Monthly Archives: April 2025

Discus, Interviews, Meets

2025 Throw Town World Invitational Preview: Laulauga Tausaga

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If you enjoy roller coasters, I encourage you to check out Laulauga Tausaga’s career stats on her World Athletics profile page. Let’s start with 2019 when she made a huge breakthrough by winning the NCAA title, a huger breakthrough by making the US team for the Doha Worlds, a monumental breakthrough by throwing a 63.94m PB in qualifying there…and then fouled all three throws in the final. In 2021, she finished second at the NCAA…but did not record a mark at the Olympic Trials. In 2022, she threw 64.49m at the US Championships to finish second and qualify for the Worlds in Eugene where she once again advanced to the final…only to go 56.47m, 55.93m, foul, and finish twelfth. The following year, she made the final at the Worlds in Budapest…then threw a 4-meter PB and won the damn thing! Last season, after opening with a solid 65.38m in April, she struggled most of the summer and had another disastrous Olympic Trials where, as in 2021, she did not record a mark.

Last weekend, Lagi began her 2025 campaign with a solid 62.85m for the win at the Florida relays. This week, she will appear for the first time at the Throw Town World Invitational in Ramona, Oklahoma, where Joe Frontier and I will serve as commentators on a broadcast produced by the fine folks at Throws University. In this interview, she reflects back on a difficult 2024 season and expresses optimism about finally finding the consistency she has worked so hard to achieve.

It had to be tough on you to struggle last year after having such an epic 2023 season. 

After 2023, a lot of people were looking for me to do something amazing last year, but I was just craving consistency. I knew those big throws at Worlds and in the Diamond League final were outliers. Not that I wouldn’t be able to reach those distances again, but what I really wanted was to put together a season where I was always hitting 62 to 64 meters no matter what. But a lot of things changed last year. My coach, John Dagata ended up moving to the Bay area while I stayed in San Diego and did a lot of training on my own. Both of us were very busy  and it was sometimes difficult to set up sessions where he could coach me over Facetime. I would go to him for training camps, and we did our best, but after a while I had to face the fact that it wasn’t working. 

After the two meets in April in China (Note: Lagi went 60.61m to finish tenth at the Xiamen Diamond League meeting, then no-marked a week later in Suzhou), I was like, “We are in crisis mode.” 

My training was going better later in the summer, but I still wasn’t consistent. I knew I could make the team for Paris, but the other girls got it done that day and I didn’t. Missing out on the Olympics put me in a position to look at my career and say, “Do we want to do this again? Do we want to go through another season of craving consistency and not finding it?” There had to be a better way to move forward.

And that’s when you started thinking about making some changes?

After the Olympic Trials, I decided to end my season. Someone told me at the time that it was a stupid move, but how was that stupid if I wasn’t feeling right physically or mentally? No amount of, “You got this!” was going to make it better, so I took six weeks off, sat down and was like “Alright, this was the second team you haven’t made. This was the third season in a row of trying to find consistency.”

I did some soul searching. I was craving the kind of consistency I had in college in 2019 when on my worst days I still usually threw 58 or 59 meters. Since then, I’d had too many meets where I was throwing like 55 meters. I took six weeks off, then told Dagata I was ready to get back on the horse, but there were things I needed to do to actually ride it and not let it take me wherever. I couldn’t afford to live in Oakland, and I wasn’t in an emotional state to drop everything and move anyway. Some athletes might have done it, but I’m an emotional thrower, and if I don’t feel comfortable it affects my training. I wanted to stay closer to home, and I told Dagata I wanted to bring on my high school coach Jorge Reyes, so I’d have someone to be here with me to bounce ideas off of and to give me immediate feedback. I realized that throwing was a social sport for me, and I thrived around other people. In 2024, I was alone for probably eighty percent of my training, and that just didn’t work. I had stayed close with Jorge through college and my pro years, and he was always easy to communicate with and good to bounce ideas off of. I did that with teammates in college. When the coach said something, I might ask the other throwers, “Do you understand what he’s saying?” I just always enjoyed training in a place where I had other people to interact with. 

So it helped having Coach Reyes around, but I was also thinking back to my time at Iowa. I had three amazing years throwing for Eric Werskey, and we kept in touch after he took the job at Florida after the Olympic Trials in 2021. 

After the 2024 season, I got to a point where I felt a little lost in the situation I was in, so I sat down with Coach Reyes and told him I was considering contacting Werskey and asking him to work with me again. I went back and forth on it and couldn’t make up my mind, and I must have been driving Coach Reyes crazy, because one day after practice he gave me an ultimatum. He looked at me and said, “You are going to call me tonight and tell me what you’re doing. You are going to make a decision and we are going to move on from there and never talk about this again.”

So that’s what I did. I went home and made my decision.

Which was?

I decided to ask Coach Werskey to take over my training. But first, I had to talk to Dagata. We won a medal together, and I respect him as a coach, but the situation just wasn’t working for me. So I told Dagata, then I had to reach out to Werskey. I guess I probably should have called him first, but…

Anyway, I called Werskey and at first I avoided asking him what I wanted to ask him. I was like, “How are you? How is everything at Florida?” Finally, I got around to it and asked if he’d be my coach for the 2025 season. 

He said he would, so we set it up where I still work with Coach Reyes, but we send Eric videos right after practice and he gives me feedback every day as soon as he can. Maybe a text message. Maybe a voicemail in our coaching chat. “Hey, here is what I see…” Those quick responses and Eric and Coach Reyes’ ability to work together have made a big difference for me. Over the course of the last few months, I’ve seen so much growth. And I’ve been able to make it to Florida around once a month to work with him in person.

Are you excited to get a chance to compete at Throw Town?

Yes. I’ve never been there before, but I’m excited to see how I do in the wind. I know people freak out about “wind this” and “wind that,” but let’s be real. Isn’t that why we go to meets like Triton? I actually prefer less wind most of the time because if you have a strong wind and don’t find your rhythm it will eat you. But sometimes the wind can also show you what’s possible, like last year with Joe Brown and Veronica Fraley. They both threw well at Throw Town then ended up in the Olympics, so are you going to tell me those throws in Oklahoma weren’t real?

Because you won in 2023, you have a bye for this year’s Worlds, right?

I do have the bye for Tokyo, and it probably saved my career. It was crushing not to make it to the Olympics last year, and during those six weeks after the Trials I spent a lot of time contemplating whether or not I was done. But then I’d think, “Well, I have the bye, so I might as well keep going and see how much ass I can kick before I give it up.”

Note: The World Invitational will take place at Throw Town from April 10-13. Check out Throws University for a livestream featuring Joe Frontier and yours truly as commentators!

Discus, Interviews, Meets, Uncategorized

2025 Throw Town World Invitational Preview: Rachel Dincoff

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Rachel Dincoff at the 2021 Olympic Trials. Photo Courtesy of USATF.

In 2021, Rachel Dincoff came from nowhere–well, New Mexico anyway–to seize a spot on the US team for the Tokyo Olympics. She’d moved to America’s 36th most populous state three years earlier to work with Coach Doug Reynolds, and her sacrifice–New Mexico is home to 47 different types of snakes for god’s sake–had finally paid off. She followed that success by making the US team again in 2022, this time for the World Championships, and as she prepared for the 2023 season, Rachel had reason to believe that her dream of becoming one of the world’s top discus throwers might be coming true. 

Then disaster struck. And re-struck. And struck again.

I’ll let Rachel tell the story, but suffice it to say that when she enters the ring next week at the World Invitational in Ramona, it will be a meaningful moment for her and for the sport to which she has given so much. 

The last time I saw you was in Eugene for the 2022 Worlds. You finished your season a few weeks later at the ISTAF meet in Berlin, and have not competed since! What happened?

In early March of 2023, I was back in Florida where I live after doing a training camp with Doug in Kansas, where he coaches now. I’d been sick for a few days, and was still not feeling well when I got up for a Sunday morning workout. My intuition told me to take a rest day, but the athlete inside of me said, “No! You must work out!” I was doing a plyometric exercise and Boom! It felt like someone had thrown something and hit me in the back of the leg. 

It’s hard to say with an injury like that if it happened in the moment or it had been building over time, but I knew right away it was serious. My boyfriend, Carl Lawson, was in the gym with me. He’s a pro football player and he’d torn his Achilles a couple of years earlier. He scooped me up, put me on a bench and did a Thompson test on my leg, and he could tell right away I’d torn mine. I was in surgery three days later. 

That must have been devastating, with another World Championships coming up in 2023, and the Olympics in 2024.

I was actually pretty optimistic at first. Carl and I live in south Florida, which is a big football community, and we knew players who’d recovered from a torn Achilles in the space of a year. Carl had done it himself. He tore his Achilles in August of 2021, had to have two surgeries, and still made it back for the 2022, so I saw no reason why I couldn’t do the same thing and recover in time to compete for a spot in Paris.

But a couple of months into my recovery, I felt like I still didn’t have a strong connection down there. An Achilles tear takes time to heal, but even after five months of hard work, I wasn’t making progress, and I started to feel the clock winding down on my chances to get ready for 2024. It was the most stressed I’d ever been. I just couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting better. I’d had an uncomfortable experience with a medical professional who was pulling on my ankle at an early stage, something which I now know should not have been done. But I couldn’t say for sure if that caused a setback, or if I was just pushing too hard in rehab. Finally, I went back to Dr. O’Malley in New York, who had done my surgery. He examined me and saw that my Achilles needed to be repaired again!

The difficult conversation this time was whether he should take part of my hamstring to repair the Achilles or use tissue from a cadaver. Carl had done it with his hamstring, and using your own tissue is better in some ways, so that’s what I chose to do. But then I had an MRI in the morning before the second surgery, and it showed that the tendon wasn’t too badly torn, and they said they could probably fix it using the cadaver tissue, which would make for a shorter recovery period because I wouldn’t also be dealing with weakness in my hamstring. So that’s what we chose to do.

And then…?

Four months later I started showing signs that my body was rejecting the cadaver tissue.

So, in December of 2023, I had my third surgery. They took, I believe, seven inches of part of my hamstring and also a tendon from my foot and used that to repair my Achilles.

How were you able to keep it together through all that?

I did a pretty good job of staying positive and focusing on my goals, even after the third surgery. I kept telling myself that I could still make it back for the Olympic Trials, which I know was kind of crazy, but I needed something to keep me going or I was going to get very depressed. 

And of course, I had Carl. He’d been through two Achilles surgeries and before that two ACL surgeries, and he understood the physical and emotional toll that takes on an athlete. 

Carl was dealing with some difficulties in his sport at the same time, wasn’t he?

He was. After tearing his Achilles and missing his first year with the New York Jets, he came back strong and got seven sacks in 2022. But in 2023, he had a lot of frustrations with the team. They lost Aaron Rogers right away, then for some reason they stopped playing Carl very much, which was really disappointing, so we had to be there for each other. Sometimes, it was like, “Who’s got the sunshine today?” But we got through it, and all that trauma made our relationship even stronger.

And things have finally settled down for both of you, yes?

They have. Carl signed with the Cowboys last year and had some really good games. It was a nice comeback year where he showed he’s still in the mix . In that business, they like to push out the veterans sometimes, but he was like “I’m here to stay!”  And after all he’s been through, it’s amazing the way he’s moving now. The guy is a freak. I mean that as a compliment.

Of course. And you’re back on track as well?

I’m pretty much ready to go with my training. I need to give myself more grace, as hard as that is to do as an athlete, but I’m throwing well and seeing good things. I know I’m probably not going to PR in Oklahoma, but I’m excited to get started again.

Ideally, I wouldn’t want to open up this early, but my goal is to make the World Championships this summer, and this meet has points. And since I haven’t competed in two years, I need to get some meets under me to get my feel back for competing, for dealing with nerves and things like that.

What is your training setup like these days?

Doug will always be my primary coach. With him in Kansas and me in Florida, we spend a lot of time on the phone, and I send him videos. After the meet in Oklahoma, I’ll go to Kansas to train with him for a while and compete there.

I also have a few people who watch me train a little bit here in Florida. On Wednesdays, I go to the University of Miami and train with Coach Cory Young and some of the throwers there. Some days, I throw at a high school near here. Wolfgang Schmidt watches me sometimes.

Wolfgang Schmidt?

Yep. I really enjoy working with him. Doug and I are two peas in a pod in that we both love biomechanics and breaking stuff down, but that sometimes leads to me overthinking. Wolfgang is very relaxed. Are you balanced? Is the disc coming out of your hand nicely? His idea is to get the basics down–foot in the middle, good release, discus behind you–and your body will figure it out from there. At first, his approach was so simple I was wondering if I’d get anything out of it, but now I can see how it builds confidence and rhythm. I really enjoy his coaching style. 

Note: The World Invitational will take place at Throw Town from April 10-13. Check out Throws University for a livestream featuring Joe Frontier and Moi as commentators!