Editor’s Note: When the Gazette reached out to the DSU coaching staff to talk about Oliviyah Thornton we got this big response from Coach Glover, in the form of a great big sports feature he wrote himself about her. To us, that spoke of how much of an impact she’s making at DSU! Thanks Coach Glover! Go get ‘em Liv!
If there are other standout students that our readers would like to know more about, drop us a line with your ideas.
Report by Alex Glover,
Associate Head Men's & Women's Track and Field Coach in Throws / Combined Events for Dakota State University, Madison SD
I had actually reached out to Liv pretty late in the recruiting process. I was looking to have a large recruiting class for the fall of 2022, so I was going through the list of marks in the state of South Dakota and saw that she had thrown well in shot put as a junior at Garretson. Her and her dad, Omar, visited that February and I thought it went really well. She had expressed that she pretty much had her mind made up that she was just going to go to SDSU for school and not do any kind of sports in college before I had reached out to her. If I remember correctly, I offered her a scholarship within the next few days after her visit and she committed a couple weeks after that.
I always make a point to tell all of my recruits that heading into their senior seasons, if they need help with their technique that they can send me videos of them throwing and I will do my best to help them out before they get here to DSU. In early March, she started sending me videos of her throwing both shot put and discus and it was easy to tell that there was a lot of raw potential there. She had never done any kind of rotational shot put yet, which is typical of your average high school shot putter, and her discus technique was interesting, to say the least. It was easy to see that there was a lot of room for potential.
Her first year here at DSU was great. No different than almost every freshman, she was learning a lot of new techniques and was being introduced to hammer throw, as well, so it can be a lengthy process to becoming comfortable with everything. She was extremely inconsistent from meet to meet, which again, is typical for your average freshman, but you could see the speed and explosiveness and I knew that with the way she was progressing that she was eventually going to catch on start hitting some huge throws. She would also never say it because she was pretty quiet as a freshman, but you could tell that she possessed some really great leadership skills. She's much more of a lead by example type of person, but I spent a lot of her freshman year having to tell her to be done throwing for the day. As things started to click, she would throw a million times in a day if she could. As a coach, that is the type of athlete you want. The person that you have to reign back once in a while because they want to work so hard to get better.
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