Hempfield grad Liz Tapper showing early signs of stardom as thrower at Michigan
Liz Tapper isn’t exactly where she thought she would be.
Competing as a Division I athlete? Probably. But that’s where her dreams and her reality diverge.
An elite-level gymnast in her youth, the Hempfield grad figured she would carry that endeavor as far as she could. But by the time she reached middle school, she felt like she needed a new direction. That’s when she took up track and field and began competing in the pole vault.
Pole vault is a natural fit for someone with a gymnastics background. The explosive power and body-position awareness gleaned from years of flipping, tumbling and balancing are tailor-made for the event.
“I was pretty good at pole vault,” said Tapper, who also was an all-section volleyball player. “That’s, honestly, what I was ready to go with and pursue and go to college for. But I needed an extra event, so I went to the throws and started working with coach (Dave) Murray.
“I picked it up pretty quick. … Coach Murray told me I had the potential to be really good if I stuck with it.”
Stick with it she did. Tapper won a pair of PIAA Class 3A titles in the shot put and another in the discus.
She added a national championship in the discus at the New Balance Nationals during the summer between her junior and senior years at Hempfield.
Now, she is a promising thrower at Michigan. The Wolverines women are the reigning Big Ten outdoor track and field champions.
Entering the week of April 8, the freshman ranked No. 15 in the nation with a shot put throw of 17.06 meters (55 feet, 113⁄4 inches). She ranked second on the team in discus (48.57 meters/159-4) and topped the team in the hammer throw (50.92/167-1).
During indoor season, her shot put effort of 15.84 meters was the seventh-best mark in program history.
As quickly as Tapper seems to have adapted to college competition, it doesn’t mean there haven’t been challenges. Allison Boevers, who coaches the Wolverines throwers, said there were some “pretty significant” changes made to Tapper’s techniques.
The good news, Boevers said, is Tapper has the patience and work ethic to perfect the things she is shown.
“Liz is extremely coachable,” Boevers said. “She’s detail-oriented, and she enjoys the process of figuring things out. She’s also extremely intelligent.”
Tapper, a biomolecular sciences major, admitted the transition was difficult. Beyond having to make technical changes, she had to get used to not being among the best — if not the best — whenever she came into an event.
The distances she was achieving in high school, she said, are “bottom of the barrel” at the Big Ten level. She said she had to reset her thought process and start almost from scratch.
“Patience with progress is such a big thing,” she said. “Not every day is going to be how you want it, and you have to learn over time that certain techniques and certain cues are going to work for you.
“I think whenever you just fully let yourself go and trust where you are, it kind of opens the door on more opportunities.”
An opportunity presented itself in the form of another new event when Boevers added the hammer throw to Tapper’s repertoire.
It was an event that was foreign to her, as the PIAA doesn’t include the hammer in its track and field menu, and she is competing with and against women who had done it at the high school or college level.
Boevers, however, didn’t throw Tapper into the event simply as a training exercise. Shot put might be Tapper’s specialty, but her coach said she believes there is a promising future in that event as well as discus.
“She’s going to be a pretty dominant triple-eventer by the time she graduates,” Boevers said. “Finding time to train three events just takes a lot of organization. She has gravitated more toward the shot … but I think she’s going to be pretty elite in all three.
“The shot is probably the most familiar, but as she continues on over the next couple of years, it will not be surprising that she’s going to be elite in every category.”
Tapper, too, has visions of being able to score in all three events in Big Ten competition. In the bigger picture, she, like every collegiate athlete, aspires to win a national championship. Despite shot put being her signature event for now, she is willing to leave the door open to the possibility that she could contend nationally in any of the three.
But Tapper isn’t in any rush. She understands she is still a teenager, and she has a long way to go and many lessons to learn.
“I do think it’s OK to realize that we all start somewhere,” she said. “I might not be the best now, but I could be one day. But I do think it’s important that that frame of mind switches to, ‘I can do this, and if I fix this, then I really can be a competitor here.’ ”
Boevers is hesitant to talk about her athletes’ ceilings. That, she said, is whatever they make it, and Tapper is no different.
The coach did allow that Tapper is “capable of really cool things in track and field,” and she is seeing indications of “an elite, world-class type of athlete at a young age.”
Tapper might not become the world-class gymnast — or pole vaulter — she once envisioned, but she hasn’t forgotten how to execute the skills.
A few weeks ago, Boevers had her throwers take a break from the usual training and took them to the gym to do some alternative workouts that would allow them to stretch and use their muscles in different ways. Tapper showed off some of those long-dormant gymnastics skills, doing back flips, front flips and even some giant swings on the bars.
“Just to think about where I started and where I ended … my life turned completely upside down,” Tapper said. “But I’m glad it did because I’m really happy about where I am now.”
Chuck Curti is a TribLive copy editor and reporter who covers district colleges. A lifelong resident of the Pittsburgh area, he came to the Trib in 2012 after spending nearly 15 years at the Beaver County Times, where he earned two national honors from the Associated Press Sports Editors. He can be reached at ccurti@triblive.com.
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