North Carolina State University Athletics
Hampton's Great Expectations
4/21/2011 12:00:00 AM | Track
April 21, 2011
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RALEIGH, N.C. – Brittany Hampton is a former cheerleader who took up the sport of track and field in high school because she thought the varsity letter her older sister won for running track was really cool. She couldn’t earn a letter for competitive cheering, so she thought she might give running a try.
Her coach at Monroe’s Weddington High School encouraged her to throw the discus and Hampton discovered that she had a talent for making it fly. Her high school performances – including a top 10 all-time distance in the discus in North Carolina prep history – led to a scholarship to NC State, where she has excelled under veteran throwing coach Tom Wood.
Hampton not only owns the school record, measured at 174-feet, 8-inches at last year’s NCAA Regional meet in Greensboro, she also has the best throw of anyone in the ACC this season, 170-feet, 4-inches at last weekend’s Kent Taylor-Joe Hilton Carolina Invitational at UNC’s Belk Track at Fetzer Field.
She’s hoping to improve on that Thursday while participating in the ACC Championships at Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium. Competition runs through Saturday at the three-day meet. Live results are available here throughout the meet.
But Hampton’s story goes further than her ability to throw the discus and the 20-pound hammer. She’s an accomplished singer, pianist and interior designer. She sang at both the athletic department Christmas party and in the student-athlete talent show and regularly sings with her church choir.
“I really love singing,” Hampton said. “It’s another way of expressing myself. A song with good music or great lyrics can do a lot to relax you. I’ve never been a television kind of person. I like to listen to music instead.”
She’s also the only member of the NC State men’s or women’s track team who is married.
She and her husband, Nathan, met at a Mormon Institute of Religion gathering in the shadow of the NC State Memorial Bell Tower last winter. Shortly after they met, she sent him a Facebook message asking him to hang out. After two months, they started dating. Two months later, they were engaged. And two months after that, they were married.
It’s made this season a little different, as she spends more time with him than her teammates. But Hampton is happy about the new twist to her life, as a couple of college students starting out their life together. Nathan is studying environmental engineering, while Brittany is majoring in women’s and gender studies. He drops her off every morning for practice, and picks her up afterwards, to avoid the construction zone around the Paul Derr Track.
“Being married makes life easier,” said the newlywed. “I have a person there who understands me, who loves me, who I can talk to about anything. If something is going wrong, I have someone to sit down and talk to all the time. He’s always there for me.”
Over the last year, Hampton’s world has been spinning faster than her rotations in the hammer throw, at which she is also ranked in the top 10 in the ACC. And it’s about to go even faster.
In November, she and Nathan are expecting their first child. So she heads into Thursday’s competition nurturing her own biggest cheerleader.
“It’s all still pretty new,” Hampton said. “My doctors say I’m fine still competing, since I’ve been doing this a long time and my body is used to it. It’s not going to affect the baby negatively or anything. I’m fine to compete this season, through the NCAA Championships, if I make it that far.”
And that is the goal for the two-time NCAA Regional qualifier, to make her first trip to the final meet of the season, held June 9-11 in Des Moines, Iowa.
“After that, I’ll take it easy and get back to track in December,” Hampton said. “In a perfect world, I’d be able to have some time to get back into decent shape for outdoor season next year.”
It wasn’t planned that way. Hampton believes it was just timely intervention.
“It was one of those cases where everything just worked out,” she said. “The timing was right. So I feel like it was something that was supposed to happen. I’m a firm believer that if the Lord wants you to do something or move forward in a certain way in your life, He’ll make it possible.
“I think that has been evident in a lot of different ways over the last year.”
If all goes well, she’ll be back in uniform next spring for her final season of competition for the Wolfpack.
She has the full support of Wolfpack head coach Rollie Geiger, who has seen a lot in more than three decades as a head cross country and track and field coach.
“She’s medically cleared, she’s throwing well and she wants to keep throwing,” Geiger said. “She’s just a terrific young lady who is very talented.”
For now, Hampton is concentrating on her competition for the next two days.
“I’d like to do well and keep progressing,” Hampton said. “It would mean a lot to me if I could get that gold medal in the discus. I feel like I've worked really hard. I just hope and pray that I can be given the skills that will help me be successful.
“I'd also like to do well at regionals and make it to the national championships for the first time.”
For Hampton, nothing seems impossible right now.
• By Tim Peeler, tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
