Sometimes I miss one, and I sure missed one this time.
When we last wrote about Fatimah Owens, she was teaming up with Bryanna Craig to help Millville win the 2019 South Jersey Group 4 championship at Washington Township. You can read that story here.
We lost track of Owens after she graduated from Millville in the spring of 2019, but she went to Towson University in Maryland, where she’s now a junior and one of the top throwers in the country.
On Saturday, Owens will throw the discus at the NCAA Championships Eastern Preliminaries at Hodges Stadium on the North Florida campus in Jacksonville. It will be Owens’ first NCAA meet and she’ll be competing at the same time as Craig, now a freshman at Purdue and one of the top Under-20 heptathletes in the world, will be high jumping.
Owens was a solid thrower at Millville, but it’s definitely been a steady climb to where she is now.
She didn’t surpass 35 feet until her junior year and didn’t even start throwing the discus until her senior year. She had high school PRs of 40-3 ½ from her win at South Jersey Group 4 sectionals and 122-10 from the Meet of Champions a few weeks later at Northern Burlington.
Owens started showing promise quickly as a freshman at Towson, improving to 134-1 in the discus the second time she threw in college and hitting 140-1 by the end of the season while PR’ing at 40-11 in the shot.
By last spring, she was at 42-8 ¼ and 157-10 and this past indoor season she made a dramatic improvement in the shot, throwing 46 feet in back-to-back meets.
She popped two huge PRs two weeks ago at ECACs at George Mason in Fairfax, Va., winning the discus with a 166-5 and taking 5th in the shot at 47-10.
Owens now ranks 2nd in Towson history in school history in the discus, just five inches behind only Phontavia Sawyer, who threw 166-10 at the 2019 Penn Relays. She’s also No. 5 in school history in the shot.
Owens throws at 1 p.m. Saturday in Jacksonville.
From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank 