This will be a quick rambling, I'm just so pumped.  I've never really liked discus but for whatever reason I got stuck with a bunch of serious discus throwers this year.  My favorite event is hammer because it goes the farthest, the less you fight it the farther it goes and when done correctly it looks so graceful.  But because hammer isn't a high school event in NYS (and not many places safe enough to throw it in Rochester) my first 2 years coaching I only did shot put, none of my athletes then really liked discus.  So I became a pretty good shot coach, wanting to be a great hammer coach while completely not caring about discus.

Like any good coach I follow the current of my athletes.  I don't hand pick my athletes (nor am I at a school where I would have such a luxury) so I either work with them or drive them insane until they quit (god I love the second option so much but it hardly works out, they just laugh too damn much).  So I learned how to coach discus.

How it's paid off.  While this isn't D1 scale (at least not yet) it's April and for college Brian Edwards one of my freshmen threw 42.26.  He's probably 5'10" and 202lbs (last time I checked he weighed that much.  After alot of effort to gain weight he put on 2lbs).  I also have a guy behind him at 39.8 with awful tech (he knows it).  Again I know these aren't bombs that should be posted on Mac Throws but god damn it I'm happy.

That was Tuesday, we have our 3rd meet this Saturday and I'm hoping for better now that they are getting comfortable.  But I'm hoping for more all-round as those two and a third guy have all thrown 14m in practice this year and have season PRs in the low 13 or mid-12s.

Why I'm writing this today rather than Tuesday night is I went to a dual meet to watch my high school team compete.  I don't have many highlights as they aren't doing well in general because I haven't been there in 3 weeks (maybe I should do a rant post explaining why...).  There was 2 PRs (that I witnessed, I had to mark for varsity boys so I missed JV and girls throwing), one was a guy who was throwing 45 at practice indoors finally got over 41 and threw 43'3".  The one that provoked this post was one of the guys popped a 157 out of no where.  He warmed up at 135-140, very sloppy too, most resulted in his flying out of the circle with no chance of saving them.

So when I went out to mark I stood at about 140-145 and his first throw went slightly pass me to 147, which was the school record for 10 minutes.  I'm usually a pretty good judge of distance but again I stood too close, figuring 150-155 was good and this one went over my head about 10ft to my right landing at 157'.  The last throw was a ~140 that he pulled early and went out of the sector, pretty sure if he held on it would have been over 160, it went out like a cannon.

I fully understand the length of this post means that it surely won't be read but I'm happy to announce that I think I qualify as a discus coach now.  I'm a new inductee, but I shall earn my keep.  Like I said the 2 guys at/and over 40m are freshmen and they have the option to do 4 years because our school is going from NJCAA to D3 their junior year.  Their season ends the first week of May.

The high school guys who threw 157 is a junior and his season ends in June so he has a ton of time.

It's going to be a good couple (possibly few) years for me.  Keep an eye open I shall be breaking through soon.

Until then, here's hoping for great results this weekend.