Austin McDougall, Hawke's Bay's new World junior athletics championships selection, in the discus circle with coach Mike Schofield in Hastings. Photo / Doug Laing.
Austin McDougall, Hawke's Bay's new World junior athletics championships selection, in the discus circle with coach Mike Schofield in Hastings. Photo / Doug Laing.
A national junior boxing champion from Hastings is off to the world junior athletics championships because he couldn’t find an American university pathway with the gloves.
Athletics New Zealand on Monday named Austin McDougall for the discus and shot put in a 12-strong squad for the championships in Eugene, Oregon,on August 5-9.
The squad is headlined by runner Sam Ruthe who, at 17, already has a string of world bests and other high-ranking efforts behind him.
By comparison, McDougall doesn’t yet have even a World Athletics profile tracking his development, which coach Mike Schofield says is because there hasn’t been a “progression” other than a dramatic emergence over the past four months.
Unable to gain a medal at the national schools championships in Hastings in the first week of December, McDougall then won the national under-20 discus title with a championships-qualifying throw of 57.81m on March 7, and a week later posted a shot-put qualifier of 18.78m at a “local” meeting in Hastings.
At the schools’ championships, he was sixth in the discus with a throw of 51.873m, well beaten by Westlake Boys’ High School athlete Adam Leece’s winning throw of 57.97m, and the 56.81m of Rotorua Boys’ High School runner-up Manaia Christiansen.
In the under-20 championship three months later, McDougall beat both by more than five metres.
At the schools’ championships, McDougall had also been just seventh in the shot put.
Austin McDougall, Hawke's Bay's new World junior athletics championships selection, has had a meteoric rise. Photo / Doug Laing
“It’s the most meteoric rise I can think of in world athletics,” said Hastings-based Schofield, who only four months ago added McDougall to his list of proteges, and now has an athlete ranked in the top 20 of those headed to Oregon.
Schofield has coached in New Zealand and abroad for more than a decade, and current proteges include Auckland-based 2024 Tokyo Olympics women’s shot put silver medalist Maddison-Lee Wesche.
But he also had a goal of getting to a “high-level” university in the US and, finding there was no channel through boxing, decided late last year to focus on athletics.
“It was basically a toss-up whether to stick with boxing or go with athletics,” he says.
He had shown some promise across the disciplines, in what he calls an “athletics family”, and it had been enough to have him thinking of a future in the decathlon.
At the 2021 North Island Colgate Games in Taranaki, his under-12 medley relay team won a silver medal, and he was third in the age group’s shot put and high jump.
Last year, he was Lindisfarne College’s senior athletics champion, including wins in the discus, shot put, high jump and 400m, and the school’s senior Sportsman of the Year, after also winning the boxing title.
Schofield says McDougall’s limb-length and size are in the right “bandwidth” to make him suitable for the throws, particularly the discus.
But when he came into the fold in November, the natural left-hander still had much to learn about the “rotational” movement involved.
McDougall, who finished high school at the end of last year and is now a teacher aide at Ebbett Park School in Hastings, says once he had won the national discus title, the goal turned to a shot put qualifier.
The opportunity arose just a week later, in the presence of Nick Palmer, the Hastings athlete who joined world-ranked New Zealanders Tom Walsh and Jacko Gill in the shot put at last year’s senior World championships in Tokyo.
“Having Nick there was big motivation,” he says, now facing with confidence a targeted 15-week programme, including training through Easter, and goals of hitting 60m in the discus and 19m in the shot put.
The chocolate eggs are not entirely off the menu: “I have to put on more weight.”
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter in Napier, with more than 50 years’ experience in provincial newsgathering, including general news and sports events and issues.
