This is the sixth installment in The Gazette’s summer “Where Are They Now?” series. Each week for the rest of this summer, The Gazette will catch up with a prominent former Emporia-area athlete.
Heather Leverington has always been able to adjust.
In her freshman season at Emporia State, the former track and field star changed her technique in the shot put from a glide to a spin. It wasn’t an easy transition and she fouled more times than she had a successful throw.
But Leverington was stubborn. She could not stand failure. After Leverington struggled at the MIAA meet her freshman year, ESU coach Dave Harris said she couldn’t stop crying.
ESU throws’ coach Rick Ginter remembers one night when she decided she wasn’t leaving practice until she got it right.
“She probably threw 80 to 90 times,” Ginter said. “... Everybody went home, and she just threw and threw and threw. And finally we worked it out and figured out what the problem was.
“A lot of times in the throws, someone will say, ‘well, we’ll come back tomorrow and it’ll figure itself out.’ Heather and I didn’t believe that. Something’s going wrong, we’re not leaving until we fix it. ... That’s when I knew she’s going to do what it takes, and she did.”
That was the beginning of Leverington beating the odds. She came to Emporia State as a lightly-recruited shot putter from Flint Hills, who didn’t even win a state title in high school. Four years later, she threw at the U.S. Olympic trials in 2000 and finished ninth.
Leverington left ESU in 2002 with five national championships (two outdoor, three indoor), a nine-time MIAA champion, seven-time All-American and with the second-best throw ever in Division II.
When she went to grad school at the University of South Dakota the next fall, Leverington continued to train, hoping to continue her career in track and field. But that year, she got lupus, broke her leg and had mono.
“I retired because my body just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said.
Instead of giving up track and field altogether, Leverington continued to put her passion to use and became a coach. She was a graduate assistant at South Dakota, and in 2004, ESU coach Dave Harris hired her to coach the throws at Emporia State.
Two years later, at 27, Leverington became a head coach, hired at Lock Haven in Pennsylvania as the track and field team’s co-head coach. She was voted the conference’s men’s coach of the year — along with her co-head coach — in her first year.
This past season under Leverington’s guidance, Lock Haven had nine All-Americans during indoor, the most in school history. During outdoor, both the men and women finished third at conference and had six NCAA Championship qualifiers.
But as it’s always been, Leverington’s accomplishments have not come without a challenge. About a year-and-a-half ago, she was diagnosed with Plymyositis, which is a disease that has affected her muscles, joints and lungs.
Even with the fatigue and frustration that came with not knowing what was wrong for a long time, Leverington never let it affect her coaching.
“It’s the desire, it’s the hard work, willing to put in the time,” Harris said. “This business is not easy and you’ve got to be at the right place at the right time and knock on enough doors in recruiting. I think Heather is a hard worker — first and foremost, she’s a hard worker — and she has the desire to be a good coach and to give to her athletes the best that she was given here.
“All the health problems she’s gone through... she lost energy and she couldn’t become an athlete. And I think now, I see her turning all that desire to be an athlete into a desire to coach athletes.”
Ginter always knew that Leverington would one day become a great coach. She always put the team before herself. She says her proudest achievement at ESU is winning the MIAA team outdoor title in 2002 — not her five individual national titles.
“There were a lot of people that went into winning that conference championship,” she said. “We came together and it was at Emporia State. Everybody went after it, and it’s great to win things as a team.”
Ginter said Leverington was like an assistant coach, and he even gave her the responsibility to coach the freshmen throwers during her senior season.
“She related well with her teammates,” Ginter said. “A lot of times I would tell Heather, I would say, ‘they’re just not getting it. Can you explain it to them in Heather terms?’ And she would explain it and they would figure out what I was talking about, just like that.
“She knew what I wanted. She knew what I was trying to do, what I was trying to say.”
After Leverington finished grad school, Harris offered her the job as the throws coach at Emporia State. In her two years at ESU, she coached Eric Hoffman, who set the ESU record for the men’s weight throw in 2005, and in 2006, Andy Volgelsberg set the school record in the javelin and won a national championship.
It didn’t take long for others to notice Leverington was just as gifted a coach as she was an athlete, and in the fall of 2006, Lock Haven coach Aaron Russell called and told Harris he wanted to make Leverington his co-head coach.
“We had some heart to heart talks in my office and I really wanted her to stay, but at the same time, I knew that I needed to push her out the door,” Harris said. “I think she wanted me to just say, ‘absolutely I want you to stay. I don’t want you to leave.’ I couldn’t do that.
“They were offering her more money and it was a chance to really move up. ... It was hard and it was emotional. It was again a very emotional time for both of us. It was in the best interest for her to go, and it was in the best interest for me to say for her to go, and that was hard.”
Harris said the ESU throwers have felt the impact of her departure for the last three years.
“We’ve been hurting in the throws,” he said. “We were hurting pretty bad this year.”
Harris hired Ginter after the season, and he hopes that bringing Leverington’s old coach back will get the Hornets back to where they once were.
While the Hornets have struggled without her, the move has been a great fit for Leverington, who had spent almost all her life in Kansas.
“It’s different. People are pretty much the same,” she said. “We’ve just got trees and mountains. They call them hills, but I would call them mountains.”
Leverington’s plymyositis is under control, and she goes to a clinic in Pittsburgh that specializes in treating the disease.
“It’s been kind of a blessing to be out here,” she said. “I get great health care, and I’ve been doing really well ever since we finally got a correct diagnosis.”