A little over a year ago, Amanda Brown had the Oregon women’s basketball blues.
As she sat on the sidelines and watched Oregon fall to Alabama-Birmingham in the first round of the 2000 NCAA Tournament, the freshman wondered what was ahead for her. She hadn’t played in a game since coming in for a minute against Portland State on Dec. 18, 1999 — a total of 21 straight games spent riding the pine.
Even though she was a part of a Pacific-10 Conference Championship team, Brown felt like an outcast.
“At first, I loved basketball,” Brown said. “I still do, but after that experience last year it was pretty hard for me to say I wanted to play basketball again.”
But the Eugene native would soon find her niche, and it would be just a hop, skip and a long jump away from McArthur Court.
For Brown, retribution would lie in the more peaceful confines of Hayward Field.
Since abandoning the basketball team for the track and field team, Brown has come into her own as Oregon’s top long jumper. She participated in the Pacific-10 Conference Championships last year after improving her length by almost a foot-and-a-half over the season.
This year, after a full off-season of preparation, Brown exploded with a personal best 19-foot jump at the Oregon Preview, then leaped two inches beyond that at the Stanford Invitational a week later. Though she has already qualified for the Pac-10 meet this year, Brown could be thinking of the NCAA Championships in May.
“There’s a lot more development to go [in Amanda],” Oregon head coach Tom Heinonen said. “The sky’s the limit.”
“She’s just going to keep on getting better and better,” sprints coach Mark Stream said.
Brown has learned more on the track and field team than just how to jump far. She says she has learned life lessons on the track that were absent from the Ducks’ basketball locker room.
“In basketball, it was more about breaking you down instead of building you up,” Brown said. “When I came to track, all of that I lost was restored back to me through the coaches and the team. They were all really supportive, and they helped put me up where I needed to be.”
Already, Brown has made lifelong friends and found support at Hayward Field. She names sprinter Lucretia Larkin and her coach, Stream, as key factors in helping ease her transition to the track team. Those two, along with a full team of throwers, hurdlers and runners behind her, made sure that Brown felt comfortable with the Oregon track team.
Larkin said the feeling was mutual.
“We’ve been sort of attached at the hip,” Larkin said. “We do everything together. We both understand where we’re coming from, we’re both dedicated to it, and we have self-discipline.”
Self-discipline and dedication are two of Brown’s key attributes. Combined, they have led her to take up sprinting. Brown has a particular distaste for sprinting — in fact, she says she hates it — but she does it anyway because it helps her on the long jump runway.
“‘I’m not a sprinter’ is all she ever says,” said Larkin, rolling her eyes as she talked. “‘Mark, I’m not a sprinter.’ Mark wouldn’t make her do it if she wasn’t good enough. It’s only going to help her in her jumping.”
“I hate sprinting, just because I get so nervous,” Brown said. “I just don’t feel like I’m a sprinter yet. Maybe in a couple months I’ll be a sprinter, but I just don’t feel like a sprinter right now.”
Still, Brown took to the fast races, and that has led her to become one of the iron women of the track and field team. At the Oregon Preview, Brown won the long jump with a personal record, then ran in the 100 meters, the 200 and the 4×100 relay.
The sophomore is not likely to compete in all those events at the important Washington Dual meet Saturday at Hayward. In fact, Brown will focus all her attention on the long jump and Washington junior Zee Ogarro, who competed with Brown at the Pac-10 meet last season and has already jumped 19-3 1/2 this season.
Brown is fully aware of the tradition behind the dual meet and the tradition behind Oregon track in general. She’s like a kid on the first day of school — she’s aware of the history, unbelievably excited to be a part of it, yet still humble enough to accept her role in it.
“I’m so proud of the program, and what we’re out there doing,” Brown said.
With the NCAA Championships and the Prefontaine Classic looming at the end of the season, Brown is getting excited for the big meets.
“It shows that other people have respect for our school and our track,” Brown said. “I mean, it’s beautiful out here, they’ve done so much to our track.”
“I think it’s everybody’s dream on this team to make the NCAAs,” Larkin said. “To compete in front of your home crowd in such an elite meet would be a dream.”
Both athletes just want the preliminary meets to be out of the way so they can compete in the larger-than life NCAA Championships. Brown, who is improving with each meet, desperately wants to fulfill the potential she knows she has.
“It would be cool if I could fast-forward to the end of the season, to see where I’m at,” said Brown, as she let out a belly laugh. “It’s funny because I’ve never done a full season of track, so I don’t know how good I can be. I could jump 21 feet, but I won’t know until the end of the season.”
If Brown wants to jump those 21 feet by the end of the season, she’s going to have to do the dance beforehand. The dance is a pre-meet ritual between Larkin and Brown that includes a handshake, a song and, of course, a little dance.
“We were doing it one time before lifting weights,” Larkin said, “and our coach was looking at us going ‘what the … ?’”
The mental image is amusing. Two college track athletes, gettin’ jiggy with it, all in the name of getting psyched up for a race.
Larkin, and the rest of the Oregon athletes and coaches, have made sure that Amanda Brown will never live through an experience like last year’s basketball team.
Now, it seems, Brown simply has to reach out and jump for her goals.