The Florida softball team had just won its second national championship in as many years. Robert Reed watched his freshman daughter, Megan, sprint from the dugout with the rest of the 2015 squad to join the celebratory dogpile. The moment for Robert was bittersweet. His daughter was now a national champion, but she was also no longer a softball player, a sport she’d been in for fifteen years.
“When we were at the World Series that year, she told us she was basically done,” Robert said. “It damn near killed me.”
Megan’s decision to walk away from softball stemmed back to the end of her high school career.
“My love for softball wasn’t the same even coming into college,” Megan said. “It wasn’t as fun to play. But I was getting recruited and I had kind of accepted that, so I decided to still stick with it and try.”
When she graduated from Strawberry Crest High School in Dover, Florida, in 2014, she left a decorated softball career in the rearview mirror on the way to Gainesville.
She was a three-time all-conference selection, two-time Tampa Tribune all-Hillsborough county first-team selection, 2013 second-team all-state selection and holds the school’s record for home runs in a season (nine).
During the recruitment process, Florida was always the favorite.
“I had a bunch of different offers, but Florida always just felt like home,” Megan said. “This was definitely my number one choice of where I wanted to go.”
Other schools did pique Reed’s interest, however.
“LSU gave her a lot of attention; she loved that school from day one,” Robert said. “Eastern Kentucky was willing to give her everything under the sun. They basically told Megan ‘show up with a pair of shorts and we’ll take care of the rest.’”
Part of the reason she ultimately decided to go there was because her sister, Nicole, was already there. While she was also a softball player in high school, Nicole excelled in academics, and she went to undergrad in Gainesville from 2010-2013 and started at UF’s law school in 2014.
“She definitely got more of the brains of the family and I got more of the athletic genes,” Megan said. “When we were younger, we had normal sister bickering, but when I got here our relationship really took off. If I was having a bad day, I could just go to her apartment and it was like a getaway even though she lived 10 minutes away from me.”
While her relationship with her sister was stronger than ever, her love for softball was not. Even a national championship was not enough to keep her playing.
“I knew it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing here,” Megan said. “But I still wanted to be a Gator, and I still wanted to be an athlete.”
That desire to keep playing sports led to a visit with coach Steve Lemke, the throwers’ coach for Florida’s track & field team.
“I had done track in like middle school, and so I thought ‘I’ll be a shot putter,’” Megan said.
Her dad had his doubts.
“I told her ‘you don’t do track, you’ve never done track, and they have a really good team,’” Robert said. “Coach Lemke asked if she had ever thrown before. She said ‘well, does eighth grade count?’ He said no.”
As inexperienced as Megan was, Lemke recalled somebody else that was in a similar situation to Megan.
“We’d had another girl a few years before that came from the softball team, and she was successful. She was third in the SEC (for javelin),” Lemke said. “It had been done before.”
That girl was Star Sansone, who placed that SEC mark in 2009. But Sansone did not do it throwing the shot put, she did it by throwing the javelin. Lemke had the same idea for Megan.
“She just thought because she was strong in softball, she could throw the shot or the discus,” Lemke said. “I told her it’s a different kind of strength. We have girls that can bench press over 300 pounds. To be successful, that’s the kind of strength you need in those events. Coming with a softball background it just seemed to me that javelin would be the most natural.”
While attempts to put down a softball and pick up a spear are rare, Lemke was open to it over a decade ago with Sansone and, ultimately, with Megan in 2015 because of her natural arm talent.
“With softball, at least they have the basic skill set that potentially can throw the javelin well because most softball players can throw,” Lemke said.
He believes that at least getting a chance is more likely in the throws because it is harder to tell how good somebody can be right away.
“I think we’re very good about at least giving people a chance in the throwing events,” Lemke said. “In the sprints or something you can pretty much tell right away if they can be at a certain level. In the throws it’s almost like you have to give them an extended tryout to see how they could pick up on things. You can’t say after a week ‘yeah, you can do it’ or ‘yeah, you have no chance.’”
Lemke let that semester be Megan’s extended tryout the following fall. The potential was there, but she was nowhere near where she needed to be. She redshirted that track season to fully develop into a real thrower.
“Javelin is very technique (driven). If you’re off just a little bit it can completely change the throw,” Megan said. “That was very different because in softball you don’t have to throw exactly the same every single time, it can just be relatively in an area.”
That process was tough on Megan. Someone who was fluent all her life in one athletic language had to learn an entirely new one. It was especially tough when the man who gave her the chance was watching.
“At first it was very scary. I didn’t want to be bad at javelin, but obviously I didn’t know what I was doing,” Megan said. “I’d always be really nervous when he was watching me.”
Now, the girl that was once nervous to throw in front of her own coach is a top-10 javelin thrower in her conference, finishing eighth at the SEC Championship in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in early May.
Out of all the challenges she had faced, one of the biggest ones for Megan had nothing to do with form or technique. It was being alone.
“No one’s out there helping me. Once I get on the runway, it’s just me. It’s all up to me on how I do,” Megan said. “In softball you might have a bad day or a bad game, but like, your teammates can still pick you up and make you look better than you did.”
Even though she only competes in one event by herself, Megan and her biggest fan have still invested in the rest of the Florida track and field team. She and her dad have taken the team aspect of softball and applied it to the track team by rooting for and encouraging everybody else.
This past weekend, Megan’s athletic career concluded in Jacksonville, Florida, at the NCAA East Preliminary Round. Many of her teammates moved on to the NCAA Championships in Austin, Texas, and Megan and Robert will be watching and cheering on their squad.
“I’m not a track dad. Never was, never followed it,” Robert said. Megan’s journey, however, has converted him.
“We stay from the first event to the last race.”
Follow Graham Marsh on Twitter @GrahamMarshUF and contact him at gmarsh@alligator.org.
Megan Reed has the seventh best javelin throw in UF history (48.67m).
