Jaslene Massey wants ‘all the smoke’

By Owen Murray

If she’d just stepped into her car instead, Jaslene Massey probably could have still been the best high school throws athlete in California. She would’ve left the state track and field championships with a discus win and a half-inch loss in the shot put, driven away and tried to forget. Maybe she would’ve returned the next year. Maybe not.

Instead, when Massey, then a high school junior, lost a shot put final which she and her coach, Mike O’Dell, figured she should've dominated, she wasn’t going to stand by.

“Usually when something like that happens to an athlete, they don't want to be around their coach,” O’Dell, who has coached Massey since her sophomore year, says. “They don't want to be around people that are gonna talk about it.”

He even offered to let it rest, to drive to dinner at BJ’s like they’d planned and to come back to it later. Massey stepped from the gravel parking lot into his car.

“I assume you’re riding here because we’re going to talk about it now, and then we’re going to leave it behind us,” O’Dell told Massey after she sat down.

“Yep,” she said. 

She didn’t want to talk about it — not really. But she knew that she had to. So she did.

A year and change later, Massey, a University of Oregon commit, still gets a little bit of grit in her voice when she talks about that night.

“I hate losing so much,” she says now. “I was supposed to win by five feet, and I lost by literally this much.”

She puts her fingers half an inch apart.

“Like, are you kidding me?”

Half-inches of Massey’s world, however messy, stick to her soul. They live in her phone, which is entirely in Spanish because, even though she can’t speak it fluently, her mom, Popi, can and Jaslene can read it. She played volleyball — beach, too, even though she hates the sand. A budding real estate agent, she’s going to “monopolize Eugene,” she says, because her path to real estate started when her family played a board game called CASHFLOW which she adored. At 16, she had to turn that maturity into self-sufficiency when her parents divorced. She moved into a host family’s house in order to stay at her high school. She color codes her schedule to keep up. Throws were the key to a scholarship, which made college possible.

“I don't like losing at all,” she says. “It still pisses me off to this day. Losing — it's not life or death, but it's damn near.”

169 weeks ago, Massey posted a picture to her Instagram Story. It's a mostly-dark room with a low ceiling and orange ambient lighting. There’s a disco ball scattering light across the hardwood court floor. One line of light arcs across the rink, weaving back and forth. “Where it all started,” the post reads, with a geotag to Fountain Valley Skating Center.

That could have been her future.

Massey’s grandfather, Gary Edwards, was her sports connoisseur. Figure skating was the second sport he dunked a preteen Massey into — and the first that stuck. 

The first, ballet, ended differently when Massey walked out of the rec center after her first lesson and turned to Edwards.

“Grandpa, can we never do this again?” she asked.

They went to McDonald’s instead — to no avail; Massey hasn’t been back since. Figure skating, the second option, became her genesis. She’d watch the upper-level girls skate, and think “I want to do that.”

Then, “I need to be better than that.”

That competitive drive permeated her high school experience, even as her future became more complicated. She wanted a sport that would pay for college in the U.S., and figure skating wasn’t on that list. Volleyball was another option; her mom, Popi, is a Hall of Famer in the sport at the University of California, Irvine, and it became Massey’s first high school sport.

In one match, Massey was “terribly sick,” she remembers. She’d rotate out regularly, and take the break to go to the restroom — where she threw up, returned, and kept playing.

“I literally could not — I did not want to give up this game, because I wanted to win so bad,” she says. “I stopped playing only because I was throwing up blood.”

Barely walking to the car, Popi had to convince Massey to leave for the hospital instead of staying to win the match. That’s the competitor whom O’Dell watched step into his car after a half-inch loss.

The coach thinks of himself as a competitive person. He loves Kobe Bryant, then starts to compare Massey to the Black Mamba. When he saw her throw a shot put for the first time, he remembers, it “looked like she was shooting a 3-pointer.” Her talent was obvious, though, and so O’Dell introduced himself to Edwards.

A few days later, he was sitting down with Massey. 

“I want all the smoke,” she told him.

“We're gonna sit here and play Go Fish,” O’Dell said. “I'm gonna beat you.”

“No, you’re not,” Massey said. 

Few have. Since they joined forces, Massey has taken over the high school scene. 

Off the track, Massey grew up fast. She was the freshman talking about college, then the upperclassman organizing her life in the wake of her parents’ divorce. She wasn’t legally responsible for herself until she turned 18 last year, but it felt like it long before.

O’Dell entered her life in the middle of Massey’s sophomore year. That version of her, which she describes now as “headstrong”, wanted to be her mom, the college volleyball star. She slacked off, missing practices as she became a jumps and shot put standout. 

At the CIF State Track and Field Championships, she finished third in the shot put while “refusing” to touch a discus, then promptly skipped summer track and field training.

Her grandfather stepped in.

“He was like, ‘You need to lock in,’” Massey says. “‘You need to call this man up. He’s putting something serious on the table for you. You’re not seeing it.’”

In the midst of her volleyball season, she added throws practice. Discus became her best event. Her days became a freight train of school to volleyball to throws. One day, she finished school, played a volleyball game, lifted and headed to the track.

“I was so locked in on sports, I forgot to realize I’m doing 12-hour days,” Massey says.

The end of junior year delivered her to a state meet she expected to sweep. She took the discus gold, but when she walked into the parking lot with the silver shot put medal, she wasn’t satisfied. O’Dell opened the door.

“I didn't really want to talk about it, but I knew I had to, and I knew I had to not be so upset in public because I did just win discus,” Massey says. “It was not a completely horrible situation, but I was just pissed.”

Her joy and frustration carried into a tour-de-force senior season in which she swept the state discus and shot put titles, with a personal-best mark in the former and a win in the latter by 2.54m (8-04). When she returned to Hayward Field in June, she swept all four available Nike Outdoor Nationals and USATF U20 Outdoor Championship shot put and discus titles, setting personal bests again in three of the four finals.

On the morning of her final day, a 16.52m (54-02.50) throw won her the NON shot put title. She never trailed. As she left the stadium, O’Dell caught up to her. She’d picked execution as her focus during the season; to not think about competitors and to focus on technique. He wanted to remind her.

“The next part is the hardest,” O’Dell told her. “You’re gonna feel it in the end. It’s going to be the hardest one, mentally and physically.”

As discus began that afternoon, Massey felt her mental fortitude waning. She tried to loop her mind back into the competition. 

A 54.96m (180-03) first throw was enough to put her in the lead. Four consecutive fouls, though, hijacked her commitment to execution. No one could catch her, but she couldn’t catch up to her mind. One more throw, at 54.48m (178-09), ensured her victory despite what she felt was a lack of execution.

“It was good practice for Worlds, for sure,” she says. “If I make both finals, then that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

She’ll return to the ring at Hayward Field in August for those World Athletics U20 Championships. She’ll carry that experience. She’ll want all the smoke.