Getting down to business
The sweatshirt comes off to reveal the tattoo of a cheetah on her left shoulder, and when Marissa Tschida reaches across to give it a pat it’s a sign that she’s ready for business. And as a javelin thrower, this is her business time of year.
College track and field compresses the meaningful part of its schedule into four fitful weeks – conference meets, followed by regional qualifying and then the NCAA championships. This week is Phase 2, Tschida and her Washington State teammates headed for Northridge, Calif., where a top five finish earns a trip to nationals.
The two-month preamble to this good stuff often seems pointless and certainly inscrutable to someone with just a casual interest: monstrous invitationals with endless sections, athletes in pursuit of arcane qualifying standards, no real difference between finishing in first place or 10th. It’s just one way the sport has managed to chase away its audience and undermine its relevance.
No wonder Tschida couldn’t wait for something more.
“It’s awesome to get to these meets and see such talented people and compete against them,” said the Cougar freshman. “Especially in the Pac-10 in the javelin, which is probably the best in the nation. You feed off what they do and put that into what you’re trying to do.”
Just one problem.
“I hate to lose,” she laughed. “I hate it. It frustrates me more than anything.”
Losing at what, exactly?
“Everything,” she insisted. “Team sports. Individual sports. Candy Land.”
Candy Land?
“I used to cheat at Candy Land when I was like 7,” Tschida confessed. “My mom said I would organize all my cards so I’d get all the magical ones, the double purples. She said I’d spend hours doing that. I was a cheater.”
Ah, but there’s no more fudging – sorry – to get to the next Candy Castle. Not only does Tschida have to contend with four Pac-10 rivals who have better marks this season, but also the conference champions from the WAC and Big West – all of them with throws beyond 162 feet. Such is the depth of the Molasses Swamp that Tschida has gotten herself into.
She was among the Cougars’ most decorated recruits of this class, a four-time state champion in Montana. Yes, it was at the Class B level – she attended Loyola Sacred Heart, a small Catholic school in Missoula – but there was nothing Class B about her resume. She holds the all-class record in a state that regularly produces outstanding javelin throwers, won the USATF junior championship last year and finished third at the Pan-Am Junior meet in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It took exactly one meet at WSU for her to break the freshman record, which she’s bumped up to 161-8.
This wasn’t an unnatural development – both parents, Brad and Leslee, threw the javelin in high school, and her high school coach was a former collegiate champion. Tschida herself started even before high school.
“It was my eighth-grade year, but it wasn’t really a javelin,” she said. “It looks like a big lawn dart with a plastic tip on the front and fins in the back. I guess they don’t want middle schoolers throwing sharp objects and I guess I can see that.”
Perhaps they decided that specifically with her in mind.
With two older brothers in an athletic family, Tschida felt free to exercise her wild side growing up.
“I wasn’t much into Barbies,” she admitted. “Or cooking. Instead of the Easy-Bake Oven, I’m sure I had one of those creepy crawly things where you made the dirty spiders nobody would eat out of Jell-O. That was me. I have one older sister, but she was always doing weird things I never wanted to be a part of. She used to sing and watch Disney movies all the time. My brothers would go, ‘Do you want to go ride down the hill on bikes as fast as we can?’ Yeah! That’s what I want to do with my afternoon.”
Now her wild side is there for all to see. Not simply because she can send a javelin cutting through the sky, but Tschida is a true devotee of the piercing arts. It started when she talked her parents into letting her get a stud in her tragus her freshman year of high school.
“Then I pushed them a little each time,” she said.
So then came a vertical industrial bar her sophomore year, then a conch piercing the next, a conch bar after that. Once she turned 18, she did her tongue, her lip and her cheek – though that one needs to be redone.
“I just like them,” Tschida said. “I was walking through Wal-Mart with my mom and she just stopped and turned to me and said, ‘Did you see all those people stare at you? Is that why you like it?’ No, that’s not it. It’s just what I want to do. I’m not out there to say, ‘Hey, look at my face.’ “
Then there’s Chester the cheetah, who is all of five months old but already needs a touch-up.
“He’s kind of flaking off,” she said. “He didn’t have a long time to heal. I didn’t keep him very still.”
And then there’s all that patting. After all, it’s the business time of year.