CCS product hammers out place in track

There is something irresistible about Britney Henry’s odyssey, although you can imagine college bluenoses across the country doing a mass brow-furrow at this particular detail:

She is now at her third university in as many years.

Uh-oh. We all know what kind of red flag that has become. In today’s sports pages, that’s code for trouble – an athlete with too little invested in either his sport or his schoolwork or both, malcontent, misguided, even (yikes) uncoachable.

Well, sometimes – often as not – the code simply lies.

Britney Henry is none of those things. She is, in fact, the polar opposite of those things, a poster child for the pursuit of excellence – even if that excellence may seem a little arcane to the rest of us.

She is, by actual measurement, the country’s No. 4 female hammer thrower this year. A few more feet and a little luck this weekend at the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Carson, Calif., and she’ll be on our team to the world championships in Helsinki come August. This is so far removed from being a not-very-promising sprinter and hurdler on the Lewis and Clark High School team three years ago that Henry herself finds it frightening.

“I expected to throw far this year – I expect to every year,” she said. “But I didn’t know I’d be ranked so high. I don’t know if the distance scares me or the ranking, but I never pictured myself being 20 years old and being 20th in the world.

“But I know I’ve wanted to be good for a long time.”

More than a dozen athletes with Inland Northwest links will compete this weekend in Carson – but with the exception of pole vaulter Brad Walker, the University High School grad who came to prominence at the University of Washington, none has joined the upper echelon quite as quickly, or in such an unlikely fashion, as Henry.

In an event she could only dabble with in high school, Henry has added nearly 60 feet to her best throw in three years, reaching 223 feet, 8 inches during a meet at Stanford this spring. That leaves her about 11 feet behind national leader Erin Gilreath, and not quite five feet short of the qualifying standard for the world championships.

On this year’s world list, she’s 27th. All but two of those ahead of her are older.

Ranked by weight, she might be 227th.

For not only has Britney Henry become world class in record time, she’s done so despite being one of the smallest throwers of that caliber – 5-foot-7, just 153 pounds. Last year’s No. 1-ranked thrower, Cuba’s Yipsi Moreno, is just as compact, but the rest of Track and Field News’ top 10 ranged from Olympic champ Olga Kuzenkova (about 170 pounds) to Poland’s Kamila Skolimowska, who weighs nearly 250.

“I’m gifted with some speed and that’s what’s helped me throw this far,” Henry acknowledged. “Size really hasn’t been an issue. When I first got into college, I only weighed 135 pounds and I did have to put on some weight or the ball would spin me right out of the ring.”

Which is why her attraction to the event seemed so unlikely in the first place.

It happened at a track camp at Spokane Falls Community College. A middling hurdler, she was toying with the idea of adding some events and trying a heptathlon when she discovered the hammer and decided, “It looked hard.

“And I’m the kind of person who tries the hardest thing first,” she said.

Of course, the hammer isn’t a sanctioned high school event in Washington, so Henry continued to hurdle and sprint for LC, satisfying her hammer Jones by her lonesome at Hart Field in the evenings. Even when she set the state high school record (166-10), no one paid much attention, even college recruiters. She had more or less decided to attend the Falls, but her mother, Sharon Rossetti, balked.

“She said to hold out,” Henry recalled. “She just knew something bigger was going to come along.”

How do moms know these things?

Late in August 2002, Henry got a call from Ramona Pagel, the four-time Olympic shot putter coaching the throwers at Southeastern Louisiana, with the offer of a full ride. She jumped at it – only to discover upon enrollment that the Southland Conference had decided to drop the hammer from the league track meet. Nonetheless, Henry upped her best to 185 feet – and promptly transferred to LSU, to throw under Pagel’s husband, Kent. As a sophomore at LSU, she threw 207 feet, but “let my head get in the way” at the NCAA meet and failed to place.

Then Kent Pagel resigned, and Henry decided to cast her lot at the University of Oregon, where Olympic silver medalist U.S. hammer record holder Lance Deal coaches the throwers. She had to redshirt this season under the NCAA’s double-transfer rule, but she obviously hasn’t been sitting it out.

Which is not to say it’s all good. All this travel has taken its toll on her transcript.

“Yeah, I was a kinesiology major at LSU and they don’t have the same major here,” she said, “so now I’m a sociology major with a business minor.”

And at Southeastern Louisiana?

“It was criminal justice,” she laughed.

But it’s not as if she considers academics a joke – indeed, by the time she graduates from UO, she’ll have more credits than she can use.

“I lost 70 transferring from LSU,” she said. “But coming out of high school, this has been my whole goal – to be good at the hammer. Because if I was good at it, it meant I was going to be able to go to college.

“It’s the thing I love. People could say it’s crazy, three schools and all, but to have the best coaches isn’t crazy to me at all.”

In fact, the notion is irresistible.