Jean Starr never has been a stranger to moving heavy objects. Growing up on her family’s organic beef farm, she performed no shortage of physically demanding tasks: chopping and carrying wood, moving hay and, yes, shoveling mounds of manure.

Toiling on the family farm helped her develop the “country strength” that would serve her well as a track and field athlete. So well that she finished her career at Penn State with a Big Ten medal in the hammer throw.

After three years of seeing little progress in her event, the Kiski Area graduate took a quantum leap this past spring, adding more than 9 meters to her personal best and, in her first trip to the Big Ten outdoor championships, winding up on the podium.

“It was just one of those moments when I felt like all the hard work paid off,” Starr said.

Starr’s journey probably was longer than most. A soccer player in her youth, she said she took up track and field in junior high only as a way to fill in time between soccer seasons.

But there was that country strength. It made her a natural in the throwing events, and track and field became her focus.

She spent her high school years competing in the throws for the Cavaliers. But, of course, hammer throw is not part of the WPIAL track and field repertoire. That event she stumbled onto almost by chance.

During the summer between her junior and senior year of high school, Starr attended a track and field camp at Penn State, as she had done the year before. She had aspirations to go to PSU and study mechanical engineering anyway, so the trips allowed her to get some extra training in the throws as well as get a feel for the campus.

At one particular workout, then-Nittany Lions throwing coach Lucias MacKay, who was observing the campers, asked if any of the throwers wanted to try the hammer. Only Starr and her friend, fellow Kiski Area thrower Ethan Newell, ended up trying.

“Definitely wouldn’t say I took to it right away,” Starr said. “I remember (MacKay) told me, between myself and (Newell), I had the footwork down better, and (he) had the release down better. If we could merge the two of us together, we might actually have a hammer thrower.”

After the camp, Starr contacted MacKay to see if there would be an opportunity to walk on to the team as a thrower. She got the position, and, after spending the first couple of weeks training in shot put and hammer, she switched to the hammer full time.

Of course, spring 2020, when she would be competing in the event for the first time, was marred by the coronavirus pandemic. Athletes were sent home, and Starr was forced to try to refine her technique — in a brand new event — on her own.

The farm land came in handy during lockdown. Starr’s father poured a concrete slab in one of the pastures, one where there was enough space to throw the hammer, and she was able to train while isolated at home.

She shared videos with MacKay and also studied other hammer throwers’ techniques online.

“I wanted to avoid falling back to Square One,” she said.

Even when students came back to campus, they were limited to how much contact they could have with others, and when covid went through the track and field team, the athletes were forced back into isolation for several days. Starr continued to do whatever she could to keep in tune, including doing drills on the sidewalk outside her apartment.

She and teammate/roommate Mallory Kauffman also would go to nearby State College High School and do two-a-day workouts.

Despite all her efforts, Starr wasn’t seeing much improvement in her marks. She was stuck at around 49 meters.

At the same time, she felt like she was close to a breakthrough.

“I think I finally came to the point where I felt like I had all the puzzle pieces that I needed, and I just wasn’t exactly sure where they all went,” she said.

Enter new throws coach Nathan Ott.

He joined the Nittany Lions staff for this past season, Starr’s senior year, and his tutelage brought all those puzzle pieces together.

Starr said in their first meeting, Ott asked all sorts of questions about her throws, and as he was giving her clarity on the answers, something clicked.

“Hearing him explain it to me, it was like this big light bulb went off,” Starr said, “and I remember a couple of ‘A-ha’ moments where everything I thought I knew was completely wrong.

“I think sometimes just hearing someone say something a different way is kind of what makes things click.”

Under Ott’s watch, Starr progressed quickly, getting her distances into the mid-50s. Then, at Penn State’s Jim Thorpe Invitational, the last meet before the Big Ten championships, Starr won the hammer with a personal-best throw of 58.75 meters.

That launched her into the Big Ten meet, where, though she didn’t achieve her goal of hitting 60 meters, she wound up seventh. She also earned the conference’s sportsmanship award.

Starr had an opportunity to continue, with the NCAA granting an extra year of athletic eligibility because of the pandemic. But heading into the fall of her senior year, Starr already had decided to look for a job and retire from track and field. (She did land a job in her field locally and still will work in her family’s fields.)

She admitted she is a little bit disappointed about not coming back, especially given her recent progress, but she can take solace in how her career ended. And her satisfaction isn’t necessarily tied to her personal record or her Big Ten medal.

“For three years, all I wanted to do was just make a mark on the team,” she said. “I just wanted to be a contributor and be someone that was valuable on the roster. My biggest fear was graduating and just being another name on the list.”

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