Nubbe Upholding Throwers' Tradition of Excellence

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — At 6-foot-3, 255 pounds, Jeremiah Nubbe does not lack brawn. As an aerospace engineering major, he has plenty of brains, too, and that occasionally poses problems for Nubbe, according to his throws coach in the University of Virginia track & field program.

“He’s almost too intelligent,” said Brandon Amo, who previously coached at Harvard.

“I tell him a lot, ‘Hey, I want to zap your brain a little bit and make you a little dumber.’ But, yeah, coming from Harvard, you got to work with really intelligent athletes that also had other interests outside of their sport, and with athletes like that, you always felt like you were learning from them,” said Amo, who’s in his second year at UVA.

“They were always teaching you something new or teaching you something different, and he’s cut from the same cloth. I think the big thing with him is making him not think as much, making practice enjoyable, making it fun, making it not a math equation.”

Nubbe, who transferred to UVA last summer after two years at the University of Texas, is a 4.0 student. He acknowledges that his analytical nature “can be a blessing and a curse. As an athlete, one of the issues that held me back up until this point was overanalyzing and getting too focused on those details that can kind of overload the way in which you approach practice. to where you never really make proper changes because you’re so focused on so many of the smaller things that are important but should be left to the coach. Not to make it sound kind of dumb, but sometimes thinking less is actually much better.”

His results this winter speak to his improvement. In his debut as a Cavalier, Nubbe set UVA and ACC records in the weight throw, an indoor event. At the Virginia Tech Invitational in Blacksburg last month, Nubbe recorded a throw of 23.94 meters (78 feet, 6.50 inches), breaking the program record held by Jordan Young (22.92m/75-2.5). NC State’s Josh Davis had set the ACC mark in 2018 with a throw of 23.83/78-2.25.

“He’s been an incredible person to coach,” Amo said of Nubbe. “I think usually when you have talented athletes, the biggest issue you run into is they’re not coachable or they think they know it all or they’re stubborn. But I think with him, he came here extremely receptive to coaching, extremely receptive to wanting to get better, and extremely receptive to just trusting me as a coach and trusting the program at Virginia.

“I think that the hardest part as a coach is getting your athletes’ trust, and I think that obviously it takes time to get people’s trust and for them to buy in. But on his day one here he was like, ‘Hey, whatever you need me to do, I’m gonna do it and I’m gonna listen to whatever you have to say.’ ”

In Charlottesville, Nubbe lives with three other transfers—thrower Keyandre Davis (USC Upstate) and distance runners Tobias L’Esperance (Trinity) and Richard Moreno (Dartmouth)—“so it’s a good setup,” he said.

Nubbe is a long way from his hometown of Yelm, Wash., about 60 miles south of Seattle. A highly sought-after recruit, he seriously considered Stanford, Texas and Washington coming out of high school, and Virginia and Kentucky also interested him.

“At the time,” Nubbe recalled, “I was like, ‘The East Coast is pretty far away. I think I want to stay more somewhat closer.’ ” And so he chose Texas, which offered an prestigious engineering program as well as high-level track & field.

“It’s a great university, with a lot of benefits, and Austin’s a really great city,” Nubbe said. “But ultimately, I still had a lot of struggles athletically that kind of made it a little bit of a damper on my successes there, or lack thereof.”

As a sophomore, he won the Big 12 title in the weight throw and was a second-team All-American in that event. But Nubbe concluded that he wouldn’t reach his potential as a thrower at Texas, and so he entered the transfer portal.

He knew that Amo had worked at Harvard with Kenneth Ikeji and Stephanie Ratcliffe, the NCAA champions in the men’s and women’s hammer throw, respectively, in 2023. Once Nubbe started communicating with Amo, he became convinced that UVA would be the best place for him to continue his college career.

In Amo, Nubbe said, he saw “someone who’s completely devoted, lives and breathes the events, lives and breathes track and field, and is gonna give it everything, just as much as I’m gonna give it everything, which previously was not something I was getting.”

Nubbe also was aware of the UVA throws program’s storied history. In 2017, when Virginia placed third at the NCAA men’s outdoor championships in Eugene, Ore., throwers accounted for all of the team’s points. Filip Mihaljevic swept the shot put and discus titles, Young placed third in the discus, Hilmar Jonsson finished fourth in the hammer throw, and Pobo Efekoro was fourth in the shot put.

On the men’s side, current or former Cavaliers hold the ACC records in four of the five throwing events: Nubbe in the weight throw, Mihaljevic (2017) in the shot put, Claudio Romero (2022) in the discus, and Ethan Dabbs (2022) in the javelin.

“Since long before I arrived, Virginia has had an incredible tradition of success in the throwing events for our women and men,” said Vin Lananna, the Cavaliers’ head track & field coach. “Jeremiah Nubbe is one of our newest leaders in this area, who along with Coach Amo, is writing the next chapter in Virginia’s throwing history.”

Nubbe had never been to Charlottesville—or anywhere else in Virginia, for that matter—when he signed with the Cavaliers in July. He’d done enough research, though, to have confidence in his decision.

“So it wasn’t like I was making the decision blind,” he said, “but to some degree, the visit didn’t really matter to me. It was purely more about: Who am I gonna be able to train with? Who’s my coach, and is the degree good? Okay, good. Check the boxes and take the leap of faith.”

When Nubbe arrived at UVA, he “wasn’t doing as well as he thought he should have been doing,” Amo said. “He’s a talented athlete, but he definitely needs a lot of work technically. In the hammer throw, or just the throws in general, you have a lot of people who are strong, athletic, flexible, with good movement, but the technical aspect or the training aspect is kind of what intertwines everything together, and I think the big thing he was missing was really just the technical aspect of it and how to train the event properly and the whole total picture.”

Nubbe will throw this weekend at the Tiger Paw Invitational in Clemson, S.C. When the outdoor season begins, he’ll compete in the hammer throw and the discus.

“He’s young right now,” Amo said, “but I think long-term, he will have the ability to be a world-caliber hammer thrower. He definitely needs a lot of time to develop into that. Usually people don’t hit their peak in the hammer throw until about 32, 33, so he’s about 10, 11 years out from there.”

Jonsson holds the school record in the hammer throw—he threw 75.26m/246-11 in 2019—and breaking that is “a very realistic goal for Jeremiah,” Amo said.

Used in the weight throw is a 35-pound ball on a short wire, Amo said. “The hammer is a 16-pound ball, and it’s a longer wire. It’s a completely different weight, but you throw it the same way, or you want to throw it the same way. With the weight, you can get a little bit away with muscling it. The weight really favors big, strong guys and the hammer is more of a technical event. But with the weight, if you’re an elite-level hammer thrower and you throw it like a hammer, it should go pretty far, and that’s kind of what Jeremiah does.”

Amo said Nubbe uses “the weight as an accessory to train the hammer. He is very, very good at the weight, but our primary focus for him is to be a national-caliber hammer thrower and a national-caliber discus thrower. With the weight throw, everything we do with that is just icing on the cake.”

His mother was born in Canada, so Nubbe has dual citizenship. He competed at Canada’s Olympic Trials last year and plans to represent that country as a thrower.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Nubbe didn’t participate in sports until he reached middle school. He started playing basketball and tried several events in track & field, including the high jump and the 400 and the discus.

By the time he began high school, Nubbe had established himself as something of a phenom as a discus thrower, and he eventually gave up basketball after suffering several injuries in that sport.

“I just said, ‘I think I’d be really good at this. Let me just cut [hoops] off and focus on track,’ ” Nubbe recalled.

He excelled in the classroom as well. His parents are engineers, Nubbe said, and “I did lot of hands-on stuff in high school, not quote-unquote engineering, but around that kind of focus and construction-based stuff.”

Once he started college, Nubbe said, he chose aerospace engineering because of the growth “of the space industry and how things are going in that direction over the next 20, 30 years. It’s just something that’s a little more interesting to me than mechanical engineering.”

At UVA, he’s been conducting research with a materials science professor, Haydn Wadley. “Depending on how that goes, how interested I am, I might go into a material-specific job within the aerospace industry. Maybe not. Once I get finished with my athletics, then I’ll be able to play around and see what I really want to do within those fields.”

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