Giving It Her Best Shot : Kawar Makes Mark in Meets--Not Practice

Listen to the weight-event athletes at track and field meets and the following frequently will occur.

One competitor will ask another, “What is your personal best?”

The answer comes in two parts: a personal best that was set in competition, and another--exceeding the aforementioned--set in practice.

Nada Kawar of Crescenta Valley High never has to give two answers.

“Her best puts are always in meets,” Crescenta Valley assistant Jim Beckenhauer said. “She’s not like a lot of throwers who have better marks in practice than in meets. She’s a really good competitor.”

Kawar, a 6-foot-1 junior born in Jordan, will enter today’s state high school track and field championships at Cerritos College as the No. 2-ranked shotputter in California with a personal best of 45 feet 9 1/2 inches. She has a simple, yet effective, philosophy about competing.

“It’s not like a personal battle to me where I’m out to beat this person or that person,” she said. “I just want to have fun out there and throw well.”

It was a lack of fun in a physical-education class that led Kawar to join Crescenta Valley’s track team as a sophomore. Kawar, who moved to the United States from Oman in 1989, had enrolled in the class after playing junior varsity basketball, but she quickly soured on the class, which featured aerobic dancing.

“I didn’t like aerobics,” Kawar said, chuckling. “And I had thrown the discus for fun when I was younger. So I decided to go out for track.”

Although she had never put the shot, it did not take her long to succeed. She won the Pacific League and Southern Section 4-A Division titles and had a personal best of 41-1 at the end of the season.

“I never expected her to win (the 4-A title),” Beckenhauer said. “In fact, when she came up to me after the Arcadia meet and said she was going to throw 40 feet before the season was over, I thought she was aiming a little too high.”

Kawar’s sophomore season ended with a disappointing eighth-place finish in the Masters meet--the top five advance to the state meet--but it was obvious by then that she had a bright future in the shotput.

“Last year, I was kind of going through it blind,” she said. “I didn’t really know what I was trying to do. I would just get out there and do it, and sometimes I ended up with some pretty good marks.”

This year, Kawar focused on getting out of the blocks quickly, but her early performances were inconsistent, partly because she was making the transition from basketball, where she started at center-forward on the varsity. “Her timing wasn’t there early in the year,” Crescenta Valley Coach Keith Gilliland said. “It was really off.”

Kawar, who has a personal best of 115-7 in the discus, concurred.

“At the beginning of the season, my form was really bad,” she said. “But I’ve started to iron out some of the technical difficulties in the last month.”

After putting the shot between 36-1 and 39-9 1/2 in the first 10 meets of the season, Kawar improved her personal best in four consecutive meets, beginning with a 41-8 1/2 effort against Hoover on April 23 and ending with a 45-9 1/2 explosion to win the Pacific League championships May 8.

Despite Kawar’s rapid improvement, she has only scratched the surface of her potential, according to Beckenhauer.

“She has all the tools to throw very far,” he said. “The powerful thighs, the height, the athleticism, everything. It’s just a matter of her putting everything together.”

Kawar is more than just an outstanding shotputter. She is a straight-A student and a self-described bookaholic. She plans to major in premed in college and works to break the stereotype that many people associate with shotputters.

“She does not want to fit the image of the big dumb jock who only excels because she is bigger than everyone else,” Beckenhauer said. “I think that drives her to a certain extent. She is big, but she is also smart, and a good athlete.”

Kawar has become a student of the shotput this year. She has a notebook cataloguing her marks from each meet and she is aware of her rivals’ accomplishments.

When asked about her win over Westlake’s Crystal Brownlee in the Masters meet last Friday, Kawar said it was a confidence builder because Brownlee was the runner-up in last year’s state meet as a sophomore and she had 13 puts this season in excess of 44 feet.

“I was trying not to be too nervous,” Kawar said about her showdown with Brownlee. “Because when I get nervous, my form goes down the drain. . . . I wanted to win, but if I didn’t, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. The really important thing was to qualify for state.”

Now that she has reached that milestone, Kawar will try to upset heavily favored Kristen Heaston of Concord Ygnacio Valley, who has a best of 49-2 1/2.

“The best thing I can do is try and improve,” Kawar said. “Whatever happens, happens. If she throws her best and I throw my best, then she’s going to beat me. I can’t expect to improve my personal best by five feet and beat her. But then again, you never know.”