PSU’S TRACK & FIELD CHAMP JOE KOVACS COACHING AT OSU
Penn State’s Joe Kovacs, the world shot-put champ, forges a new life at (gasp!) Ohio State
Joe Kovacs returned from London in 2017 with the shot-put silver medal from the World Championships and a pressing need to rent a U-Haul. His life as a professional athlete remained in Los Angeles. His future waited in Columbus, Ohio.
“It was probably the biggest, most extreme decision I had made in my life,” said Kovacs, a Nazareth native and Bethlehem Catholic graduate. “I’m always an Excel spreadsheet decision-maker. But I just had this big, gut feeling it was the right thing to do.”
Two years after that decision, Kovacs is the defending world champion in the shot put, having won what the throwing community considers the sport’s defining competition. In October, Kovacs launched his last throw 22.91 meters (75.2 feet), tying for the third-longest in history, to win gold by one centimeter. He beat three other athletes who threw 22 meters, which never had happened in any competition.
Watching nervously was Ashley Kovacs, Joe’s wife of nearly 11 months at the time, who coached the U.S. men’s throwers at the world championships in Doha, Qatar. An assistant track coach at Ohio State, Ashley was the reason Joe rented the U-Haul and moved to Columbus.
They had gone from video-chat dating to engagement to their November 2018 marriage and then celebrated a gold medal that once had seemed so elusive. Last winter, Joe pondered retirement after feeling his throwing distance slipping away.
Ashley wouldn’t let it happen. Now she oversees his training, they work together at Ohio State (where Joe is a volunteer assistant coach), and their future is bright with promise.
There’s just one thing: On Saturday, Penn State visits Ohio State for the Big Ten’s biggest football game of the season. Kovacs graduated from Penn State, wanted to walk-on with the football team, worked at Beaver Stadium his senior year and drove Joe Paterno to the locker room after the coach’s final game in 2011. Kovacs’ bachelor party was a huge tailgate prior to the 2018 Penn State-Ohio State game.
Ashley was raised in North Canton in an Ohio State household and is in her fifth season as the Buckeyes’ throwing coach and a recruiting coordinator. She brings potential track athletes to every football game at Ohio Stadium.
That’s all fine, though. This week,
Joe gets to wear his Penn State gear on campus. And Saturday’s tailgate will be epic, just like that throw in Doha.
“It feels like everybody wants it to be this thing where we just sit there and fight about football all the time,” Ashley Kovacs said. “But honestly, it’s all good fun. Joe’s always a good time.”
On to Columbus
At 30, Joe Kovacs is a two-time world champion in the shot put and 2016 Olympic silver medalist. He has labored over a professional career that has taken him to Los Angeles to train full-time and to more than 30 countries to compete.
But along the way, Joe wondered whether he would be able to compete and have a rewarding personal life simultaneously. He even wondered that aloud with Ashley.
“And I was just like, physically that doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Maybe I was downplaying the emotional aspect of it. But he really believed that.”
Joe knew about Ashley long before they met. As a kid, he often visited his godfather, the Rev. Joe Gleixner, who was serving near Canton, Ohio. During one trip, when Joe went to practice the shot put, a coach told him about this local thrower he just had to meet.
Ashley Muffet was a three-time Ohio shot-put champ at Hoover High School and set a state record. She became a four-time all-American at the University of Kentucky, where she began crossing paths with Joe at invitationals.
They talked occasionally, got to know each other better at the Olympic Training Center in 2013 and, after the U.S. championships in 2017, began dating seriously. Following worlds that August, Joe couldn’t wait any longer.
“Anybody who knows my career would say, ‘Never leave California,’ so, I mean, that was hard,” Joe said. “But I knew Columbus was where I wanted to end up.”
Losing, and regaining, faith
Joe asked Ashley to marry him before she became his coach. In fact, they didn’t talk much track before getting married in November 2018.
But as Joe worked out in Columbus, Ashley began noticing tics with his technique and training. Ashley didn’t say anything (Joe still was working with Art Venegas, considered among the world’s top throwing coaches), but Joe knew she had questions.
“She’s watching my practices, and she has two Master’s degrees, and thinking, ‘This makes no sense,’” Joe said.
Soon, the logistics of long-distance training (video exchange, travel) became wearying, and Joe turned over his training program to Ashley, with Venegas’ blessing, he said. Ashley calls it a “collaboration,” one that helped Joe emerge from his low points of 2018.
For a variety of reasons, Joe was throwing 11 feet shorter than his best days. In one 2018 indoor competition, he threw 63 feet (less than 20 meters) and finished behind an athlete he had been coaching.
That stung. Joe wondered whether he’d ever throw 70 feet. And he knew Ashley would be at worlds as the men’s team coach.
“The worst thing in the world would have been me sitting on the couch at home while she’s in Doha coaching all my competitors,” he said.
Joe began looking at job sites. It was time for some tough love.
“He lost faith in himself a little bit,” Ashley said. “He kept saying, ‘I don’t have it,’ and I would make him defend that. Are you less strong than you were in 2015 [when he won the world title] or at the Olympics? Do you think you’re slower? No? Then what’s the problem? What’s keeping you from being as good as you’ve been? Why can’t you be better?”
A ‘legendary’ night in Doha
The Oct. 5 shot put competition at the 2019 IAAF World Championships still vibrates in the throwing community. Eight throwers topped 21 meters (a first) and four went over 22 meters (also a first).
New Zealand’s Tomas Walsh had thrown 22.90 when Joe Kovacs entered the circle for his final throw. Ashley’s head raced.
As a coach, she had other duties, like dealing with a protest involving U.S. thrower (and Penn State graduate) Darrell Hill. But as Joe’s wife, she felt a quiver.
“I knew going into the last round that something was going to happen with him,” she said. “It wasn’t going to be a normal throw. It was either going to be a big throw or a big miss. The whole time, I felt like I was in this bubble watching him from the outside.”
Joe surpassed his personal best by more than a foot, generating a guttural roar. Then he paced anxiously again as U.S. teammate Ryan Crouser and Walsh prepared for their final throws.
Crouser reached 22.90, also a personal-best. Walsh fell short of that. He and Crouser finished one centimeter behind Joe Kovacs. Ashley’s phone nearly burst.
“One centimeter; that’s crazy to me,” Ashley said. “I had coaching friends saying that this could never happen again in our lifetime. This was so legendary.”
Their lives have been happily chaotic since, with moments of calm mixed in between. But not long after worlds, Joe and Ashley shared a quiet moment about the future.
The next major event is June 19, 2020. At the U.S. Olympic Trials, Joe has to throw big again to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Games.
“You know what I think about Doha?” Joe told Ashley. “I think we’re going to need to forget about it pretty soon.”
But first, football
This weekend should be thrilling, as Joe is planning a blowout tailgate before the Penn State-Ohio State game. Ashley’s family, full of Ohio State fans, will be there. As will Joe’s mother, Joanna, his stepfather, Larry Royer, and Hill, his throwing teammate at Penn State.
Joe gets along fine in Columbus now. Sure, when he became a volunteer coach with Ohio State’s team, Joe made a little show of throwing his Buckeyes gear to the ground. And at the Big Ten championships, his Penn State friends harassed him about divided loyalties.
But to be sure, Joe carried his Penn State football fandom with him in that U-Haul to Columbus. More than a decade ago, he wanted to join the football team as a walk-on. The coaching staff was interested in him as a fullback. But, alas, the track staff wouldn’t allow it.
“I was definitely mad about that then,” Joe said, “but I’m pretty happy about it now.”