Spark Spotlight
Ryan Whiting
ASU Track and Field
Major: Civil Engineering
Words: Joanie Segall
Photos: Steve Gladys, Spark Magazine
Sun Angel Stadium holds over 5,000 fans on the west side, but when ASU thrower Ryan Whiting looks at the massive seating structure he only sees the 45 rows he has to climb.
Sitting in the first row of the concrete stadium, Ryan describes his off-season practices with as much exhaustion as he would have after actually completing the workout. "We lift Monday through Friday for two-and-a-half hours a day – so about 10 to 15 hours a week of lifting. Then, every day we throw one or two events. I throw shot along with disc and hammer…they’re about an hour each." After catching his breath, he ominously looks up and adds his least favorite part of the routine, "Then we do a lot of running up and down this stadium."
Gentle Giant
You’d think anyone who can complete this kind of physical training would have an intense "throw-or-die" mentality, but not the low-key sophomore, whose favorite hobby is knitting. Ryan nonchalantly admits that he picks up knitting needles when he’s in front of the tube. "My best friend is an art major and he taught me. Last year, I taught my mom how to knit, which is kind of backwards… It’s weird having your mom come up to you and ask, ‘How do you knit?’ I like getting something done when I’m relaxing and watching TV, so knitting is kind of a mindless activity that your hands just know how to do."
Something else Ryan just knows how to do is shot put. Ryan won both the shot put and the discus in the 2005 Pan-American games and was selected as the 2005 Gatorade National Male Track and Field Athlete of the Year. When asked how he got into throwing, Ryan first had to go back to his childhood in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. "I was always pretty quiet, never really talked too much, wasn’t very social, but I always liked throwing things. I was always breaking stuff and throwing everything I could find." Unfortunately Ryan’s penchant for hurling objects sometimes landed his two brothers, Ross and Evan, in the emergency room. "I threw a rock at my brother’s head once… well, not at his head. I just threw a rock and he popped up.
He needed stitches." Luckily, his brother has since healed and harbors no ill feeling toward Ryan. Even though his throwing arm could cause a crisis, Ryan saw himself more as the middle child who helped create a tranquil atmosphere around the Whiting household. "We were pretty much best friends… my older and younger brother fought, but I was kind of the peace-keeper."
Building Bridges
After his amateur throwing days as a child, Ryan found success in track as well as football at Central Dauphin High School, but it was his talent for throwing that brought him to Sun Devil territory. Ryan, who had originally settled on Georgia Tech, used a recruiting trip to visit relatives in Tucson and found ASU’s atmosphere to be a major selling point. "The team just had really good chemistry with each other. Pretty much everybody gets along. It was the best team chemistry I’ve seen. The coaches are great; the sports staff is great." And while he was glad to get out of the snowy, rainy Pennsylvania weather, the warnings of how hot the desert gets didn’t sink in until about mid-June. "I didn’t expect 120 degrees to feel that badly. I think the summers here are like the winters in Pennsylvania: no one goes outside."
When Ryan isn’t at the track, he usually can be found studying for a degree in civil engineering, which he explains as "the math behind architecture… Civil engineering deals with building roads and bridges. It’s just different forces acting on static objects. It’s a lot of labs and a lot of out-of-class work. Some majors you don’t really need prerequisites to understand the next level, but with engineering you need to understand everything to go on and get any kind of decent grade." For someone with not a lot of out-of-class time, Ryan admires those who appear to have school come naturally to them. "Probably some of my teammates, like Josh Kinnaman and Andy and even our freshman Jeff, don’t know that, even though I’m good at this and I’m succeeding here, I look up to them in school just because they’re so smart. School is as easy for them as throwing is for me.
I look up to them for that."
Pain-free Mornings
With his unique hobby, his ambitious major and his killer throwing arm, Ryan Whiting is a well-rounded individual. An Olympic hopeful, he knows that it’s too much of a gamble to rely on perfect conditions before he goes to the trials. "I know people in high school always ask me if I’m going to the Olympics or not, but you really don’t know until that year. So I can’t really look much farther than this season. I just hope I stay healthy… at least to get a chance."
As of now, Ryan is reluctantly pushing himself up the Sun Angels bleachers hoping for his opportunity. And though he enjoyed it as a child as much as he does now, Ryan doesn’t see himself 50 years down the road heading down to the track to throw things. "It’s kind of hard on your body. I look forward to some time – not anytime soon – to be healthy maybe? Maybe not hurt when I wake up? You can ask anyone out here. Everyone hurts when they wake up – guaranteed."
Ryan Whiting feature article provided by Spark Magazine.
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