Mesa Community College’s throwing teams, both men and women, have proven to be tough competition for years.
During all those years, athletes have been under the training of track and field throwing coach Selmer “J.R.” Olson.
Olson has been at MCC for 33 years and for eight of those years, he was head coach of the track and field team. Olson says he cherishes each one of those years.
Coach Olson believes he is an effective coach and explains this is because, “I seem to be the best at making complicated things simple, and I help players to be fundamentally sound.”
Seeing that MCC has had such a hot-bid for throwers, Olson has had a lot of success working with his athletes.
Each year he only recruits three young men and the same amount of women to train. “If there’s not three good ones, then I won’t take the kids that can’t compete on this level just for the sake of taking players,” Olson said.
It takes a long time to develop a technique and the main elements he teaches his athletes are patience and determination.
Coach Olson said, “I recruit just a few good kids, so I can spend a lot of time with them. That is how you get National Championships.”
Olson focuses on local kids and has been able to take local talent and develop it.
This is the case of Ron Semkiw, who Olson categorized as “one of the most outstanding thrower the country produced.”
Semkiw set a Junior (under 20) World Record in 1974 in the shot-put event and still holds all of the National Junior College Athletic Association records.
During these years of his life Semkiw lived with Olson, which would very likely be against the NJCAA rules currently.
Olson is presently coaching two of the best throwers in the NJCAA, Shawn Best and Michelle Maete. They recently swept the indoor throws in the NJCAA indoor championships in Charleston, Ill., at Eastern Illinois University, March 4 and 5.
Their accomplishment has never been done before.
