anna jelmini| 08-09 dyestat girls athlete of the year
This continues the final part of DyeStat's year-end awards for 2008-09, the DyeStat Athletes and Team of the Year. Selections are made by DyeStat editors and are based a combination of multiple major victories/honors won and performances on all-time and yearly lists. Performances from outdoor track, indoor track, and cross-country are taken into account. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Anna Jelmini
By Dave Devine, DyeStat/ESPN RISE Senior Editor Photos by Robert Rosenberg, John Nepolitan, Mark Smith, Donna Dye, Kirby Lee and Joy Kamani
By now, the touchstones to Anna Jelmini’s stunning senior season are familiar to followers of high school track and field. There was the promising junior campaign in 2008, when her 183-11 discus mark left her #4 all-time and less than five feet shy of the national record. There was the difficult decision to walk away from basketball—a sport she dearly loved—in the winter of her senior year to focus exclusively on the throws. The stated goal of breaking, not only the high school discus mark, but the shot put record as well. Her single indoor appearance at the Simplot Games in Pocatello, Idaho, where she stormed to the top of the national shot ranks with a 51-05 which raised her PR by more than a foot, endured all winter as US#1, and made her =#9 all-time in the US. Her striking consistency, come spring, over 180 feet in the disc and 50 feet in the shot, rendering the astounding commonplace while relegating the rest of the country’s female prep throwers to a remote tangle for runner-up slots on the national lists.
In April, at the UCSD Triton Open against collegiate competition, there was her thundering 188-04 discus toss, tying Suzy Powell’s 1994 national mark. And on May 13th, competing in the Sequoia-Sierra Finals in California’s Central Section, came the day which cemented her status as not only the best American high school female thrower of 2009, but very likely of all time. There, the discus landed 190 feet, 3 inches from the toeboard, leaving Jelmini alone atop the all-time list in that event. The shot put measured out to a monster 54-04.75, advancing her to #2 all-time and a mere six inches behind Michelle Carter’s US record. No other girl’s thrower is even in the top 10 in both events all-time.
All of this has been well-documented and covered extensively here on DyeStat: Jelmini’s unbeaten year against high schoolers. Her double wins at the Arcadia Invitational, the California state meet, the USATF Junior Championships, and the sundry meets in between. The shot put gold and discus silver at the Pan American Juniors, and the 7th in the USATF Senior meet against pros and Olympians. The Gatorade Girls Track and Field National Athlete of the Year laurels at the end of the spring. Collectively, these accomplishments make Jelmini a unanimous choice as the DyeStat.com 2009 Girls Athlete of the Year. While the accumulation of records and medals is impressive—eye-popping, really—they are statistics, not stories. They are numbers on paper. Hash marks on a grassy field. There is a lot more to Anna Jelmini than a whirlwind wind-up and a whip-sharp release.
Earlier this week, Anna packed her belongings, said her goodbyes to Bakersfield, California, and set out for Tempe, Arizona, to begin her collegiate career at Arizona State University. A high school career for the ages has drawn definitively to a close. We may not see her like again for a long time.
Consider this her curtain call. A final chance to scratch beneath the surface of the numbers and get to know the person. Here is a collection of things—stories and quirks and admissions and anecdotes—you may not know about the best female high school thrower to ever step into the ring.
1. Key to the City – Every year, when the Gatorade National Athlete of the Year trophies are presented to honorees in various sports around the country, one of the highlights is a carefully-orchestrated pep rally at the winner’s high school at which the trophy is presented. The thought of your entire student body assembling on the gym bleachers for the sole purpose of celebrating your athletic accomplishments might seem overwhelming, but for Jelmini the Gatorade fete wasn’t even the first time such a gathering had been called. She had an unexpected dry run several weeks earlier in the days leading up to her sectional championships.
Jelmini, who didn’t have a 7th period class this past spring, was called to Athletic Director Doug Thompson’s office on the premise that he needed her to sign something for the NCAA Clearinghouse. Thompson informed her that the fax was delayed and asked if Jelmini would mind running to grab him a soda while they waited for the documents to arrive. While Jelmini was out of the building, an announcement was made over the school PA system asking students to report to the gym for a special assembly. When Thompson came up with a reason for Jelmini to walk with him over to the gymnasium after she’d returned, she stumbled into a raucous rally in her honor.
“The gym was full,” Jelmini says. “Some of the newspapers were there. I was really surprised because I didn’t know what was going on. They were all cheering for me when I walked in, it was really cool.”
The mayor of Shafter, Cathy Prout, was on hand to present Jelmini with a key to the city.
Jelmini says her friends always want to know what doors the key actually opens. “It’s not a real key,” she clarifies, “like you couldn’t open something with it. It is really heavy though.”
Only days before from the best shot put/discus double in high school girls history, Jelmini was floored at the attention and outpouring of support from her classmates and friends.
“I was shell-shocked,” she says. “I didn’t think anyone would actually do that. I was honored, also, that the school would be so nice to me.”
2. School FUN-draiser – Although it may have been somewhat surprising to find herself at the center of, not one, but two pep rallies in her honor this year, Jelmini was no stranger to the challenges of gathering rowdy students and elevating school spirit at Shafter High School. As the school’s Associated Student Body Commissioner of Girls Athletics, she was responsible for helping organize spirit events for the sports teams and served as a tireless fundraiser for the Generals’ athletic program, which is largely privately funded.
“We planned all the pep rallies,” she says, “especially Homecoming and our rally for the game against our biggest rival, Wasco.”
According to Jelmini, the rivalry between Shafter High and neighboring Wasco High, eight miles away, is the longest-running prep football rivalry in the state of California and among the oldest in the country. She and her fellow ASB planners burned serious time preparing for the annual showdown and raising money throughout the year for the various sports on the Shafter High roster. Her position, as with any appointment carrying some influence and a connection to the purse strings, allowed her to shine some light on a personal interest.
“It was nice to be able to get a little attention for track,” Jelmini acknowledges, noting that like many high schools, hers tends to be dominated by the Holy Trinity of football, basketball and baseball, despite the considerable success of the track and field program.
3. Red Carpet Treatment – One of the thrills associated with being selected as a Gatorade National Athlete of the Year in any sport is the opportunity to walk the red carpet at the ESPY Awards following an afternoon awards luncheon for the high schoolers. As Jelmini found out, however, being recognized as one of the top preps in the country doesn’t buy you much time on the crimson runway.
“We were the first group there,” she says, “and a lot of the famous people hadn’t arrived yet. We were trying to hang out so we could get photos and autographs with some of the stars, but [the officials] were kind of shoving us along, because we were the kids. It was like, ‘Move it along.’ We were trying to walk really slow, because the red carpet’s not as long as you would think.”
Jelmini, still glowing from an afternoon luncheon at which she’d had the chance to talk with US Beach Volleyball star Misty May-Treanor, followed the other Gatorade award recipients as they worked their way around the back and completed a “second lap” of the red carpet. Fellow track standout Curtis Beach proved particularly adept at infiltrating the inner circles of some of the sporting world’s biggest stars.
“Curtis could just get right in with celebrities,” Jelmini marvels. “You’d turn around and see Michael Phelps and his posse and his bodyguard, and then you’d turn back around and see Curtis face-to-face with him. It was like, ‘How did you get that close to him?’”
The red carpet wasn’t Jelmini’s only brush with the trappings of celebrity life. Trying to return to their hotel after the ESPY’s had concluded, the band of Gatorade high school stars were traveling in a pack from the auditorium when they were led through the wrong door and ended up wandering down “a long, narrow hallway with pipes in the ceiling,” past the back end of the kitchen, following Mike Tyson and his crew.
“We were all saying, ‘Are we going the right way?”
After loading onto an elevator, they were stunned to find themselves, when the doors opened again, at a private post-awards bash.
“We realized we’d just crashed the ESPY after party,” Jelmini says. “The baseball guy, Matt [Hobgood], was like, ‘We can either ditch our parents and friends, and stay here, or we can go back and be with them.’ And then someone else said, ‘We don’t have to stay a long time.”
The group eventually agreed to leave together, but true to form, Beach helped himself to plateful of gourmet food before heading out the door.
4. Mustang Anna – According to Jelmini’s coach, Shafter throws mentor Matt Godbehere, Anna sometimes speculates that she was born in the wrong decade. A child of the ‘90’s, Jelmini has a real affinity for the movies and pop culture of the 1980’s.
“She definitely likes The Breakfast Club and other ‘80’s movies like that,” Coach Godbehere says, “things that I actually grew up on.”
But if Jelmini’s cultural tastes run toward neon Ray-Bans and Izod’s with popped collars, her mode of transportation dates her even further in the past. Throughout high school, she revved through the streets of Bakersfield and wheeled into the parking lot at Shafter High in a red 1968 Ford Mustang.
“My friends all say, ‘That’s your signature car,’” Jelmini says. “It’s in pretty good shape. My dad’s put a lot of money into it.”
A bemused Godbehere might disagree slightly with the assessment of ‘pretty good shape.’
“She loves her car,” he says, “but she hates her car too, because it seems like every week there’s something the matter with it. One day she’ll show up driving the family Suburban, and it’s like, ‘Okay what happened now?’ And it’ll be that the brakes went out or the power steering went out or the air conditioning died. It’s on-going. She talks about taking it to the bluff of Bakersfield and letting it roll over the cliff.”
While the Mustang hasn’t made the trip out to the bluff yet, it also won’t be making the journey with Jelmini to her new home in Tempe, AZ. Although she is driving to her college destination this week, the car is staying home in her Bakersfield driveway.
“It can’t survive that heat,” Jelmini says, “It heats up in Bakersfield, and Tempe’s a lot hotter.”
5. A Coaching Continuum – While Shafter coach Matt Godbehere gets a lot of the credit for guiding Jelmini to greatness, it was actually Godbehere’s wife, Dawn, who first coached the eventual record-setter when Jelmini was just a promising middle-schooler. Before marrying Matt, Dawn Godbehere was Dawn Dumble, a standout California thrower in her own right who ranks on the all-time lists for both the shot put and the discus. Thus, as Jelmini has ascended up those same lists toward the very top, one name she had to scramble past was that of her own middle school coach.
According to Matt, his wife and Jelmini hooked up when Jelmini was in sixth grade, after Anna’s parents, Richard and Michele (below, with Anna) , realized their daughter had some promise in the throwing events.
“Dawn worked with her for that 3-year span,” Godbehere says, “and then Anna came out to Shafter after that.”
One of the first times Matt Godbehere realized he might have a truly special athlete on his hands was during Jelmini’s sophomore year, when she threw 155-08 in the Valley Championships at Madera High School.
“There have obviously been kids with way better sophomore seasons, as far as the numbers and stuff,” he says. “And at the time there were still a lot of things that weren’t very clean, technically. When she threw the 155-08, her stance and her power position were totally reversed, but she still just exploded from this totally crazy position. I knew there was still so much more there. I could just see that athleticism.”
In addition to the raw ability, Godbehere notes that Jelmini’s commitments shifted as her athletic passion slowly turned toward track.
“There had to be a buy-in to track. When she came to Shafter, as much as she’d had success in age-group track, she was a basketball girl,” he says. But an early taste of success as a ninth grader left Jelmini wanting to give more to the throws. “Her freshman year at Arcadia she won the daytime discus event and qualified to compete in the Saturday Invite section. It was really exciting for her; she was really proud of that, and it really kind of hooked her.” A subsequent summer stint at a throws camp in Washington state only solidified her growing commitment to the sport. “She went to the Ironwood Camp in Washington,” Godbehere says, “and she’s been on fire ever since.”
Before Jelmini left for Poland to compete in the World Junior Championships the summer after her junior year, she spoke with Godbehere about walking away from basketball to focus on the throws.
“She told me before Worlds that she wanted to break Suzy Powell’s record,” he says. “She wanted to train for a full season and see what she was capable of doing. She also knew that her ticket was track and field, and that she wasn’t going to play basketball at the next level.”
The remarkable thing, given the wealth of collegiate possibilities available to the nation’s best female thrower, is that “the next level” will see her staying within the same family of coaches.
Jelmini’s coach at Arizona State University will be Dawn’s younger brother, David Dumble.
Despite the family connection, Godbehere is clear that the decision was solely Jelmini’s to make.
“We put together a list of coaches and programs that we felt were good,” he says, “and we did the best we could to inform [the Jelmini’s] and have them ask good questions. We were happy to see them choose Dave, but we also very much tried to stay out of that. We wanted that to be Anna’s decision and make the choices for herself.”
Now that the decision is made however, and Jelmini is getting settled into her new home in Tempe, Godbehere is optimistic about the prospects for his talented charge to improve under his brother-in-law’s tutelage.
“I think Dave’s going to be awesome for Anna. As well as she’s done with me, Dave’s going to take her to a whole different level. Not just the technical stuff, but how Dave is as a coach. He’s very positive, very motivating for his athletes, and that’s going to be a good fit for Anna.”
6. Spider-sense is tingling – While Jelmini might appear intrepid in the throwing ring, ready to take on the best her competitors can manage, she harbors a deep fear of something far less imposing in stature than an Olympic-caliber discus thrower.
She can’t stand spiders.
“I don’t like insects,” she says, “but I especially hate spiders. I always have to have my dad come and kill them. They just freak me out, I can’t deal with them.”
Admitting her mom thinks she’s being overly dramatic every time she retells this story, Jelmini plows ahead with an experience she had this past autumn, when an eight-legged tormentor landed on her during class.
“I was in English class, and I felt something land on my neck,” she says. “I brushed it aside, thinking it was a piece of my hair, but it was a Black Widow. It was the size of a half dollar, and it was on my neck. If it had bitten me in the carotid artery,” Jelmini continues, beginning to exude the drama that amuses her mom, “I could have died. It would have gone right to my heart.”
Spotting the flicked spider on the floor, she stomped on it, but only connected with a glancing blow. “It was still twitching, so the boy sitting next to me killed it. My teacher was like, ‘What just happened?!”
7. Girl’s Stuff – When you’re a well-known female athlete who spends most of your time in the limelight wearing athletic gear and hurling heavy objects, it can be hard to cut through the “jockness” and give off any semblance of femininity to the fans following your exploits. Jelmini, by her own admission a tomboy while growing up, keeps in touch with her inner girliness through the color on her toes.
“It’s true,” she says, “I used to be kind of tomboyish when I was little. Not so much anymore, but I’m not super-super girly either. I like having nail polish on my toes, especially when I’m wearing flip-flops, because I think it looks really weird without. So I usually have my toes done. I’ll go with my friends to get pedicures.”
And the red dress she was sporting at the Gatorade Awards luncheon inside Los Angeles’ Millennium Biltmore Hotel? That was her prom dress from this year’s senior formal. The gown she donned later in the evening was picked up at the Beverly Center in Beverly Hills.
“There’s a better selection in Beverly Hills than in Bakersfield,” she says.
Matt and Dawn Godbehere agreed it was both refreshing and rewarding to see Jelmini all dressed up for the gala events.
“She’s always in shorts and a t-shirt,” Godbehere says, “and sweaty and chalk all over her…so yeah, both Dawn and I thought she looked beautiful. And she had a great time, which was awesome to see.”
8. Make mine a veggie – When you’re a high performance athlete in a strength-based sport, things like nutrition and balanced diet are essential for maintaining peak fitness and recovering from the physically daunting workouts. For Jelmini, the mix becomes even more tenuous, because she’s a long-time vegetarian.
“I have to eat so many protein supplements,” she says, “because I don’t eat meat. It’s not like I’m against the killing of animals, I just don’t like the texture and the appearance of meat. The way it looks, the veins.”
It’s been that way since before Jelmini was in high school, and the challenges of getting sufficient protein to rebuild the muscle broken down in tough weightlifting and throwing sessions is particularly pronounced.
“My mom is always saying, ‘Anna, what are we going to feed you?’” Jelmini says with a laugh, before launching into a list of protein bars, supplements and the other alternative sources of protein that bolster her diet.
Godbehere has a favorite story from Anna’s freshman year about his own introduction to Jelmini’s vegetarianism.
“It was after the Arcadia meet, and we went out to this steakhouse with her family. Her younger sister Paige, who has a really slight build—she’s just a tiny little thing—is there with us. Dinner comes out, and Anna’s got like a bowl of soup, a bowl of vegetable soup, and here’s Paige, this little tiny girl, with this plate of ribs that was bigger than her head. I’m looking at the two of them, thinking, ‘What is wrong with this picture?’ It’s been a joke with us ever since.”
Like everything else between the coach and his pupil, they’ve worked out a routine that has produced record-breaking results.
“Sure, it would be nice if she could add lean meats to her diet,” he says, “but I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen. When you talk about a strength athlete…it’s kind of different, but she still gets what she needs.”
9. Trouble with tennis – You have to wonder, given Jelmini’s deft handling of the throwing implements, her 18.9 points per game as a junior center on her high school basketball team, her recognition as the Gatorade National Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year, if there’s ever been a time when the talented Cali star felt completely un-athletic.
Turns out there is—she’s terrible at tennis.
One of the best preps ever at heaving a metal ball, she’s remarkably inept at hitting a smaller one with any sort of accuracy.
“I have a friend who’s competed in international tennis competitions,” she says. “One time she asked me if I wanted to go play tennis, and I said sure, thinking, ‘How hard could it be?’ I sucked so bad. I can’t play tennis at all. I’m not coordinated swinging a racket. Somehow I kept hitting the ball over these 60 foot fences around the court.”
If she’s confounded by the mechanics of the backswing and the forehand, Jelmini is also “gun shy” about the sort of throwing her sister Paige is engaged in performing. Paige, one year younger than Anna and a rising senior at a different high school, is a member of the school’s celebrated color guard.
“It’s the thing where you throw rifles and sabers in the air,” Jelmini clarifies. “I don’t know how she can do it—it looks so hard. I don’t understand how she doesn’t hurt her hands…she’s always showing me the bruises she has on her hands, like, ‘No big deal.’”
Shot put? Yes.
Discus? Absolutely.
Sabers and rifles? Not so much.
10. Christmas in July – For Jelmini, as well as other preps who’ve had the privilege of qualifying to compete for US national teams, one of the initial excitements of the experience is the day a box arrives from USA Track and Field containing the national team uniform and accessories.
“When the box comes I like to call it my Christmas box,” Jelmini says, “because there’s so much awesome stuff in there.”
When she was a member of the US team that traveled to the IAAF World Junior Championships in Poland last summer, Jelmini and her compatriots received the same kits worn by the 2004 US Olympic squad. The uniforms were somewhat outdated and predominantly white, which left them easily dirtied after one or two trips to the track. For the Pan American Championships earlier this month, where Jelmini was a contestant in both the shot put and the discus, the US team received identical gear to that provided to the 2008 US Olympic squad—navy-blue singlets, tights, warm-ups and accessories, all featuring the latest in Nike performance technology.
Jelmini was thrilled.
“I love that stuff,” she says with the enthusiasm of a sportswear fashionista. “Last year the stuff that we had was from ’04, so I was really excited when I got this year’s stuff.”
As a thrower, she didn’t receive the light blue, aerodynamic arm- and leg sleeves which were primarily provided to sprinters, but she was surprised to find some items in her box which were significantly shorter than the typically more modest throwers garments.
“I wear the half-tight spandex, or the Capri tights,” Jelmini says, “but I got some sprinter’s spandex, and I was like, ‘Um, no. I’m not wearing that.’”
“She definitely likes The Breakfast Club and other ‘80’s movies like that,” Coach Godbehere says, “things that I actually grew up on.”
“There have obviously been kids with way better sophomore seasons, as far as the numbers and stuff,” he says. “And at the time there were still a lot of things that weren’t very clean, technically. When she threw the 155-08, her stance and her power position were totally reversed, but she still just exploded from this totally crazy position. I knew there was still so much more there. I could just see that athleticism.”
She can’t stand spiders.
