Abigail Kaplan is about to throw in the final track and field meet of her college career. But the University of New Hampshire senior and Franklin High grad isn’t worried about going out with individual fireworks during this weekend’s America East Championships. Instead, she’s thinking about her teammates, because that’s what a two-year captain does.
“Honestly, being a great teammate, that’s my biggest expectation this weekend,” Kaplan said. “We have a lot of young people on our team this season, so I’m just trying to be a positive role model for them so they don’t get nervous, because we’re facing some people we haven’t seen before.”
The Wildcats were third at last year’s conference championships. Sophomore Elinor Purrier (1,500-meter and 3,000-meter steeplechase) and senior Amber Short (10k) are the lone returning champions for UNH.
Kaplan was 11th in the shot put, her primary focus, at the 2015 AE Championships and 14th in the hammer throw. She finished seventh in shot in the six-team pre-conference meet last Saturday (UNH took second as a team) and was 13th in the hammer.
“I just have to do what I’ve been doing in practice, not get nervous and trust what I’ve been working on,” Kaplan said.
As for the younger teammates she’s hoping to role model for, there are some familiar local names on that list, like Merrimack Valley’s Mary Mullen and Gilford’s Emily Wernig, both sophomores. Mullen was 15th in the hammer at last year’s AE Championships, but she just took sixth in the hammer in the pre-conference meet.
“Mary is great. She’s kind of like in the mom role where she takes care of everybody, which is nice to have when you have a big team,” Kaplan said. “She’s very hard working, she tries to push herself in ways that as a captain is great to see, and she’s really excelled this season.”
Wernig, a sophomore, was fifth in the discus at last year’s conference meet and she just broke the school record with a discus throw of 145-10 at a meet on April 23. She competed against Kaplan in high school and came away from those encounters rather intimidated.
“I guess in the competitions I had a very serious face, I came off kind of aggressively, and (Wernig) would always tell her dad I came off as a mean person, so she was kind of nervous coming in her freshman year,” Kaplan said. “But we got to know each other her first week and she was like, ‘You’re not anything like I thought.’ And we’ve become really good friends.”
Kaplan started throwing after her older brother Matt, a standout defensive tackle at UNH from 2012-15, brought her to Franklin High one day when he was practicing on his own.
“I probably brought her with me to fetch the shots, to be honest,” Matt said.
While she was fetching, Matt noticed his younger sister could throw the 12-pound shot (high school girls use an eight-pound shot, the boys use the 12-pounder), “what would have been the second- or third-best throw for the guys’ high school team.”
Once he saw that, big brother pestered little sister to drop softball and join the track team. She decided to make the jump her sophomore season, but only after some unique coaching from Matt.
“He thought I needed to throw higher, so he would stand in front of me. His idea was I wouldn’t hit him, so I would have to throw it higher,” Abigail said. “It was really more like a scare tactic. I never hit him, but I was really nervous.”
When she joined the high school team, her father, Jeff, took over the coaching duties.
“I liked having my dad as coach,” she said. “It was hard sometimes because he expected me to do better. So when I was upset he would would just say, ‘Well, you should just throw better.’ So it had its plusses and minuses.”
Abigail never considered throwing in college until after her senior year of high school (she was the D-III shot put champ and finished fifth at the Meet of Champions), which is when she realized, “I didn’t want it to end, I was too passionate about it.”
The UNH men’s track and field team will also be in Vermont at the AE Championships. Senior D’Mahl McFadden, a Merimack Valley graduate, will be looking to defend his title in the 110 hurdles. McFadden just finished first in the 110 hurdles at the pre-conference meet. He was also sixth in the 200 at the 2015 conference championships, helping UNH to a fourth-place team finish.
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at 369-3341 or tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20.)