An Olympian at Tokyo and a three-time World Championships participant for Team USATF, hammer thrower Alex Young has come a long way from his days as a young athlete in Tennessee, rising to the top of the international scene at a time when American fortunes in his event have never been greater. Winner of three USATF indoor weight throw titles and an NCAA indoor crown for Southeastern Louisiana in 2016, Young has also made the most of his college degree, landing a position with NASA where he influences the next generation of innovators. Here, in his own words, is the story of his rise in the hammer world and where his professional career is headed. Q: Why did you choose Southeastern Louisiana as your university? AY: That was actually my second university. My first was Gardner-Webb, and I left Gardner-Webb because my throws coach at the time, Andy Fryman, wanted to pursue his own Olympic dream and moved to Myrtle Beach. When he did that, he didn't go into another college coaching job. I wanted to go somewhere I could have a coach with great hammer expertise, so I tested out the transfer process. Lucais MacKay was the throws coach at Southeastern Louisiana at the time, and since I had never been to Louisiana I took a visit. I loved my visit with Lucais and absolutely loved the head coach at the time, Sean Brady. Coach Brady was the reason I went there. He sat me down in his office and said, "I believe in you 110% and I think you'll do just fine." He offered a full ride and said, "I don't care if you get a single centimeter better, you're still going to make this team better." Once he said that, I knew that was the place I wanted to go. Q: How did it affect you when Lucais MacKay moved to another school and Amin Nikfar took over as your throws coach? AY: Lucais was my coach the first year I was there, in 2014-15. It was a good time all-around for me as an athlete because Lucais showed me a lot about the hammer. But he also had to move on and figure out Power 5 at Oklahoma State, which was great for him. Amin came in from the University of New Orleans and he built his career from there. We were all steadily bettering our levels of experience and getting better and growing together. Q: When did you start your hammer career? AY: I was from the Nashville area of Tennessee and all we had was the shot put and discus in high school. My high school coach, Mark Stevens, had a good friend in the next town over named Jim Brown who had a throws club. His son, Cameron Brown, ended up being a great thrower at the University of Tennessee. At the end of my junior year, I was able to briefly pick up the weight and had a pretty ugly makeshift technique. A lot of horsepower, not much technique. That's actually what got me recruited by Gardner-Webb. Andy Fryman saw me throw the weight at the East Tennessee indoor meet. I was able to throw the hammer a bit the summer before college, again with an ugly two turn technique, sometimes three. I threw a PR at the New Balance meet in Greensboro, something like 181, and I thought maybe the hammer should be what I do. Q: You're a talented all-around thrower. Which is your favorite event? AY: I love the hammer, right. That's why I still do it at age 29. Obviously, I want to continue to push the limit on how far I can take it and I feel like I am not done yet. If you take the hammer off the list, I would say my favorite event by far is the shot put. I always thought I was going to be a shot putter. The first time I was really exposed to track was the 2008 Olympics, and that year Reese Hoffa was the number one shot putter, I think. He was the first guy I had ever seen throw a shot and he was humongous. I'm pretty sure Christian Cantwell was on that team, too, and I was like, "These dudes are massive. I want to be a big guy. I want to throw these metal balls extremely far." As I got a little older and made my first Pan American U20 team, I met guys like Coy Blair and Josh Freeman, and those were real shot putters. That's when I knew I wasn't shot putter size. Q: What has been the key to your development into the top echelon of hammer throwers? AY: It's my belief in my God-give talents, first and foremost. But I also think that having a really strong support system would be number two. What I mean by that is obviously my family, my close friends, and my coaches. Andy Fryman, Sean Brady, Lucais MacKay, Amin Nikfar — everybody who played a part in getting me here. Everybody has a part to play. That's something I think we oftentimes overlook in this sport. It's very individual, but if you really look at the under roots of it all, there's a lot of roots supporting the tree. That's something I have been blessed to have. I have had people who genuinely care about my success and my development, not just as an athlete, but also as a person. That's taken me a long way in achieving my dream and my goals. Q: Why has the United States become so powerful in the hammer? AY: Everybody used to talk about the Europeans, the Soviets, all that. When we were younger it was Lance Deal, Kevin McMahon, James Parker, those were the Americans we looked up to. It was almost mystifying. We would wonder why we couldn't be as good as those overseas throwers. We had strong athletes, very athletic, why didn't they throw as far? I think it came down to knowing how to train for the event. Now, several years down the road, the knowledge base has expanded so much, just in a 10-year span. If you really think about it, it's just the spreading of knowledge. We have really knowledgeable coaches and knowledgeable and talented athletes now, and it's the perfect storm. That's also why the women's hammer throwers are doing so well. Their event didn't start until much later than ours, but since the knowledge base has increased and the coaches have gotten more educated, the athletes who are as talented and athletic as ever are now able to apply that to the event. Another big part of it, too, is we get a little bit more funding. A big thank you to Ken Flax, another former American hammer great, has worked with us through the USATF Foundation and he's made us more visible. He has been working with some awesome donors, and I appreciate very much what they have done. Operation Hammer Sweep has helped us get some more support. It all starts with lived experiences. Ken knew from his experience how hard it can be to be a hammer thrower since we are always the redheaded stepchild in some form or fashion in track and field. We scrape by to make the equivalent of a teacher's salary, for example, and it's tough. Ken realizes what it takes for America to actually be good at the hammer. He and his donors have become activists and forward-facing in raising support for the event and the athletes. Q: What will it take to get you out past 80 meters? AY: I'm getting older. I'm not old, right, but I'm getting older. For me to get better I have to stay healthy and continuously believe the possibility is there. When you're young you think you can do everything. You're green and you keep learning. Since I have been in this for more than 10 years now, I'm not green. I just have to be disciplined and keep working toward that dream of doing the impossible. The impossible is always possible, especially with God. So, to put it simply, stay healthy and keep believing. Whether it's this year in Paris or next year, that remains to be seen. I will be 33 when the Olympics come to Los Angeles. Realistically, I eventually want to start a family and do all those fun things, so 2028 will probably be my last rodeo. Q: How has having to work now for a living complicated your life as an athlete? AY: It's kind of tough. I have worked ever since I started, except for grad school, and in 2019 I started working in the IT department at Stanford. That was really fun, and I loved my boss and all the people I worked with. That was great, and they helped accommodate training. When I moved from Stanford to UNC (North Carolina) I was able to work as an academic tutor for student-athletes. When Covid hit I lost a bunch of those hours, so I was working at Amazon and at Harris Teeters, the local grocery store. That was interesting, to say the least. I made the Tokyo Olympic team and was able to get an application put in for the NASA New York Space Grant opportunity, which is where I work now. I honestly felt like this was my first truly professional position. All the other jobs were tied to a college or heavy labor, intensive tech work. So, work has always made training a little complicated! You only have so many hours in a day, and if you are good and disciplined, you're sleeping eight or nine of those 24 hours. That leaves very limited daylight. You're competing with athletes who don't have full-time jobs, especially the Europeans. They get most of their stuff covered, and that's obviously a training advantage. Instead of having to buckle down at your computer for five or six hours, whatever it might be even for a part-time worker, you can get a massage, go to the chiropractor, do aquatic workouts, whatever you need to do to get recovered for the next day. Obviously, it's a big advantage not to have to work. Q: You're working with NASA. What do you do there, and how did you land that position? AY: It was really the luck of the draw getting this position, and just knowing the right people. Me and Rudy (Winkler) have a good friend who is a hammer thrower and she reached out to him and asked if he knew anybody who was looking for work in that field (NASA). He said he did know someone, and he sent me the link and told me to apply. They had been looking for someone for months and either nobody was qualified, or they just weren't interested. I put in my application, they liked what they saw, and I got the job. My direct supervisor now was also a hammer thrower herself, so the small world of hammer throwing got me the job. Joking, obviously... it was my brains and wits. Big picture, my job entails trying to get the next generation of students interested in NASA and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) activities. Our program is based out of Washington, D.C., and we are in the office of STEM Engagement and Outreach. There are 52 programs in all the states, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, and I am in the New York branch. We get X amount of funding for a certain number of years, and we work with a whole lot of affiliate institutions to create informal education centers like science centers and museums. We help fund various projects at different levels of the pathway so hopefully we get a student who starts in kindergarten and then goes K-12 all the way up into workforce development. We support STEM outreach and STEM engagement at the lower levels all the way up to scholarships and fellowships at the high school and higher education levels, and then hopefully into internships to finish the pathway. We hope that leads to a job and a career where they are very successful, and it builds diversity for the next generation of students. Q: STEM is a field which has not been traditionally seen as a pathway for underrepresented populations. How do you encourage these students to follow that path? AY: NASA has been an institution of the government that really supports diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, all the way back to the Civil Rights era. NASA put centers in the South, recognizing there were a whole bunch of beautiful, brilliant people who came in all shades and sizes. They needed to figure out a way to innovate, to get where they wanted to go, which was the moon. They put these centers down in the South and basically forced integration whether people liked it or not. Look at how much the innovation and advancement improved, and how quickly it did so! NASA has always done that. I think having an organization like NASA that prides itself on doing that, and knowing we were getting a little stagnant in the science areas as a nation, it was important they readdress this after President Biden's executive order for this. Having a return to what NASA does, which includes inspiration, creativity, and innovation, that's really neat to see happening and being such a priority. For everything we propose, there has to be a component of outreach, specifically trying to target underrepresented communities. Innovation and advancement are always better when you have people from different trains of thought, different socioeconomic status, and different communities. My work is mostly remote and administrative, trying to partner with institutions and bring them into our consortium to broaden our reach. A lot of what I was doing was creating a diversity, equity, and inclusion advisory board for our consortium to oversee all our policies and make sure they are actually equitable and we're getting the biggest impact we can. We have an external evaluator to help us with that as well. If students have questions for me, I communicate with them and try and help make the biggest impact we can. We really take pride in making sure our solicitations look welcoming and don't include any exclusionary language. We want to make sure we disseminate the information to our affiliates that have really great track records of diversity and then we support these programs. For example, if we give you a little bit more funding from the pot, what else can you do with that? Can you expand and reach a broader range of people? Q: What has been the response during your time at NASA? AY: Just in the short time I have been working there we have added two central school districts in New York, Freeport and Half Hollow Hills, and I was able to bring in two more minority serving institutions, community colleges, and some more science centers and museums with already bustling underrepresented minority (URM) populations in the area. Behind the scenes I was creating a database of the URM STEM-focused student groups at universities, looking to disseminate our information and different solicitations for scholarships and internships out to those specific organizations. Better recruitment leads to better results. New York state has been great about promoting STEM, it hasn't really been an issue up there, but I feel for any of my colleagues in states elsewhere, where there has been anti-science activity. Q: Looking into the future, what aspirations do you have? AY: I toy with this question every couple months of what I want to do long term. I really like STEM outreach and STEM work. I am a product of such things, right? I was a Head Start kid. My grandmother worked on a college campus, so she made me go to Head Start and I was working on math in the summers. Obviously, I ended up being more involved in kinesiology, dealing with the human side and biology side of everything, but I like the idea of continuing STEM outreach. I have also thought about becoming an educator or doing more hands-on stuff like a technician or a machinist. I feel like I have a few more years to really figure that out, but I would love to continue working for NASA long-term. It's a great organization and I love what they do. Q: What is the number one issue athletes in our sport face? AY: That's a loaded question! I think equal opportunity in the sport. There's big money in the sport, but it's tied up in a few events. I think the athlete voice thing is also a concern. A lot of athletes are pretty much silenced by their sponsors because they can't address how much money they make. That hinders the sport a lot. I also think it's the culture of our sport that athletes don't have a lot of unity. Throwers are complaining about lack of opportunities, saying the sprinters and distance runners, for example, get way more opportunities than we do. But then it is very difficult when something arises and opportunities are taken away from one of those groups and the throwers are like, look at us. If we had stood up for each other from the start, we could have kept this from happening to all of our events. Having a sport that is so big and so vast with so many constituencies, it's really hard to have a system that is functional and sustainable. The ebb and flow of people with interest is very difficult to maintain over time. There's a big push to change the way the sport is, but part of the reason track and field is so attractive is that it hasn't really changed since the modern Olympics began. It still has the same focus in a new frame – who can run the fastest, the farthest, jump the highest, throw the farthest, all of that. We need to give the sport more exposure and let people know what it's like. Tennis doesn't change. People love tennis. Golf doesn't change. People love golf. What keeps our sport from growing? People just need to see more of our sport. For example, if I hadn't seen Reese Hoffa throwing in 2008 in a 30-second clip, I might not even be competing now. It would have been nice to see more of that competition and maybe that would have inspired a lot more people to throw the shot. You barely see field events on broadcasts anymore. Throws-only meets with a beer garden, barbecue, all that stuff, like the USATF Throws Festival in Tucson but much bigger in promotion and entertainment, that would be great. Get the word out and make people want to come see what it is all about. Make it fun. Make it a real festival. Q: You have been very public about your faith. How has that impacted your throwing and your work? AY: It's everything. I wouldn't be here otherwise if it wasn't for God. Faith is something that keeps me grounded. More importantly, it is something that has guided me through every step from middle school to high school. From when I wasn't an athlete at all to getting a scholarship. Basically, it makes what I thought was impossible, possible. Faith really motivates me and keeps me working to reach my goals. If you look beyond the athletic realm, it's really bringing people to Christ and hopefully they get to see the savior and understand that unconditional love can be achieved and has been. I like to say that after you get baptized and after you get saved, you have a new lens on life. You don't see everything as bleak as you would otherwise if you didn't believe in anything.