Pressure builds diamonds.
Janess Blackburn, a 2025 Rainier High School graduate and rising sophomore at Saint Martin’s University, has faced a handful of high-pressure situations in her short discus career.
She’s thrived in every one.
After toying with discus once as an eighth grader at Rainier Middle School in 2021, Blackburn didn’t return to the sport until her junior year at RHS as she had focused on basketball, volleyball and briefly softball.
In her first trip to Yakima for the 2024 state meet, she erupted for an 18-foot personal record in discus to finish third with a mark of 121 feet and 7 inches. The following year, Blackburn broke the school record three times and won the state championship at 138-3.
But entering her freshman campaign at Saint Martin’s, she had no idea what to expect. Athletes were bigger and stronger. Qualifying marks were further.
That lack of expectation didn’t hinder Blackburn in the slightest.
She shattered the program record in her first collegiate track meet, throwing 44.81 meters (147-0) at the Ed Boitano Invitational at the University of Puget Sound on March 7. She went on to break the record again on April 25 at 44.98 meters (147-7).
Two weeks later, in the biggest competition of her young career, Blackburn became the first Saint Martin’s female athlete to take home the GNAC discus title. The two best throws of the competition belonged to her, and she topped out at 44.52 meters (146-0) to win the championship.
“It means a lot. To come into the first meet and break the school record and then to win GNACs, it’s really important,” Blackburn said. “It’s hard for me to find a passion in a sport that I’ve only been doing for two years, so to get that is real encouragement to keep going and aim for bigger things.”
Blackburn’s dominant three-year stretch in discus wasn’t supposed to happen. In fact, her goal while in high school was to play collegiate volleyball. She was a standout All-Central 2B League player for a Mountaineers team that earned back-to-back state trophies.
“It was something that I really had fun with. I may not have been the best at it, but it really brought me joy,” Blackburn said of volleyball.
She also flirted with the idea of playing basketball after high school and wanted to skip a spring sport her junior year to focus on AAU basketball. But Rainier co-track coach Rob Henry and throws coach Josh Frunz convinced Blackburn that she could accomplish big things in track and field, and they were proven right. After her third-place state performance in 2024, she received her first collegiate offer.
In January 2025, Blackburn’s goals shifted when she began working with a private coach named Lex Strom, who also helped former Rainier thrower Jeremiah Nubbe, now an NCAA All-American hammer thrower at the University of Virginia. Blackburn’s confidence blossomed through those lessons ahead of her senior year at Rainier, and college coaches began to take notice as she took the 2B discus world by storm.
She heard from five colleges before choosing Saint Martin’s to stay close to home. Blackburn said the school was the most outstanding coach because of its coaching staff, led by then-head coach John Schultz, who has since stepped away from his coaching role.
“I loved the coach here. He’s a great guy. The coaches are cheerleaders,” Blackburn said. “John Schultz is the biggest cheerleader you’ll ever meet in your life. If you do something bad, obviously he’s going to coach you and correct you. But he’s never gonna make you feel belittled. Track is all confidence. He set me up with really big goals that I didn’t think I’d be able to accomplish, but I did.”
Blackburn’s top goals entering her freshman season were to break the school record and to qualify for the GNAC Championships. Not only did she accomplish both, but she punched her ticket to both the outdoor and indoor championship meets as she qualified in the indoor weight throw, finishing 11th.
The life of a three-sport student athlete is taxing, especially at Rainier. Blackburn said Rainier’s practices were similar to that of a collegiate level, but arriving on campus at Saint Martin’s and adjusting to the workload of a collegiate student athlete was a wake-up call.
“That was my ‘Come to Jesus’ moment,” Blackburn said. “You get to college and your whole life is track. I had no free time. I’m working out for track six hours a day. But your goal for high school is to make it to something bigger, and I think that pressure is way greater than college.”
What allowed Blackburn to immediately adjust to the collegiate level and set the school record in her first meet was the work she put in during the summer, and even the lack of work she put in. Blackburn took a break from throwing the summer after her high school graduation, and she came back to it a month before school started at Saint Martin’s. She learned how to throw the weight throw and hammer for the first time, and she said it felt like she also had to learn how to throw the discus all over again, as well.
“I almost had to relearn how to throw. I was able to tweak the things that I didn’t like about my technique from high school and reinvent myself in a way that I would be able to compete in college,” Blackburn said, adding that she threw three to four hours per day and spent the rest of the six-hour workout lifting weights and stretching. “The preseason was probably the most important part to get me to be able to compete with the rest of the college athletes.”
Walking into the GNAC outdoor championship meet at Central Washington University was quite intimidating for Blackburn. She fouled her first throw of the day, hitting the pole.
Coincidentally, Blackburn also fouled her first throw at the state championship meet in which she eventually finished first. Evidently, the recipe for success in discus is to get the jitters out immediately.
“That’s something I do once I start getting tense. My body tenses up and I get nervous, and then I do something out of the ordinary,” Blackburn said. “I knew that I was made for something bigger and that my first throw can’t determine my next ones. I made sure that I slowed down and focused on being centered. I told myself that I was going to bring less power and try to go less fast because sometimes that ends up making it go farther when you’re not so tense.”
Blackburn’s second throw landed at 43.95 meters, which was enough to finish first, and she followed it up by launching her third toss 44.52 meters. She knew after her second throw that she was in first place but felt she needed to continue to throw further.
“I could see the rest of the competition was getting a little bit in their heads,” Blackburn said. “I was able to kind of relax because I was having fun with it. I was at a different level.”
In her sophomore campaign, Blackburn’s goal is to reach 50 meters in discus and continue to reset the school record books.
“I want 50 meters. I know that’s kind of far out, but I know I can hit it. I want to hit a mark that qualifies me for nationals,” Blackburn said. “I obviously want to be the GNAC champ again. The thing that I had to learn in college is that it’s a mental game. I don’t want to put my accomplishments in numbers or places. I know if I put my 100% effort in, whatever happens will happen. I’m just hoping that I’ll have another successful season like this year.”
