Redshirt senior Anna Jelmini poses for a photograph after a practice in Tempe at Sun Angel Stadium on April 8. Jelmini took home an award for outstanding female NCAA student-athlete at the 2014 Pitchfork Awards. (Photo by Andrew Ybanez)ASU track & field redshirt senior Anna Jelmini, seven-time All-American and reigning discus throw NCAA national champion, added another piece of hardware to her mantel Thursday night.
Jelmini took home an award for outstanding female NCAA student athlete at the 2014 ASU Pitchfork Awards. The award was yet another accolade in Jelmini's underdog career.
Thursday night, Jelmini was competing against the best the ASU athletic department had to offer, including mid-distance junior Shelby Houlihan, who won the award last year. Jelmini also bested ASU softball star and senior right-hander Dallas Escobedo and ASU volleyball sophomore outside hitter Macey Gardner.
“It means a lot because there’s so many other good athletes here,” Jelmini said. “So just to be singled out not only by the athletic department but the student body is really nice.”
Jelmini knew before the event that she won the award after helping associate athletic director Bill Kennedy show some children around the ASU campus.
“He was like, ‘Oh you won. You should probably go,’ ” Jelmini said.
One thing Jelmini was not prepared for going into the awards ceremony, which took place at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Phoenix, was that she was expected to give a speech after receiving the award.
“I just winged it. Hopefully, I didn’t sound too dumb,” Jelmini said. “It was really blinding, it was like staring at the sun, looking into the crowd.”
Jelmini came to Tempe by way of Shafter High School in Shafter, Calif., which is just north of Bakersfield, Calif., where she played basketball and competed on the track and field team. She was the USA Track and Field Girls High School Athlete of the Year her graduating year of 2009.
She was also the Gatorade National and California Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year the same year. She holds several high school records in the discus and the shot put, and is the only woman in California to be state champion in both of those events in back-to-back years.
She also had a successful Junior Olympic career in high school, winning gold in the shot put and silver in the discus at the 2009 Pan American Junior Athletics Championships in Trinidad.
Jelmini has been at ASU for five years now and has become one of the most decorated athletes in the program’s history with seven All-American honors in her career.
While redshirting her freshman year, Jelmini still competed unattached to ASU and finished in the top 10 in both the USA Indoor and Outdoor Championships. Some of her marks that season would have been in the top five in the nation as well, collegiately.
Last outdoor season, Jelmini became the national champion in the discus with a throw of 57.95 meters in the finals. She holds the third-best mark in school history in both the shot put (17.27 meters) and the discus throw (60.61 meters).
Despite the success that Jelmini had early in her career at ASU and in high school, she says that she has never in her career been thought of as a favorite as an All-American, despite earning that honor each year she has been at ASU.
Jelmini attributes that success to being able to keep herself cool and collected on the biggest of stages, stages where other athletes tend to fold under the pressure.
“Coach (David) Dumble has talked to me about it before and he thinks that I’m just really good at staying focused and competing better than the other girls,” Jelmini said.
In fact, Jelmini will be the first to say that on paper some of the athletes she has competed against seem to have a better chance of winning the event, and yet she still has been able to succeed.
“In those situations, it’s usually going to be the people who have a good head on their shoulders, and have the mental game set,” Jelmini said. “Because there are definitely girls that have way farther (personal records) than me, and they don’t even make it to finals, and that’s just something that happens at NCAAs.”
Jelmini has been nursing an injury she sustained in the indoor season on her throwing hand and has so far only competed in one meet in the outdoor season. That came in the Arizona State Invitational, where she competed only in the discus throw and placed second to UA senior Julie Labonte.
Jelmini called that meet a “soft open” as she continues to recover from the hand injury and hopes that the Sun Angel Classic will be more of a showcase of what she hopes to accomplish this season.
“This weekend is going to be my real opener, so we’ll see how that goes,” Jelmini said.
Jelmini described her hand as still being “banged up” and as such she will still not be competing in the shot put, but she will be throwing the discus.
On Tuesday, Jelmini said that she was going to try throwing a shot put for the first time in nearly a month but still will be holding back on competing in that event until her hand is more fully healed.
“I haven’t thrown the shot put since the meet at NCAAs,” Jelmini said. “Discus isn’t affected.”
Jelmini will be double-dipping in meets this weekend, throwing the discus at the Mesa Classic at Mesa Community College on Friday before throwing at ASU’s marquee event, the Sun Angel Classic, on Saturday afternoon.
Recently, it has been the team’s sprinters, and specifically the relay teams, who have been getting a lot of attention for their success, and even coach Greg Kraft has said that they sometimes take Jelmini for granted.
However, it seems that Jelmini is still ready and hungry to compete in her last outdoor season of her collegiate career, one where she must defend her discus crown from last season.
The award she took home Thursday night was just another indication of the athletic prowess of Jelmini and maybe now in her final few months as a Sun Devil student athlete, she won’t be taken for granted anymore, and she can shed that underdog role she has thrived in so well.
Reach the reporter at wslane@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @bill_slane
