Olympic team, it would be really good mentally to get back on that horse of feeling like I can make teams again, that I am that caliber of thrower.”
Maggie (whose indoor PB is 19.54m) hit 19.03m at a meet in Fargo on February 5th, and feels like she is rounding into shape.
The automatic bid to Worlds gave her the luxury of starting her training a bit later this fall as she won’t have to worry about peaking for the US Outdoor Championships, but she has begun seeing nineteen-meter throws “sporadically” in practice, which she says is a good sign.
Maggie believes her strong finish to the 2021 season carried over to 2022.
“We figured things out technically at the end of last season, and now those things have shown up right away in training. I’m very happy that we don’t need to make any major technical changes.”
The main thing that Maggie and her coach, Kyle Long, figured out late last season, was a way to smooth out her entry coming from the back of the ring. The progress they made allowed her to produce an outdoor season’s best toss of 19.41m in winning that DL title last September.
Much of Maggie’s training this winter has centered around rehearsing the modifications they made last summer so that the movements become automatic.
“I’m pretty good,” she says, “on the middle and on the finish. It all comes down to whether or not I can have a clean entry.”
Maggie feels like she is in a good place right now in her life and in her career. In 2019, she navigated a coaching change, transitioning from her college mentor Brian Blutreich to Kyle. Then, she and Kyle moved from Arizona to North Dakota. There was also the small matter of dealing with a pandemic. But now, Maggie says, all is calm.
“Halfway through last year, we found the rhythm of what life and training up here looks like. Things are settling down and lining up, so there is not much to worry about other than training well and throwing far. The more comfortable you are in your own life, in what is going on in your home and with your family, the easier it is to focus on what happens in the ring.”
Maggie will put that focus to use this Saturday at 2:35pm Pacific time. Her main competitors for the top two spots should be Olympic Trials champion Jessica Ramsey, and three time US champion Chase Ealey.
It promises to be a rollicking start to a potentially epic year for the women’s shot put in this country.
If I told you that three-time United States shot put champion Chase Ealey has ditched the sunny skies of Arizona and chosen instead to train in the dripping cold of jolly old England, you’d think I’d gone barmy, wouldn’t you?
You might even tell me to “Sod off!” and refer to me hereafter as a “cheeky wanker.”
Couldn’t blame you if you did, but facts are facts and not only has Chase decamped to the UK, but she’s feeling and throwing better than she has in years, which is brilliant news for throws fans even if it might be a load of tosh for her competitors.
Here’s how this all came about.
Chase, you may recall, was one of the great stories of the 2019 season. Working with two-time World Indoor champion Ryan Whiting, she transformed herself from a decent glider with an 18.46m PB into a rotational arse-beater. By year’s end, she was US indoor and outdoor champion and had raised her PB to 19.68m. She also made competing overseas against top competition seem easy peasy lemon squeezy by winning her first ever Diamond League meeting with a 19.58m bomb in Shanghai, and notching that 19.68m PB at the DL Final in Zurich.
Chase in 2019 winning her first ever Diamond League meet.
That’s a gobsmacker of a season, and no one could blame Chase for thinking her momentum might continue through the World Championships in Doha.
“I don’t even want to set my goal at simply making it onto the podium,” she told a reporter that summer when asked about her outlook regarding the Worlds. “I want to win.”
It’s rare for a thrower to approach his or her best marks at their first World Championships or Olympics. Similar to getting married or having an MRI, one’s initial experience at a meet of that magnitude can be disorienting. Subsequent attempts usually go better.
It didn’t help that the environment in Doha was so strange. The intense heat made venturing out during daylight hours a dodgy proposition. Most athletes trained in the evening, but even then the humidity was such that putters had a hard time just keeping the shot against their neck while spinning. Then, the competition took place in an air-conditioned open-air stadium. Try saying that three times fast. Perhaps most disorienting was the fact that the Worlds were held in October, making the 2019 season a good five or six weeks longer than normal. When Chase stepped into the ring for the qualification round, eight months had passed since she’d won Indoor Nationals.
That’s a long road to travel, and under the circumstances making the final and finishing seventh was an accomplishment. But Chase felt disappointed at “only” throwing 18.82m after routinely surpassing nineteen meters all season, and she was still brooding about it when Covid showed up and turned the world inside out.
She still managed to throw 19.41m during the weird, truncated 2020 season, but a case of long Covid in the winter of 2020/2021 caused her bodyweight to drop by twenty-five kilograms in two months and robbed her of the vitality and explosiveness that had carried her through that magnificent 2019 campaign.
She entered the 2021 Olympic Trials as the defending US champion, a title she’d captured in 2019 by throwing 19.56m in the pouring rain in Des Moines, but she no longer had, in her words, “the same oomph” that had enabled her to easily blast throws over nineteen meters.
Much of her confidence was gone as well after all those months of feeling wretched, and Chase finished fifth at the Trials with a best of 18.39m. It was a pretty good throw considering her physical and mental state, but she felt gutted. Keep in mind that had Covid not intervened and she’d gone into a 2020 Olympic Games healthy, Chase might well have contended for a gold medal. Now, with the delayed Games finally happening a year later, she would not even be on the team.
The next month, she threw a 19.45m season’s best and also competed a few times in Europe, but nothing could assuage her disappointment. To make matters worse, her best friend and training partner Nick Ponzio left Whiting’s Desert High Performance group.
Long story short, she rolled into the winter of 2021/2022 feeling lousy.
One bright spot of the past two years was a growing friendship with the British putter Sophie McKinna. The two met at the 2019 Worlds and crossed paths regularly when Chase competed overseas.
This past January, Chase decided to join Sophie in England for a three week training camp. Initially, she had no intentions of staying there long term, but says that “after a week we were like ‘Holy shit, we train together really well!'”
One day, Chase and Sophie were throwing at the Loughborough High Performance Center when the British men’s shot put champion Scott Lincoln showed up accompanied by his long time coach, Paul Wilson.
Coach Wilson saw that Chase was struggling with her technique and “throwing it all over the place,” so he asked if she’d mind a suggestion or two.
She did not mind, and they quickly developed a nice rapport. Chase describes Paul as “very chill,” and says that she works well with “chillaxed people.”
Before long, Chase visited Paul at his home base in York, and they drew up plans. Paul would take over her coaching in the ring and in the weight room. They’d train together in person whenever possible, and virtually in between the live sessions.
“The video sessions actually work well,” she says. “We have Paul on a tripod, and we move him around whenever he needs a different view.”
One aspect of Paul’s coaching that Chase especially appreciates is that he expects collaboration on the part of the athlete.
Paul describes the coach/athlete relationship as a “partnership” and says that “you have to talk and communicate. You can’t dictate what they need to do and how to do it. They are adults. I say to Scott and Chase all the time, ‘You tell me what you think we should work on.'”
Paul is also careful to explain the rationale behind any suggestions he makes.
According to Chase, “He will tell me why I am doing stuff, which makes me feel more comfortable. It makes it easier to trust the process. He really cares about my input in the ring and in the weight room, which is nice.”
He also does his best to maintain a stress free environment. “We’re just here to train and encourage each other,” he says. “That’s the main mentality in my group, and I think that’s helping Chase. She’s also getting pushed every day by Sophie, which has been good for her, too.”
Scott Lincoln with coach Paul Wilson.
It didn’t take Chase long to realize that the situation she’d found in England was just what she needed.
When we spoke recently, she made it clear that she wasn’t looking to get away from Ryan Whiting and Desert High Performance. There was just something about training with Sophie and Paul in an entirely new environment that made her feel refreshed. And Whiting was supportive of the move.
According to Chase, Ryan told her that “as an athlete, you know when you need to make a change.” He recommended that she make the move now rather than wasting valuable time dithering over the decision. “Your career is short,” he advised her. “If something needs to happen, it has to happen now. Don’t wait.”
With Whiting’s blessing, she and Paul got to work on shoring up her technique, mainly by establishing a more balanced entry position.
According to Paul, the goal is for Chase to “rotate around the spine” as she moves left at the back of the ring. “I stand behind her and hold up my hand, and she has to go out and around me. She used to pull her left shoulder down on her entry, which threw her off balance. That’s the main thing, getting more consistent out of the back.”
Chase agreed that this was a weakness in her technique. “Remember,” she says, “I was a sprinter before I was a thrower, so my instinct out of the back was to sort of drop down and charge like a sprinter.”
She and Whiting made a conscious decision to leave her entry as it was when she started throwing far in 2019. They planned to set about fixing it after that season, but with the disappointment of her seventh-place finish at the World Championships and the difficulties brought on by the pandemic, her head was never in the right place to endure a painstaking technique renovation.
This January though, the time seemed right. “I’m much more open to working on things now,” she says. “And when you are open mentally to making changes, they actually work.”
Proof came when Chase hit marks of 19.21m and 19.20m on consecutive weekends earlier this month.
Chase with a nice toss in Sweden on February 12th.
The plan now is to qualify for the Indoor Worlds by finishing in the top two at the USATF Indoor Nationals this coming weekend. After that, she’ll focus on getting ready for the Outdoor Nationals and hopefully another crack at a World Championships medal.
Paul, for one, thinks she can do it. He says that “During the last two or three weeks, her technique has been more consistent, and she’s been smiling. When she smiles during training, it shows she has confidence in what we are doing, which gives me the confidence to say she is going to throw far.”
If nothing else, Chase has endured some rough times physically and mentally and made it through. Now she’s ready to show that 2019 was just the first act of what promises to be a cracking good career.
That’s kind of a fun story, init mate?
Chase and Sophie McKinna have seven national titles between them.
Maggie Ewen is a veteran of the Diamond League circuit, as is Chase Ealey, and both were invited to compete in Gateshead, England, in late May.
It was, in Maggie’s words, “refreshing to be back into the pattern we were used to of traveling to meets,” but there were a couple of aspects of the experience that were downright weird. Maggie says that the athletes were quarantined to the hotel and the dining area. “They had people watching the doors to make sure we didn’t leave, and the English athletes were kept in a separate hotel to try to prevent cross contamination.”
Such precautions are understandable in a pandemic, but there was another aspect to Maggie’s Gateshead adventure that defies explanation.
This year, in an effort to make the throwing events more “exciting” for a television audience, the folks at the Diamond League came up with a new competition format. All throwers in the field receive five attempts, and then the top three up to that point are each given a “bonus” throw that determines their final placing.
In Gateshead, Maggie tossed 18.54m in round three, which turned out to be the second-best throw of the day. But, because she had a lousy throw in the “bonus round” and was beaten by the other two finalists, she was credited with a third-place finish and awarded third-place prize money.
Val Allman had a similar experience at the Doha Diamond League meeting. She produced the day’s best throw (65.57m) in round four, but is listed as finishing second because Yaime Pérez threw 61.35m on her “bonus” throw, while Val could manage only 58.58m.
If the women’s discus final at the Trials had been run the same way, Val, in spite of posting a monster 69.92m toss in round two and five consecutive throws over 66.99m, would have lost to Micaela Hazelwood, who threw 59.72m in round six while Val fouled.
According to Maggie, the athletes in Gateshead were not even informed until just before the competition that only three of them would receive a sixth throw. Then, as the “bonus round” was about to commence, “They were like, ‘by the way, your throws don’t matter up to this point.’”
I assume the idea here is to make it easier for the TV people to decide which throws to include in the broadcast. Rather than having to monitor the flow of the competition–as television networks do quite easily and effectively when broadcasting professional golf tournaments–TV producers only have to worry about capturing those three final attempts.
To someone who has no regard for the sport, it probably sounds like a great idea.
It’s not.
Nostalgic No More
UCLA’s Alyssa Wilson is one of the most versatile and talented throwers in the world, and in 2019 she put together an epic season, launching the shot 18.02m, the hammer 70.63m, and the disc 60.76m.
Then came the pandemic.
With 2020 a washout, Alyssa was gearing up for big things this season when she contracted the virus over the winter and was quarantined in her dorm room for three weeks. “I lost twenty pounds,” she recalled, “and it took me a long time to build up my strength. Then, I still had nauseous feelings, especially on meet days.”
She qualified for the NCAA meet in two events, but had a terrible time in both, finishing nineteenth in the disc and tenth in the hammer.
A week later, though, she found her footing. Her comeback began with a 58.80m season’s best in discus qualifying at the Trials, a full six-meters better than what she’d managed at NCAAs.
She followed that up with a 57.63m toss to take eighth in the final.
Then came the hammer qualification round. Alyssa opened with a 70.97m PB, then crushed a 73.75m bomb. At the NCAA meet, she had thrown 66.52m.
She fell back a bit in the final, finishing sixth with a best of 69.04m, but what a week.
Alyssa said afterwards that a bad day in the hammer at NCAAs carried over into the disc, but in the days before the Trials she “got her mindset back on track.”
“Then, having that great season-best in the disc…I wasn’t expecting to take eighth in the final, and I took more self-confidence from that, and I carried it over to the hammer.”
Throwing a PB in front of someone like DeAnna Price, who Alyssa describes as ‘one of my idols,” made the day even more special.
“And it was my first hammer PR since 2019,” she said afterwards. ”As soon as I saw the mark, I started to tear up. This whole year, I was always thinking, ‘Alyssa, your sophomore self is better than you!”
Not anymore.
Cyclone Power
You may have noticed that women’s shot winner Jessica Ramsey set up for her throws by placing her left foot on the center line and right foot back about twelve inches from the edge of the ring.
A similar starting position has been used to great effect by 2017 men’s shot World Champion Tom Walsh of New Zealand, but according to Jessica’s coach, John Smith, that’s not where he got the idea.
“I set up that way when I threw the disc in high school,” he explained. “We called it the ‘cyclone spin.’” (Just to be clear, Walsh was not yet born when Smith was in high school. You’re welcome, Coach.)
Smith had Ramsey go cyclone as a way of making sure she loaded her left leg on entry.
“Dropping the right foot back forces you to keep your weight on your left,” he explained. “And keeps you from falling back into the ring.”
At times, Ramsey has struggled with the all-important “get left” phase of the entry because of a balky left knee.
She clearly had that figured out in Eugene and will spend the next few weeks with Smith back in Oxford, Mississippi, preparing the cyclone for its Olympic debut.
At the 2018 US Championships in Des Moines, the women’s shot shaped up as a battle between Maggie Ewen and Raven Saunders over who would represent the future of the event in this country. Raven came in as the defending US champion with a PB of 19.76m. Maggie, a phenomenally successful NCAA thrower in the shot, disc, and hammer, had stretched her PB out to 19.46m earlier in the season.
I had barely sat down to enjoy the show when a thrower I did not recognize spun her first attempt out past the nineteen-meter line. “Who was that?” I asked the folks sitting around me. “Jessica Ramsey,” came the reply, which did not help. Some frantic Googling revealed that her season’s best the year before had been a whopping 17.76m. The year before that she’d gone 17.74m. Now, suddenly, she was the early leader and a likely medalist at the US Championships with a toss of 19.23m. How in the world, I sat there wondering, did that happen?
Here’s how.
Ramsey, it turns out, was a former glider who threw for Ashley Muffet (now Ashley Kovacs–yes, that Ashley Kovacs) at Western Kentucky, then joined John Smith’s group of post-collegiate throwers first in Carbondale, Illinois, and then Oxford, Mississippi where he still resides as the throws coach at Ole Miss.
A two-year tug of war ensued, with Smith trying to convince the 5’6” Ramsey that her future lay in converting to the rotational technique and Ramsey sometimes acquiescing, sometimes pushing back. (I describe those days in more detail in a piece you can find here.)
The huge toss in Des Moines finally settled matters, but afterwards, Ramsey slipped back into a state of semi-anonymity, posting season’s bests of 19.01m in 2019 and 18.64m last season.
She sometimes had trouble with a balky left knee, she struggled to balance a full time job delivering for Insomnia Cookies with the full time training necessary to reach her potential, and looking back Ramsey admits that during the long months of the pandemic she “sometimes lost focus a little.”
But Smith is not one to lose focus, and he was able to secure access to an abandoned sportsplex outside of Oxford where his post-collegiates could continue throwing. There, Ramsey worked endlessly to improve her technique.
Smith also used what was essentially twelve months of off-season training to experiment with set/rep schemes in the weight room in an effort to discern what type of program might bring out the best in each of his throwers when they would need it the most.
In the days leading up to the Trials, I checked results for possible podium contenders, and it was hard to tell based on Ramsey’s season so far, whether or not she was ready to battle for a spot on the team. She produced a huge 19.50m toss indoors in February, but then slipped back into the mid-to-upper eighteen-meter range in all of her outdoor meets.
Was she injured? Struggling with motivation?
“No,” explained Smith. “All spring we were doing hard training, and she still threw over sixty-one feet in every meet, so I was very happy.”
“Hard training” in Smith’s world means–in addition to lifting–lots of non-reverse throws into a net using a variety of implements.
“She lived in the net,” Smith recalls. “We did non-reverse throws with light and heavy shots practice after practice.”
Those were tough workouts, especially on mornings after Ramsey had worked until 1:00 or 2:00am. But, she persevered.
In March, Smith shared with Ramsey the plan he had drawn up to get her on the podium at the Trials. It reflected his years of experience guiding his wife Connie (now head coach at Ole Miss) and Raven Saunders, whom he mentored to a fifth-place finish in Rio but no longer trains.
“It was a good plan,” Smith said recently. “But, in order for it to work you have to have an athlete that buys in, and she did one hundred percent.”
A vital component of the plan was preparing Ramsey to compete in qualification and final rounds on the same day. Several weeks before the Trials, Smith arranged her workouts so that she threw twice on certain days–once in the morning and again in the evening, as would be the case at the Trials.
At first, Ramsey struggled with that practice pattern. Smith says that for a while, “her numbers were all over the place. Sometimes she’d throw well in the morning, and sometimes at night.”
Eventually, she adapted and was able to consistently produce far throws in both sessions.
She looked great warming up for the qualification round in Eugene, producing a non-reverse throw in the 18.50m range.
“After seeing that,” Smith says, “ I asked ‘Are you sure you don’t want to just non-reverse this and make the final?’ but she said no.”
Instead, Ramsey used her full technique to power her first throw out to 18.82m and then packed it in to prepare for the final.
Smith described her as looking a bit “shaky” warming up that evening, but at some point she launched another 18.50m non-reverse, after which Connie advised her husband to “leave her alone. She knows what she’s doing.”
Truer words.
Ramsey opened with a 19.45m that was very likely to put her on the team, but Smith knew she had more in her. He reminded her that there were several women in the field capable of throwing that far, and admonished her to “keep pushing.”
If Ramsey was feeling any kind of letdown, her friend and former training partner Saunders snapped her out of it by blasting a 19.96m PB in round three.
Once she threw that,” Ramsey recalled afterwards, “I was like ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’ Then I had to zone in.”
She responded to Raven’s challenge by blasting a new Trials record of 20.12m.
“I did not know it was that big a throw,” Ramsey recalled afterwards. “But, they always say the best throws are the ones that don’t feel like they are going far.”
Smith remembers telling Ramsey in March that “we are going to stick to our plan no matter what, and at the end you should have the stuff to make the team.”
They did and she did.
Now it’s time for a new plan. Maybe they’ll call this one “Operation Olympic Gold.”
On June 20th, one of America’s best ever shot/disc throwers Andy Bloom, and his coach Scott Bennett joined us on a Mcthrows.com webinar titled “Rotational Throwing.”
The guys broke down video of some of Andy’s best throws and revealed the technical concepts that allowed him to reach PB’s of 21.82m and 68.46m.
It was a fun and informative chat! You may access it here.
Andy Bloom, one of history’s greatest shot/disc doublers, and his coach, Scott Bennett, will appear on a free Mcthrows.com webinar Saturday, June 20th at 12:00pm CST.
After winning the 1996 NCAA title in both events, Andy and Scott had trouble deciding which he should focus on as a pro, so they stuck with both. He ended up with PB’s of 21.82m and 67.46m in a marvelous career that took him all over the world, including to the Sydney Olympics where he finished fourth in the shot.
In this presentation, Andy and Scott will break down Andy’s technique and talk about their journey together.
Attendees will be able to submit questions throughout the webinar. Register here.
American record holder Lance Deal recently appeared on a Mcthrows.com webinar to discuss the fine art of hammer throwing. Whether demonstrating concepts from the comfort of his home office or breaking down film of himself and other hammer greats, Lance did his best to help us understand the approach that won him the silver medal at the 1996 Olympic Games. You may access that video here.
Also available, is a recent session in which Colorado State University coach Brian Bedard examined the process by which shot putter Tarynn Sieg went from throwing 14.19m as a high school glider, to 17.44m her sophomore year of college using the rotational technique. Brian shared that journey using lots of interesting vids taken along the way. You may access his presentation here.
Check back soon for information on upcoming webinars!
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and nothing says “desperation” quite like a man of my advanced age spinning around on his driveway with a broom or a medicine ball.
I know what you’re thinking. “This guy will stop at nothing to entertain his neighbors.” But no, I actually started posting these drills last week as a way of helping my throwers work on their technique.
I decided to share them with anyone out there who would also like to encourage their throwers to drill fundamentals but would rather not risk gaining a reputation as “that idiot next door” by filming their own.
The first one is here. There are more queued up on my youtube page, and more to come.
Coach Nathan Fanger of Kent State University spent an hour with us this past Thursday breaking down the rotational shot put technique of Danniel Thomas-Dodd, the 2017 NCAA champion and 2018 Indoor World silver-medalist.
It was a fantastic presentation.
I have spent twenty-seven years obsessively tinkering with how best to coach the rotational shot, and I learned a bunch from Coach Fanger’s analysis of Danniel’s form.
His approach with Danniel is very different from anything I’ve tried over the years, and I can’t wait to work on some of his concepts with my athletes.
Those attending the webinar live were able to get their questions answered directly by Coach Fanger. You won’t be able to do that, but if you are at all interested in the rotational shot, I think you’ll love the video of his talk. Here it is:
