Scott Russell ate green beans and rice every day when he was at rock bottom in his athletic career.
A few years later, he was competing at the Beijing Olympics.
Russell is now in his first year at Eudora High School and brings a world full of experience after more than two decades pursuing a career as a javelin thrower.
He has traveled the globe and competed in some of the most prestigious track and field events, including the 2008 Olympics. His journey features the highest of highs and the lowest of lows for an athletic career.
Becoming an athlete
Russell was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, and was the third of four children. His father, Dan, introduced him to many sports at a young age. No matter what the sport was, Russell dominated.
“I had a pretty successful youth career in whatever I wanted to do,” Russell said. “I had good success in baseball, football, volleyball, basketball and was incredibly successful.”
Russell’s first introduction to the Olympics came when he was in fourth grade. His teacher, Sharron Fluke, had the class write letters to a Canadian bobsledder competing in the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. That was the spark that lit the flame of passion that Russell had for competing in the Olympics someday.
By the time he was a freshman at FJ. Brennan High School, Russell was a three-sport athlete in football, basketball, and track and field, the sport where Russell found the most passion.
Russell did not face much adversity in his sporting career prior to high school, but that changed by the time his first track and field season came around.
Russell did not make the varsity team his freshman year.
“I was a terrible javelin thrower my freshman year,” Russell said. “There were three other freshmen that were better than me.”
Not happy with the lack of success, Russell was ready to put the javelin throw behind him and focus on the shot put and discus throws instead.
“My coach talked me into coming back out my sophomore year,” he said.
It was in his sophomore year that things began to click for Russell and the javelin throw.
Russell said he won the regional championship as well as the 15 and under provincial championship.
He spent the following summer competing in track and field events and won his first Canadian National Junior Championship.
“As a sophomore, when you’re the top javelin thrower in the entire country for 19 and under at 16, I clearly had some talent for it,” Russell said.
For the next two seasons, Russell would claim many more accolades and set individual and school records.
According to the Windsor/Essex County Sports Hall of Fame page, Russell won back-to-back Royal Arcanum awards as the local prep scene’s top male athlete. He also won four consecutive Ontario Federation of School Athletic Association gold medals in the javelin. He was inducted into the hall of fame in 2015.
Russell was recruited by a few Division I schools for not only track and field, but basketball, too. He accepted a full-ride scholarship to be a thrower at the University of Kansas over Alabama and others.
Assistant throwing coach Lorri LaRowe, a Windsor native like Russell, recruited him from the start and made him confident in his choice to compete for the next few years at KU.
“She was actually a Canadian javelin thrower who had some success. It felt like home here because I had her here as my coach,” Russell said.
Between his first year with the team in fall 1997 to his last in spring 2002, Russell competed in all five throwing events: shot put, discus, javelin, hammer throw and weight toss.
He broke and still holds the school record for men’s outdoor javelin with a throw of 81.66 meters, or roughly 89 yards. In his senior year, he won two NCAA national championships for javelin and weight toss.
While at KU, Russell also won two more Canadian national championships in 2000 and 2001. He won nine total Canadian national championships from 2000 to 2011.
“It was cool to try and qualify for my first world championship, and KU was working with me to try and make that happen,” Russell said.
It was also in 2001 that Russell broke the Canadian record in javelin for the first time in his career and qualified for his first-ever world championship competition.
The struggle to turn professional
After graduation in 2002, however, Russell would learn that the grind of life as a professional athlete was just starting.
“How do I support myself as an athlete?” was the question that Russell wanted to answer right away.
Russell signed with a sports agent who helped get him into meets around the world, from Europe to South America. Financials proved to be an obstacle, even though Russell was among the top 30 javelin throwers in the world.
“I had minimal funding from Athletics Canada that would come in,” Russell said. “When it was converted to U.S. dollars, depending on the exchange rate, it was between $1,200 to $1,300 a month.”
Russell had to work part time at a physical therapy clinic as a rehab tech in 2003 to get by.
In 2005, Team Canada cut off funding for Russell to continue competing. He continued to train that year while only making $14,000 between jobs to survive.
Rock bottom for Russell is when he had to call family members for money so he could have food to eat.
“I basically ate green beans and rice every day because I had no money,” Russell said. “Having to ask my parents for money, which was so embarrassing that I couldn’t support myself in what I was doing.”
In 2005, KU professor James LaPoint asked Russell to speak to a sports psychology class where he told students about some of the struggles of becoming a professional athlete. Mentally worn, Russell broke down to tears in front of the class.
“It was legit rock bottom as an athlete,” Russell said. “I didn’t love the sport. I didn’t understand why I was still doing it. I wasn’t making money, I wasn’t making national teams. The grind became too much.”
Russell won another Canadian National Championship in 2005, but it still wasn’t enough to qualify him for the world championships. With no money and no love for the sport, Russell was ready to say goodbye to competing.
“I have no support outside of my family, I don’t love this, I don’t like the sport. Why am I doing this?” Russell asked himself.
In need of a spark to re-ignite the flame that Russell had back in the fourth grade, he got just that.
All eyes on the Olympics
As he was walking off the track after winning the national championship, some donors who had been following his career since 2001 gave him $2,500 to continue to chase his dream.
“They basically said to me, ‘You can’t quit,’” Russell said.
After discussing with his agent and coaches about potential meets later that evening, Russell was determined to make the most out of this generous opportunity.
“I flew back to Lawrence to pack up my apartment and put it in storage. Three days later, I flew up to Ottawa (Canada) and ended up breaking my own national javelin record by 12 feet,” Russell said.
Russell qualified for the world championship team and got his funding back from Team Canada.
“From that point on, I realized the sport itself has to be fun,” Russell said. “It gave me a different meaning for continuing my career beyond that point of enjoying what I got to do as opposed to it being about money and fame.”
With a re-energized passion for the sport, all eyes were ahead on the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Determined to make the most out of it, he pushed through the pain of a tear in his left patella tendon to compete in the Olympics.
“I went into Beijing basically falling apart and hoping to hold on,” Russell said.
Russell was no stranger to injuries during his collegiate and professional career. He separated his right shoulder during his freshman year at KU and battled many knee injuries, including a torn meniscus in his right knee in early 2008.
After an hour delay in the pouring rain on the morning of his qualifying group’s round, Russell won his qualifying group with an 80.42-meter throw on his first attempt. After the second qualifying group finished, Russell was heading to the finals as the sixth-best thrower in the group.
“At that point, I was like, ‘I just made my career. I made an Olympic final!’” Russell said. “Then you start thinking to yourself, ‘Oh my God, could I win an Olympic medal?’ You kind of go in with a different mindset.”
Russell ended up finishing No. 10 in the finals with his wife, Tiffany, and other family members in the stands.
“I broke down walking off the field just thinking about the amount of energy and time spent just to get there,” Russell said.
Russell was driven to make it back to the games in 2012 in London but was met with some obstacles along the way.
It was discovered in late 2008 that he had an irregular heartbeat. In 2009, Russell had to sit out the entire year to have three ablations on his heart.
Moving on to teaching and coaching
During that time in 2009, Russell began working as a physical education teacher at Basehor-Linwood Middle School. He would continue to train and work to compete at the 2012 games while teaching.
In 2011, Russell broke his national javelin record again with an 84.81-meter throw. He still holds the record to this day.
A year later, he came up 3 feet shy of qualifying for the Olympics. Russell said it was hard to sit at home and watch the Olympics after competing at the previous Olympic games.
The gold medal throw that year was shorter than Russell’s record-breaking throw he made a year earlier.
“Literally a year earlier I threw what would have won the Olympics,” he said. “It was incredibly difficult.”
Russell spent the rest of the summer in a depression that took him some time to get past. Once he came to terms, he was ready to move on with his career in education and coaching.
“It’s another story to share with my students and future students of, ‘What are your goals? Do you really want this? What is your passion? How are you going to get there?’” Russell said. “I’m pretty fortunate to have the ups and downs of a really successful track career. It provides more opportunities for me as a teacher and a coach to shed light from every angle.”
Russell’s Olympic coach, Larry Steinke, believes Russell’s injury history limited his career from reaching its full potential.
“Had he had a different path along the way, I truly think he could’ve been a world record holder in the javelin,” Steinke said.
After 2012, Russell picked up the track and field head coaching job at Basehor-Linwood High School on top of being the physical education teacher at the middle school.
“It was an opportunity for me to spread my passion of the sport,” Russell said.
For the next 10 years, Russell stayed as the track and field head coach. He also coached middle school boys’ and girls’ basketball.
This past year, Russell became the next strength and conditioning coach at Eudora High School.
“We are very fortunate to have him on our staff,” Athletic Director Cara Kimberlin said. “I was a little jealous of Basehor-Linwood that they had him for as long as they did.”
Since arriving at Eudora, Russell has started a powerlifting team with his students in weightlifting class and continues to inspire the next generation of athletes in any way he can.
“To me, it’s all about paying it forward to the kids at Eudora and the community of Eudora,” he said.
Reach reporter Dylan Funk at [email protected].
If you appreciate our sports coverage, please donate. Our newspaper depends on your donations to provide coverage of Eudora and continue providing local news.
To donate to support our community journalism, please go to this link: tinyurl.com/y4u7stxj
