Kassanavoid making tracks in hammer throw
Hard work and perseverance have made her one of the world's elite competitors
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fedba5c60-abb7-416e-b872-f0e3b12999ce_8001x5334.jpeg)
Last June at the U.S. Olympic Trials, Janee’ Kassanavoid threw a 4 kilogram (8.8-pound) hammer more than 240 feet yet came just three inches short of making the U.S. Olympic team.
Today the 2018 graduate of Kansas State University will take another toss at qualifying for her first U.S. national team when she competes on the first day of the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field – where her hammer throw fell just short one year ago.
Kassanavoid had a best of 73.45 meters (240 feet 11 inches) in last year’s meet in which the top three finishers qualified for the U.S. team competing in the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, later in the summer. But that left her five centimeters – or approximately a quarter of a foot – short of the top throw of third-place Gwen Berry, whose 73.50 effort converted to a distance of 241-2.
“You want to do well because that’s what I trained for, and that’s what I’ve committed my time in my life to and sacrificed for,” Kassanavoid said. “But in the end, in that moment, I kind of patted myself on the back for understanding that… every four years is the Olympics and I may not have made the team, but that is not going to make my career. I did perform at a high level, but unfortunately you know the rules and the system says you can only take three to the Olympic Games.”
Now Kassanavoid, 27, competes for a national team spot for next month’s World Championships, beginning at 5 p.m. Pacific time, amid the best season of her career – as she has raised her personal best three times.
The scenario will differ from last summer because DeAnna Price, who set a U.S. record of 80.31 (263-6) in the Olympic Trials, has an automatic bye into the World Championships because she won the women’s hammer throw in the last edition of the meet in 2019.
That means Kassanavoid could conceivably place fourth in the meet, but still qualify for the World Championships – which will take place at Hayward Field from July 15-24 – if Price is one of the three women ahead of her.
Not that Kassanavoid is thinking along those lines.
“As long as I focus on what I can do, and on what I know I’m capable of doing, that’s all that matters,” she said. “My goal is to get first because I don’t want to lose.”
Her first career best of the season came on May 7 when she threw 76.82 (252-0) to finish second behind three-time Olympic and four-time World champion Anita Wlodarczyk of Poland in the Kip Keino Classic in Nairobi.
She topped that mark two more times on May 21 when she unleashed throws of 77.17 (253-2) and 78.00 (255-11) to win the USA Track & Field Throws Festival at the University of Arizona.
Her winning mark made her the sixth longest women’s hammer thrower in history and was two and a half meters better than her personal best at the start of the year.
“I consistently want to go 74/75 at these meets,” she said. “So I was not expecting a 76 internationally. And then a 77 and a 78, I didn’t see that coming.”
Part of Kassanavoid’s surprise stems from her habit of not thinking about numbers when it comes to motivating herself.
As she says, it’s “solely about me and the hammer in the ring. If I focus on that, the results will come.”
Kassanavoid’s thinking reflects that of her coach, Greg Watson, who has been coaching her since she transferred from Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, after a freshman year that saw her win the 2014 National Junior College Athletic Association title in the hammer during her first season throwing the implement.
“I tell everyone, ‘I don’t know how far you can throw,’” Watson said. “I don’t know if any of us coaches can recruit a girl, look at her and say, ‘Oh, she’s going to throw 80 meters one day.’ But I can say to them, ‘Let’s just train and I think you can be pretty good.’”
Kassanavoid is the youngest of four siblings who grew up in Lawson, Missouri, which is approximately 35 miles northeast of Kansas City.
All four of the Kassanavoid children excelled in sports and every one of them was offered some type of athletic scholarship to an NCAA Division I school.
Joseph, the oldest of the four Kassanavoid children and the lone boy, was a quarterback who received a scholarship to Kansas State, but he didn’t end up playing the position there after a coaching change and the arrival of Josh Freeman, who would later play in the NFL for five seasons.
While Joseph would later play for both the Wichita Wild and the Salina Liberty in the Champions Indoor Football League, he has been retired for several years.
Janee’ grew up playing a variety of sports and said she and her siblings all “loved, loved, loved” basketball.
She started competing in track and field in middle school and eventually the shot put and discus became her specialties.
She played basketball and volleyball in high school, but realized during her senior year that track and field was the sport that would give her the greatest chance at landing scholarship aid to help pay for college.
Her sister Jasmine set a Lawson High School record of 42-6½ in the girls’ shot put to finish second in the Class 2 final of the 2008 Missouri state track and field championships. But Janee’ said she had more modest bests of 39 feet in the shot put and 124 feet in the discus when she graduated in 2013.
She ended up attending Johnson County Community College because of its highly-regarded culinary arts program and still remembers the first day of fall track and field practice when she was introduced to the hammer throw.
“I was given a hammer and told to do turns with this,” she laughs. “I was kind of watching the other athletes out there and I was like, ‘What? How do you do this?’ I was going down a line and doing turns, like 20 at a time. And that first practice was the one, and only time, I got pretty dizzy and nauseous. After that I was a three turner in the hammer and a two turner in the weight throw. So I started off super basic, super weak, and not very strong. I was just a baby.”
Despite her inexperience, she won the NJCAA title that year and had a best of 53.37 (175-1).
However, she did not return to the school for a second year for a variety of reasons and ended up approaching Kansas State, where Watson was the throws coach.
“I knew she was a good athlete,” Watson said. “So I recruited her without ever seeing her throw the hammer. I saw her throw the weight, but I don’t recruit people as a weight thrower. She didn’t throw the weight very far, but I liked how she moved. After watching her, I just thought things could turn out well based on how she moved.”
After redshirting the outdoor track and field season in 2015, and undergoing surgery on her right knee that summer, Kassanavoid finished third in the 20-pound weight throw in the 2016 Big 12 Conference Indoor Championships. She then placed sixth in the hammer in the Big 12 outdoor meet before throwing a personal best of 61.46 (201-8) to place ninth in the NCAA meet.
After undergoing surgery on her left knee that summer, she won the weight throw in the 2017 Big 12 indoor meet and finished ninth in the NCAA meet. That was followed by a fourth-place finish in the hammer throw in the NCAA outdoor meet during a season in which she raised her best to 66.97 (219-8).
After a second – and thankfully last – surgery on her right knee that summer, she raised her best to 68.21 (223-9) during the 2018 outdoor season, although her 13th-place finish in the NCAA Championships was a disappointment.
While Kassanavoid would like to have had fewer surgeries during her time at Kansas State – which would have allowed for more uninterrupted training – being part of the track and field program opened her eyes to different cultures and also made her want to learn more about her own Comanche heritage on her dad’s side of the family.
“I was born and raised in a small town. There were very small-minded people there who didn’t get out and see the world and meet all the beautiful people and experience the beautiful different cultures. Being on the track team, there was a lot of diversity. There were people from Jamaica, Africa, and from all over the United States. It was just like, Wow. These people are beautiful and they are from so many different cultures and they are super proud of that.”
That kind of pride was missing from her own life, as she never felt as though she fit in living in a town that her mom Janet said was comprised mostly of white farmers, generations of whom have lived there and rarely moved away.
“The kids I grew up with looked at me and knew I was different,” Janee’ said. “They joked about my nationality and used stereotypes in references, but because we were friends, didn’t see it as hurtful and racist. I allowed a lot of things to be said to me because I gave them the benefit of the doubt, blamed the education system, and being products of their environment.”
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed3d2ae1-4477-4fc5-981e-572d2f45e09c_1440x1800.jpeg)
Ron Kassanavoid, who died of liver cancer when Janee’ was seven, met Janet when she was a student at Northeastern Oklahoma State University and he was a graduate assistant.
They dated for 10 years before getting married and deciding to raise a family. Although Ron had grown up on land that was owned by the Comanche Nation, his dad had died of alcoholism, and he and Janet decided to raise a family where they felt their children would have a better chance at succeeding in life.
“They wanted us to have a better upbringing,” Janee’ said. “Unfortunately, with that decision, we lost the family ties and traditions, and being able to learn from family and get to know a culture.”
That sense of loss has led Janee’ to reach out to Comanche tribal members, and she has been invited to attend the 29th Comanche Nation Fair in Lawton, Oklahoma, from Sept. 30-Oct. 2.
“It will be a chance for me to make connections with people and learn,” she said. “Because I want to learn the right facts about the Comanche Nation, and if I do speak on anything, I want to be correct of course.”
Janee’, whose Instagram handle is @naethrowsheavyrock, is excited to learn about her Native American roots at a time when she is not involved in a serious relationship, is focused on the hammer throw, and supports herself through a contract with Nike and part-time work.
Nonetheless, she will always miss her dad.
“I kind of feel like I got the short end of the stick,” she said as she wiped away tears. “He was so involved in coaching my brother and sisters, and I feel I could have been a better athlete in high school, and even college, if he had been alive.”
Watson still recalls the 2016 West Preliminary meet where Janee’ was on the verge of not qualifying for the NCAA Championships and just seemed out of sorts. He spoke to Janet about what he was observing and she informed him that the meet was being held on the date that Ron Kassanavoid had died many years earlier.
“I just told him to go talk to her,” Janet said. “Treat her like she’s your daughter.”
Watson doesn’t remember exactly what he said to Janee’, but she does. She even recalls that it was a gloomy day and the meet had been postponed a few times because of storms.
“He said in so many words, ‘Your dad is looking down on you and is so proud of you, and I am too. Go throw,’” she said. “In that moment, I felt the clouds clear and the sun come out. I threw a PR and that was my first ticket punched to the NCAAs.”
Janet said Watson’s actions that day further solidified her admiration for him.
“I love Greg to death,” she said. “Because he’s not just a coach to Janee’. He’s like a big brother, like a father figure.”
Janee’, whom Janet describes as a very strong and humble woman, freely admits that she would not still be throwing the hammer if Watson was not her coach.
He was the one who sat her down near the end of her senior season at Kansas State and explained to her the commitment it would take for her to compete at the next level.
“He just told me, ‘I’m not going to tell you to do it. You have to decide because it’s not for everybody,’” she said.
Watson then explained to Janee’ that committing herself to the hammer would change her life. She would have to figure out where she was going to train and how she was going to train. She would probably also have to have a job.
He ended his talk by saying there would be no definite end goal, like there had been in college with the NCAA Championships. She would just have to want to throw far and she would have to want to do it on her own without the benefit of training in a university setting with teammates.
Janee’ gave some deep thought to what Watson had said and eventually decided to continue throwing under his tutelage.
Shortly after that, he took an assistant coaching position at LSU.
Although coaching her from long distance wasn’t ideal, she added nearly five meters to her personal best during the 2019 season and placed fifth in the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships.
She eventually moved to Baton Rouge, so she could train in person with Watson at LSU, only to have the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020.
After spending much of that year training at home in Missouri, Kassanavoid was scheduled to throw in a meet in the Netherlands in September, but she never got on a plane due to various restrictions regarding international travel.
As a consolation prize, Watson instructed her to simulate a meet and take six throws. He does not remember what she threw, but does recall that almost all of her throws were further than the winning mark in the meet.
Watson returned to Kansas State last summer, and Kassanavoid is enjoying training once again at her alma mater where she earned bachelor’s degrees in Health and Nutrition in 2018 and in Dietetics in 2020.
“I’ve always dedicated the time and the energy and the hours to this,” she said about throwing the hammer. “But I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated my personal passion and success towards it until I’ve seen the results and knowing that I got a late start in this event and am super young in it.
“What I love and have a fire and passion towards is being an athlete and challenging myself. It’s like a personal intrinsic motivation because other than my coach and me, no one knows what I do or understands what I do…So I’m just super, super proud of myself and that is what keeps me going.”