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Stamford Advocate
 Eric Pellini a 2006 graduate of Stamford High School
STAMFORD -- At Stamford High School, Eric Pellini relied on brute strength to hurl a javelin almost 150 feet. His form was lacking, flexibility was an after-thought.
A few years later, though, form is everything for the junior javelin thrower at Temple University. The 21-year-old can now bend backward in a bridge that looks like a painful reverse crab-walk. He can also throw a javelin close to 180 feet. "It's one-on-one with myself," Pellini said of the somewhat obscure sport, while training recently near the Stamford High softball field. "I can put aside whether I win or lose." He took breaks between short tosses with a javelin and worked on his core with a medicine ball, throwing it several yards into the sky and letting it thud onto the field. Despite sitting out the past track-and-field season, Pellini is muscular and stocky. He has a close-shaven head and stands near 5-foot-7. "You're torquing your body and twisting it in way that it normally doesn't," he said, explaining how to cast the 8-foot-long spear across a field and what he didn't grasp until throwing at the collegiate level. In 2006, Pellini graduated from Stamford High and went on to Temple University in Philadelphia. He walked onto the Temple Owls track-and-field team as a freshman and was one of two javelin throwers, a ratio that improved his chances of finding a spot on the roster. His personal best of 177.9 feet came during the 2007 Atlantic 10 conference championships at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He finished fourth in the Division-I tournament and surprised his teammates and coaches with the achievement. "That's a huge jump," said Brian Hartley, Pellini's throwing coach at Temple during his freshman year. "He went from barely being able to walk-on to finishing fourth in the conference." |
The way he did it also surprised them. Pellini recalled getting psyched up by Hartley on the sidelines. Up on the runway, he began screaming, then let loose the best throw of his life. "It was a full-out scream, a warrior's scream," Hartley recalled. "It was crazy, because he'd never done that before. It was out there. It was like he was going hunting for his life with that spear." Pellini competed in the Nutmeg State Games in Danbury over the weekend, throwing in the 170s. He took a year off this past season to focus on academics -- he's a broadcast journalism major and blogs about Temple sports for the Philadelphia Inquirer -- and used the Nutmeg tournament to gauge how much work he needs to accomplish before rejoining the team next season. Andrew Fries, 23, was Pellini's teammate and graduated from Temple in 2008. He was the only other javelin thrower on the team and helped mentor Pellini, who at first lacked speed on his approach and treated the javelin too much like a football or baseball. "You can't just muscle it and be world-class at it," said Fries, who once threw 199 feet and was on scholarship his last two years at Temple. "It takes more education and discipline." What Pellini lacked in experience he made up for in an eagerness to learn. Fries said his former teammate would look up videos of world champion throwers to see how the best do it. If his work ethic had a flaw, Pellini spent too much time training and not enough time resting, Fries said. While Pellini debates whether to dive back into another demanding season at Temple, the real world looms large. The journalism major first wanted to cover sports for a living, but he now wants to take on weightier subjects. The history of the sport isn't lost on Pellini. Men have thrown javelins in some form or another for thousands of years, and he is continuing the tradition. "It gives it a primal nature," Pellini said. "It's something men have done for such a long time." Staff Writer Jeff Morganteen http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/After-high-school-javelin-thrower-worked-on-form-5835.php September 1st, 2009 |
