Coventry’s Edmondson on top of the worlds
team at the World Championships, which run S e p t . 2 7Oct. 7.
“S e e i n g the world is one thing, but being around the best in the world is something totally different,” Edmondson said. “How lucky am I?”
Edmondson, 55, is an assistant track coach for the throwers at Trinity College and a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, where she coordinates the graduate program and teaches courses in school health education.
She has been to the World Championships four times as an assistant coach but this is her first time as a head coach.
“I see that as an incredible opportunity to lead a team,” she said. “There are four assistants, event coaches in throws, sprints, jumps, distance. You’re really not coaching, technically. It’s more coordination, organization, problem solving. Overseeing and making sure that people are where they’re supposed to be. The assistant coaches are the direct contacts for the athletes.
“It’s different for track and field from say, basketball, where [UConn women’s basketball coach] Geno [Auriemma] is the head coach and they work as one unit. In track, all the athletes have their own personal coaches. They train at their own home sites. If their coach can’t make it, you become their eyes and their ears. Or they’re between coaches and then they’ll say to you, can you watch this or that? Our job is not to change their technique when they get to that point. We’re the liaison for them. The only thing the athletes need to worry about is competing. Our job is to take away the barriers.”
Edmondson, a 1987 Eastern Connecticut State University graduate who was an All-American in discus and the hammer throw, competed at the highest level of the hammer throw, even though there was no women’s hammer in the Olympics until 2000, three years after she retired. She was instrumental in getting the sport into the Games.
So she knows what the athletes are going through on a big stage. After serving as a coach for multiple world championships and the Olympics, she’s familiar with the logistics of managing a large team in competition in a different country.
“It ’s looking at the 30,000-foot picture and seeing the machine working,” she said. “USA Track & Field is a pretty well-oiled machine because they’ve done so many international competitions. And they’re very well organized.”
She will not be going to the Olympics in 2020. Her friend Sandy Fowler, the director of track and field at Coastal Carolina University, will be the throws coach for both the World Championships and the Olympics and Edmondson is thrilled for her. But she’s still in the pipeline for Olympic coaching jobs.
“I went last time,” she said. “We’ve got to spread the wealth a little bit. The worlds is the same as the Olympics, really. It’s just with a different name. it’s every two years vs. every four. This is a prime checkpoint for our athletes.”