Coach Nathan Fanger webinar now on Youtube

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POhbm1pgVec&t=6s

 

A chat with British shot put champ Amelia Strickler

There is no NFL-style draft for graduating collegiate throwers, no carnival of excess where the most promising among them are paraded in front of television cameras and offered multi-million dollar deals to join the professional ranks.

For a college thrower, going pro often means going without–without regular coaching, without regular treatment for injuries, sometimes without regular meals.

The challenge is to find a way to stay in the sport long enough to reach your athletic prime. In a recent interview, 2004 Olympic shot put champion Adam Nelson reminisced about living in a closet under a stairwell Harry Potter style during his first year as a pro. Curtis Jensen, currently in his fourth year as a professional, broke twenty-one meters for the first time ever this season while working two and sometimes three jobs to support himself. Gwen Berry and Jessica Ramsey, two of the best young throwers in the US, have paid the bills at times by working for a company that bakes and delivers fresh cookies to college students at all hours of the night.

So, if it is a glamorous lifestyle you seek, put down that metal ball and start working on your mid-range jumper.

I know that other countries have different systems for developing their athletes. In Germany, for example, the best throwers are offered a chance to enlist in the army or the police force where they receive a salary while training full time for much of the year.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the 2018 British shot put champion Amelia Strickler, and I was curious to find out what life is like for a professional thrower in that country.

It’s funny talking to Amelia because she sounds as American as apple pie. Not once during our conversation did she refer to cookies as “biscuits” or the bathroom as the “loo.”

That’s because Amelia grew up on Ohio, and is a 2017 graduate of  Miami of Ohio University.

She feels, however, a deep connection with her adopted country. According to Amelia, her mother, a British citizen, “raised me very British. We celebrated all the British holidays in my house growing up, and we visited my family there all the time. When I started having success in college, I knew I wanted to represent Britain some day.”

Amelia graduated from high school with a shot put PR of 42’2”. During her freshman year, she upped that to 48’7”. As a junior, she broke the school record with a toss of 55’5 ¾” and finished twelfth at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. A promising senior season was derailed by stress fractures in three different leg bones during the winter of 2015/2016. Amelia ended up taking a medical redshirt, but that summer she competed in the British Championships for the first time.

She remained healthy during the 2016/2017 season, her final year at Miami, and managed a PR of 56” (17.12m) but a lousy performance at regionals kept her out of the NCAA finals.

With her mother and sister planning a move to England, Amelia jumped the pond for good that summer. She quickly became the second ranked putter in the country and qualified to compete in the European Team Championships.

Talking to Amelia, it became obvious that post-collegiate putters in the UK have one significant advantage over their counterparts in the US: the club system.

As is commonly the case in European countries, sports in the UK are not affiliated with schools. Rather, various communities sponsor clubs.

Amelia explained that the clubs are organized in different tiers, “kind of like NCAA division I, II, or III. I went with a club, Thames Valley, that was really competitive. We won the  premier division last year.”

Though the clubs do not support the athletes financially, they provide something that can be hard to come by in the US: meets. Lots of meets.

For post-collegiates in the US, opportunities to compete are not hard to come by during the college season when there are lots of invitationals that allow open entries. But once mid-May rolls around, the NCAA regionals begin the invites end and those not yet accomplished enough to snag spots in Diamond League meets are out of luck for a good chunk of the summer. And forgive me for stating the obvious, but it is awfully hard to get better at your event if you can’t compete regularly.

According to Amelia, the league that her club is part of, the UK Women’s Athletic League, holds one meet per month in June, July, and August, “but there are also Southern League matches around London that I can do as well.”

The club meets are held in venues that remind Amelia of the home facility at Miami of Ohio. She says they are well attended. “The sport is much more popular over here. Football takes the cake, obviously, but  there is a much bigger following for track and field.”

This, too, is likely a byproduct of the club system.

“It’s just so easy for people to get involved with the sport here.There are quite a few tracks around, and it is easy for people to join a club. This system encourages kids to get involved in athletics at a much younger age. A lot of them will do it with all their friends.”

So finding competitions is no problem for post-collegiates in the UK, but like their counterparts in the US, they still face daunting challenges in trying to extend their career. Though Amelia is the current British shot put champion, a 17.26m PR and a promising future have not been enough to secure financial support from the British Athletics Federation. She currently lives with her mother, works mornings in a local shop, and commutes two hours by rail every day to a practice facility that she pays to use.

She is also on her own in trying to secure top-flight coaching. When she first arrived in the UK, Amelia tried to rely on Steve Manz, her coach at Miami. She regularly sent him practice videos and solicited his advice, but that was clearly not an ideal arrangement. At the 2017 European Team Championships she met former British discus champion Zane Duquemin, who was trying to finance his own throwing career by coaching on the side. She heard good things about Duquemin, who also coaches current British discus champs Jade Lally and Brett Morse, and so began making the two-hour trek to the town of Loughborough to train with him.  

The results have been promising.

In spite of a torn calf muscle that interrupted her training this winter, Amelia has had a solid outdoor season. She hit that PR of 17.26m on June 9th, won the British shot title later that month, and represented Britain at the recent World Athletics Cup in London where she greatly enjoyed her first experience competing in a large stadium.

“It was amazing, to be honest.  I’ve never thrown in a big stadium quite like that before, and to have that big a home crowd as well was awesome. At the NCAA championships in Eugene, there was a big crowd, but they don’t really bother with you if you’re not from University of Oregon. At the Cup, people were waving flags, and I heard someone yell ‘Go, Amelia!’ when I walked into the ring. And it wasn’t my coach’s voice, either!”

Next up for Amelia are the English Championships followed by the European Championships this August in Berlin.

Getting sponsored by the British Federation would make life easier going forward. She’d have free access to Federation facilities and physiotherapists. To obtain that sponsorship, though, she is likely to have to break the 18-meter barrier.

“That’s been my goal for a long time,” she said. “Things haven’t gone my way the past two or three years with injuries. It’s nice being a professional now and able to choose the meets I compete in. Looking back on the NCAA season where you have a meet every single weekend, I can see how the injuries might have occurred. Now I try to be selective, be prepared, and make the meets count. I think 18 meters is doable this year.”

A perfect end to the season would be an 18-meter throw in Berlin followed by an invitation to the Birmingham Diamond League meeting followed by a sponsorship offer from her Federation.

That’s a lot to have riding on these next couple of meets, and I wondered if that would make it difficult to stay focused on the task at hand as she stepped into the ring.

“For me, I’m still new to being a professional, and I just try to put that stuff out of my mind, For example, at the British Championships this year I knew if I won I’d get selected for the Athletics Cup, and that was something that I really wanted to do. My attitude was ‘I’m going to throw far today.’  At meets, I just try to worry about myself and not let those outside pressures bother me. I love the atmosphere of a big stadium and a big crowd,”

She will get all the atmosphere she can handle in Berlin, as one of the more charming aspects of German culture is their passion for the throws. They will show up in force to cheer on 2015 shot put World Champion Christina Schwanitz who, after two injury-plagued years, is back in 20-meter form.  

Oh, and running concurrently with the women’s shot, both prelims and finals, will be the men’s discus where one Robert Harting will be making his final appearance…ever. Think that stadium will be rocking?

Maybe Amelia will be able to tap into that energy, blast out an 18-meter throw and take a big step forward as a pro. Either way, she’ll be back at the grind this off-season, hopping aboard that Loughborough train day in and day out hoping it will eventually take her to the big time.

Free Rotational Shot Put Webinar with Coach Nathan Fanger

McThrows.com is extremely jacked to present a free webinar on rotational shot put technique with Nathan Fanger, the long time throws coach at Kent State University.

This webinar will take place on Thursday, July 26 at 7:00pm Central Standard time.  You can register here.

During his time at Kent State, Coach Fanger’s throwers have won fifty Mid American Conference titles.  Thirty-three of Nathan’s throwers have qualified for the NCAA Championships, with fourteen finishing as All-Americans including Reggie Jagers (who last month won the USATF title in the discus) and Danniel Thomas-Dodd, 2017 NCAA shot put champion, 2018 Indoor World Championships silver medalist, and 2018 Commonwealth Games champion.

In this webinar, Coach Fanger will break down Thomas-Dodd’s rotational shot put technique, which is quite a bit different than the standard American approach to rotational throwing.

A year ago, I interviewed Nathan on this topic, and his explanation of Danniel’s technique was really interesting. You can find that interview here.

This webinar will be a unique opportunity to get an inside look at the technique of a world class thrower. Participants may submit questions to Nathan throughout the presentation. Whether you coach beginning or advanced throwers, I think you’ll find this to be fascinating discussion.

 

Jessica Ramsey intends to contend

Remember that moment in Rocky when out of nowhere he decks Apollo Creed in the first round?  Nobody in the place thinks he’ll so much as lay a glove on Creed,, and then…Bam!…he lands a haymaker. In the end,  Rocky did not win the that fight, but that punch and his ability to hang tough for fifteen rounds against overwhelming odds gave him credibility as an athlete and changed the course of his career and his life.

Okay, I know Rocky is a movie. Don’t mistake me for those Game of Thrones fans who can’t wait for time travel to be invented so they can go back and get a look at a dragon.

But I witnessed a very Rocky-like moment in real life recently. It occurred, ironically enough, during the first round of the women’s shot at the USATF Championships in Des Moines.

As I sat down on that perfect Sunday afternoon to watch flight two warm-up, I anticipated a hard-fought battle between the current NCAA shot put champion Maggie Ewen and the defending USATF champion Raven Saunders.

I’d also hoped that Rio Olympic champ Michelle Carter would push the youngsters and make it a three-way contest, but it became clear during warm-ups that she was not in shape to do that. (Afterwards, Michelle revealed that that she was still recovering from off-season knee surgery.)

No other thrower seemed likely to break 18 meters, and since Ewen and Saunders were reliable 19-meter throwers, this was clearly going to be a two-person race.

It turned out, however, that I’d missed something during warm-ups, a clear sign that a third contestant might just upset the form chart.

Twenty-six-year-old Jessica Ramsey, who had finished fifth in the hammer competition a day earlier and who came to Des Moines with a lifetime best in the shot of 18.42m, had warmed up with several non-reverse throws, each of which had traveled around 17 meters.

As signs go, this was admittedly a subtle one.

According to the Bible, signs foreshadowing an earth shaking event may include “distress of nations in perplexity…the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding.”

Nothing in there about fixed-feet fulls.

But to two people present in Drake Stadium that day, Ramsey and her coach John Smith, those warm-up throws portended a cosmic shift in the women’s shot.

 Ramsey recalled later that those warm-up tosses “told me I was going to get it.”

Smith recalls seeing them and thinking, “Okay, here it comes.”

And come, it did.

Ramsey strode into the ring on her first throw and absolutely killed one.

“After warm-ups,” she recalled later, “I  prayed and did my little meditation. Then, on that first throw when I hit the middle and  I stayed in, I felt like it was a good one.”

It was. The throw measured 19.23m.

It was a three-foot PR and the seventh best throw in the world this year. In the space of a couple of seconds, Ramsey had gone from an anonymous member of a large group of better-than-average American female shot putters to one of the best in the world at her event.

Actually, it took a little longer than a couple of seconds.

Ramsey graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2014 having put together a fine college career (seven-time conference champion, all-American in the shot) under a fine college coach (Ashley Muffet, now at Ohio State). Her PRs though (53.84m in the disc, 61.44m in the hammer, and 17.49m in the shot) were not necessarily those of a future world-class thrower.  Ewen, by comparison, just graduated from Arizona State having thrown 62.47m in the disc, 74.56m in the hammer, and 19.46m in the shot.

In spite of this, Ramsey was determined to pursue a career in the professional ranks, so she packed her belongings and relocated to Carbondale, Illinois, to train with Smith, at that time the throws coach at Southern Illinois University.

Two months after her arrival, Ramsey’s determination received its first test when Coach Smith and his wife Connie Price Smith accepted an offer to take over the track program at Ole Miss. Ramsey describes that moment as “very hard for me. I had just moved to Carbondale! I’d packed up everything and spent all my money to move there, and a couple of months later I had to pack up again.”

After settling in Oxford, Mississippi, Ramsey had to figure out how to support herself while also leaving time to train.

“When I first came to Mississippi, I worked at a senior care facility, a daycare facility, and a company called Insomnia Cookies. That kind of hindered my practicing.”

“Later, I got a raise at Insomnia, so I dropped the senior care job. After that, I  got hired at Dicks Sporting Goods, so I dropped the daycare job. That’s where I’m at now. Most of the time, I work seven days a week just to pay the bills.”

In spite of this, under Smith’s tutelage Ramsey kept improving in the hammer and the shot.

As a glide shot putter, Ramsey could not have found a better, more experienced coach than Smith. Many years ago, Smith developed a reputation as the best glide shot coach in the United States. He honed his skills at teaching the glide while guiding Connie to a long and remarkably successful career that began in the 1980’s when winning international medals meant beating the Commies, and lasted until the early 2000’s by which time the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the advent of stricter drug testing protocols had significantly altered the nature of the sport.

Throughout most of Connie’s career, all evidence indicated that the glide technique was the most reliable path for a female shot putter to win a medal at a major championship.  

It was not until Jill Camarena-Williams nabbed bronze at the 2011 Worlds that a rotational shot putter broke through. Prior to that, every World and Olympic medal awarded in the women’s shot had been won by a glider.

But the increasing success of the rotational technique among the men (including a sweep of  shot medals at the 2000 Olympics) caused Smith to believe that women could benefit from adopting the rotational technique as well.

In March of 2014, shortly before Ramsey joined his training group, Smith posted an article in which he made a compelling case that it was time for female putters to abandon the glide. 

So Ramsey was in for a bit of a surprise when she arrived in Oxford. Smith wanted to convert her to the spin.

She did not give in easily.

“The first year,” Smith told me a couple of days after the USATF meet, “she fought me on it. If the spin wasn’t working for her in practice, she’d go back to the glide.”

Ramsey has similar memories of that period. “I didn’t want to change because I was consistently throwing  58-59 feet with the glide, and when we tried the spin it was so hard! Some days I’d be like, ‘I got this!’ Then other days, I’d be slipping in the middle, fouling, dropping my elbow, and I’d think, ‘I’m going back to the glide!’ The thing about the spin is, if you miss one thing then the whole throw is messed up! That’s what’s frustrating about it. Even at meets, I’d sometimes start with the spin and then switch to the glide.”

Complicating matters was the fact that over her first two seasons with Smith, Ramsey pushed her glide PR into the 18-meter range. But Smith still felt that she was wasting her potential.

“She’s 5’6”, which is too small to be more than a sixty-foot glider. She’s explosive as hell, but her top end in the glide will never be what it is in the spin.”

Matters came to a head at the 2016 Olympic Trials.

“She didn’t throw worth a crap at the Trials,“ Smith recalled, “and a couple of days later at practice right there in Eugene, I said, ‘You need to change to the spin. I know for a fact from training people over the years that the spin is nine to nine-and-a-half percent better than the glide. If you add that on to your glide, you’re a sixty-six-footer!’”

Finally, a year ago, Ramsey committed fully to the rotational technique. Job one was to master the art of using the ground or, as Smith calls it, “working the Earth.”

Over many years of careful observation, Smith came to believe that gliders and non-reverse discus throwers shared a quality that was often missing from the technique of rotational putters: a strong connection with the ground. As he saw it, discus throwers and rotational putters who focused too much on getting air time–whether during the non-support phase or as they launched the implement from the power position–were sacrificing distance and reliability.

He discussed his theory in this article first posted in 2003. (Note: Check out Smith’s vision of the kind of rotational putter who might eventually threaten the men’s world record. It calls to mind a certain Sasquatch-sized Olympic record holder who was eleven years old at the time Smith wrote the article.)

Long story short, Smith made Ramsey take a whole lotta fixed-feet throws over the past year.

It all finally came together in Des Moines. After her huge throw, Ramsey felt the emotions welling but tried to hold them back. “I had to compose myself because I didn’t want it to look like I didn’t know I had a throw like that in me.”

She didn’t come close to 19 meters again (her series went 19.23m, 17.65m, 17.61m, F, 18.24m, F), and she didn’t win (Ewen passed her in round five with a toss of 19.29m) but that one throw was enough to get her an invitation to her first Diamond League meeting (in Rabat on July 13th) and perhaps usher in further life changes that will make staying in the upper echelon of putters a bit easier than getting there in the first place.

A strong showing in Rabat could get her invited to the Diamond League meeting in Monaco on July 19th. She is also scheduled to compete at the NACAC Championships in Toronto in early August.

If she finishes the year with a top-ten world ranking, Ramsey will likely qualify for the USATF tier system, which will allow her to  have health insurance for the first time since leaving college.

Additionally, Ramsey hopes to soon be sponsored by the New York Athletic Club. Should that happen, she would be able to cut down to working only one job and have more time to recover from her daily training sessions.

Owing to the brutal financial calculus of the sport of track and field, Ramsey’s performance in this next handful of meets may determine whether or not her days of averaging five hours of sleep, of trying to get by on $300-$400 dollars worth of food per month, or praying that she doesn’t sustain an injury for which she cannot afford treatment, are over.

Either way, Ramsey is committed to continuing her journey.

“Confidence is the biggest thing in this track industry, and I’ve got it. I believe I am going to throw great in Rabat and that will open more doors for me.”

Not a bad attitude for a young athlete who wants nothing more out of life than a little extra free time that she can devote to mastering the fine art of  “working the Earth.”

(You can find additional coverage of the USATF women’s shot competition including videotaped interviews with Jessica, Michelle, and Maggie here.)