Photo by: Mark Palczewski/Millersville Ath
Madison Martin's equation for success
1/15/2019 2:10:00 PM | Women's Indoor Track and Field, Features
Millersville, Pa. - Madison Martin's world is filled with numbers. How far can she throw? How much weight can she lift? For the non-mathematics major who isn't working toward concentrations in statistics and actuarial science like Martin is, she wants to throw the shot put, weight throw, discus and hammer far and lift a lot to help her throw far.
Generalizing rather than calculating specific benchmarks likely makes Martin cringe because the basic addition is far simpler than what Martin tackles in classes like Abstract Algebra and Ordinary Differential Equations—a course that she says was her most challenging.
It couldn't have been that difficult. She got an A.
"It was a lot of work," Martin retorted.
Martin likes numbers so much she a member of the Math Club. A simple question about her upcoming finals and Martin gleefully launches into an explanation that includes functions, rings of functions, transitive and associative properties, integers…"It's not that bad," she reassures.
Not that bad for the student with a 3.95 GPA who has totaled 87 credits in five semesters and is technically already a senior. She decided to add an additional concentration because it was "just" adding microeconomics, macroeconomics and a seminar. Her aim is to become an actuary, and in order to do so, she must join a society of fellows by passing highly-specialized tests. She has already knocked out one, which has a pass rate of 41 percent. She hopes to pass two more by the time she graduates in May 2020.
"I like to be busy," said Martin. "I don't like to sit around. I had some semesters where I really challenged myself and I got ahead."
This, of course, was accomplished with a competition season that stretches from November to May. She says she tries to study two hours each day after practices. She has a paid internship at Conrad Siegel Actuaries lined up for the summer.
Math comes naturally to Martin. It runs in the family. Her father is accountant for Volvo Construction Equipment, and after living the first 14 years of her life in North Carolina, her family moved to Shippensburg, Pa., when the company's headquarters relocated.
Martin was a soccer player, but at Boiling Springs High School, soccer was a fall sport, and that left her nothing to do in the spring.
"My dad said I should try throwing," said Martin. "I had never heard of throwing before. I think he just wanted to keep me busy and get me out of the house, meet new people."
Martin loved throwing but recalls that she wasn't especially good at it. That soon changed. She started qualifying for invitational events as a sophomore, won the district championship in shot put as a junior, and that is when she realized there might be a future for her in the sport.
Now, Martin competes in five different events for the Marauders: the weight throw and shot put indoor and the hammer, discus and shot put outdoor. In a span of six years, Martin has gone from never before picking up an implement to quietly building an impressive athletic resume. Unsurprisingly, the improvement has come from a studious understanding of each event and the same work ethic exhibited in her math classes.
"She was mainly a discus thrower coming in, but she has a lot of talents," said Millersville throws coach Brittany Hartman. "I don't know where her ceiling is because she has a lot of potential we haven't reached…She has a good knowledge of her events, and she has a drive to want to do more. Discus is her favorite, but she has athleticism and strengths that made it intriguing to see what she could do in the other events."
The weight throw and hammer were new to Martin, but in two years she has scored points with top-eight finishes in five PSAC Championship events including a fourth-place finish in the discus and a fifth-place finish in the hammer at the 2018 PSAC Outdoor Championships. In 2018, she was a USTFCCCA All-Atlantic Region performer in both the weight throw and hammer.
In the first event of the 2017-18 indoor season, Martin actually set the school record in the weight throw at 52-2 3/4. Her name was erased from the record book less than an hour later, because as so often happens with the Millersville throwers, they are constantly one-upping each other: in events, in the weight room, wherever they find competition.
"They are all pretty competitive with each other," said Hartman. "They are supportive of each other but they want to beat each other. It is a driving factor for each of them. Every competition, practice and in the weight room they are going after each other. You will see it in their actions—the look that they give. It says 'I'm coming after you.'"
Martin's school record didn't last long, but Martin says that her teammate who broke it, Sunflower Greene, might not have broken it if Martin hadn't first set the standard. Millersville's throwers have created a unique team dynamic in such a singularly individual event. There is a drive to be better than your teammate while also making your teammate better. Martin thrives on that.
"I love my teammates," said Martin. "We all compete against each other because we have a really good team. The PSAC has constant competition, which I like. You want yourself to do well but you want your teammates to do well, and you want to do well for your teammates. It is saying 'If you are doing this, then I can do this.'"
Greene went on to win a NCAA Division II Championship in the indoor shot put and won back-to-back PSAC Field Athlete of the Year awards. That raised the bar, but all of those accomplishments only help Martin see what she can accomplish.
"If I hadn't hit (the school record), Sunny wouldn't have hit it," said Martin. "Me passing her lit that fire, allowing her to do better. I would have loved to keep the record but it gives me something to work toward."
Now Martin's goals in 2019 include hitting NCAA provisional qualifying distances and joining Greene (who has already qualified) at the NCAA Championships.
"Someone should be going with her," said Martin. "Having her win nationals gave us all more of a drive to get there."
The inter-team rivalry helps, but Martin really doesn't need all that much fuel from her teammates. She wouldn't have a 3.95 GPA or be an all-region thrower by relying on others for motivation. Some would call her a self-starter. As she puts it: she's a perfectionist and nit-picky—although not as much these days.
She was part of a throws group that scored 62 of Millersville's 98 points for a runner-up finish at the 2018 PSAC Outdoor Championships—Millersville's best placement since 1996 and a team achievement Martin calls "amazing." Yet despite her top-five finishes in two events her place on the podium wasn't satisfactory.
"I'm very hard on myself," said Martin. "I didn't feel like I performed as well as I could have at PSACs."
That same attitude carried into her academics. For her first 13 years as a student, Martin's report cards read like the start of the alphabet on repeat—all A's. Then, in the spring of 2018, along with her self-described disappointing finish at the PSAC Championships came her first-ever B. It was second-level statistics theory—a 400 level class. Discouraged, Martin then came to a freeing realization. It came when she stopped identifying success as a number. Success can't always be measured by feet and inches or percentages.
"I always thought that if you work hard enough and put in 100 percent effort, everything is attainable," said Martin. "Some things aren't attainable and that's OK. I had to get over that and realize that failure is part of the process. That is in academics or not hitting exactly what I want at a meet. Failure is important because you can learn from it."
Or in Martin's world of mathematics, failure can actually get you closer to a solution.
To reach the NCAA Indoor Championships in the weight throw she must at least hit the NCAA provisional mark of 55-8. Martin's season-best through two meets is 52-11 ½. She's close. Yes, numbers matter. But maybe numbers aren't everything.
A mindset focused on that "100 percent effort" added to the ever-present prodding of her teammates, gives Martin a simple equation for success.
"She did a lot of work over the summer to get to that next level," said Hartman. "I see some big things out of her this year."
Generalizing rather than calculating specific benchmarks likely makes Martin cringe because the basic addition is far simpler than what Martin tackles in classes like Abstract Algebra and Ordinary Differential Equations—a course that she says was her most challenging.
It couldn't have been that difficult. She got an A.
"It was a lot of work," Martin retorted.
Martin likes numbers so much she a member of the Math Club. A simple question about her upcoming finals and Martin gleefully launches into an explanation that includes functions, rings of functions, transitive and associative properties, integers…"It's not that bad," she reassures.
Not that bad for the student with a 3.95 GPA who has totaled 87 credits in five semesters and is technically already a senior. She decided to add an additional concentration because it was "just" adding microeconomics, macroeconomics and a seminar. Her aim is to become an actuary, and in order to do so, she must join a society of fellows by passing highly-specialized tests. She has already knocked out one, which has a pass rate of 41 percent. She hopes to pass two more by the time she graduates in May 2020.
"I like to be busy," said Martin. "I don't like to sit around. I had some semesters where I really challenged myself and I got ahead."
This, of course, was accomplished with a competition season that stretches from November to May. She says she tries to study two hours each day after practices. She has a paid internship at Conrad Siegel Actuaries lined up for the summer.
Math comes naturally to Martin. It runs in the family. Her father is accountant for Volvo Construction Equipment, and after living the first 14 years of her life in North Carolina, her family moved to Shippensburg, Pa., when the company's headquarters relocated.
Martin was a soccer player, but at Boiling Springs High School, soccer was a fall sport, and that left her nothing to do in the spring.
"My dad said I should try throwing," said Martin. "I had never heard of throwing before. I think he just wanted to keep me busy and get me out of the house, meet new people."
Martin loved throwing but recalls that she wasn't especially good at it. That soon changed. She started qualifying for invitational events as a sophomore, won the district championship in shot put as a junior, and that is when she realized there might be a future for her in the sport.
Now, Martin competes in five different events for the Marauders: the weight throw and shot put indoor and the hammer, discus and shot put outdoor. In a span of six years, Martin has gone from never before picking up an implement to quietly building an impressive athletic resume. Unsurprisingly, the improvement has come from a studious understanding of each event and the same work ethic exhibited in her math classes.
"She was mainly a discus thrower coming in, but she has a lot of talents," said Millersville throws coach Brittany Hartman. "I don't know where her ceiling is because she has a lot of potential we haven't reached…She has a good knowledge of her events, and she has a drive to want to do more. Discus is her favorite, but she has athleticism and strengths that made it intriguing to see what she could do in the other events."
The weight throw and hammer were new to Martin, but in two years she has scored points with top-eight finishes in five PSAC Championship events including a fourth-place finish in the discus and a fifth-place finish in the hammer at the 2018 PSAC Outdoor Championships. In 2018, she was a USTFCCCA All-Atlantic Region performer in both the weight throw and hammer.
In the first event of the 2017-18 indoor season, Martin actually set the school record in the weight throw at 52-2 3/4. Her name was erased from the record book less than an hour later, because as so often happens with the Millersville throwers, they are constantly one-upping each other: in events, in the weight room, wherever they find competition.
"They are all pretty competitive with each other," said Hartman. "They are supportive of each other but they want to beat each other. It is a driving factor for each of them. Every competition, practice and in the weight room they are going after each other. You will see it in their actions—the look that they give. It says 'I'm coming after you.'"
Martin's school record didn't last long, but Martin says that her teammate who broke it, Sunflower Greene, might not have broken it if Martin hadn't first set the standard. Millersville's throwers have created a unique team dynamic in such a singularly individual event. There is a drive to be better than your teammate while also making your teammate better. Martin thrives on that.
"I love my teammates," said Martin. "We all compete against each other because we have a really good team. The PSAC has constant competition, which I like. You want yourself to do well but you want your teammates to do well, and you want to do well for your teammates. It is saying 'If you are doing this, then I can do this.'"
Greene went on to win a NCAA Division II Championship in the indoor shot put and won back-to-back PSAC Field Athlete of the Year awards. That raised the bar, but all of those accomplishments only help Martin see what she can accomplish.
"If I hadn't hit (the school record), Sunny wouldn't have hit it," said Martin. "Me passing her lit that fire, allowing her to do better. I would have loved to keep the record but it gives me something to work toward."
Now Martin's goals in 2019 include hitting NCAA provisional qualifying distances and joining Greene (who has already qualified) at the NCAA Championships.
"Someone should be going with her," said Martin. "Having her win nationals gave us all more of a drive to get there."
The inter-team rivalry helps, but Martin really doesn't need all that much fuel from her teammates. She wouldn't have a 3.95 GPA or be an all-region thrower by relying on others for motivation. Some would call her a self-starter. As she puts it: she's a perfectionist and nit-picky—although not as much these days.
She was part of a throws group that scored 62 of Millersville's 98 points for a runner-up finish at the 2018 PSAC Outdoor Championships—Millersville's best placement since 1996 and a team achievement Martin calls "amazing." Yet despite her top-five finishes in two events her place on the podium wasn't satisfactory.
"I'm very hard on myself," said Martin. "I didn't feel like I performed as well as I could have at PSACs."
That same attitude carried into her academics. For her first 13 years as a student, Martin's report cards read like the start of the alphabet on repeat—all A's. Then, in the spring of 2018, along with her self-described disappointing finish at the PSAC Championships came her first-ever B. It was second-level statistics theory—a 400 level class. Discouraged, Martin then came to a freeing realization. It came when she stopped identifying success as a number. Success can't always be measured by feet and inches or percentages.
"I always thought that if you work hard enough and put in 100 percent effort, everything is attainable," said Martin. "Some things aren't attainable and that's OK. I had to get over that and realize that failure is part of the process. That is in academics or not hitting exactly what I want at a meet. Failure is important because you can learn from it."
Or in Martin's world of mathematics, failure can actually get you closer to a solution.
To reach the NCAA Indoor Championships in the weight throw she must at least hit the NCAA provisional mark of 55-8. Martin's season-best through two meets is 52-11 ½. She's close. Yes, numbers matter. But maybe numbers aren't everything.
A mindset focused on that "100 percent effort" added to the ever-present prodding of her teammates, gives Martin a simple equation for success.
"She did a lot of work over the summer to get to that next level," said Hartman. "I see some big things out of her this year."
Players Mentioned
Throws
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