Why Britney Henry Is Willing To Go Into Debt For Her Dream

ByDOUG WILLIAMS
July 24, 2015, 12:51 PM

— -- SAN DIEGO -- Working a job isn't optional for hammer thrower Britney Henry. Some elite track and field athletes have big sponsorships and full support. Henry isn't one of them. Each year she works, trains ... and piles up debt.

"Credit cards have funded most of my athletic career," she says, smiling.

So she's always juggling her passion for throwing an 8.82-pound steel ball (aka the hammer) with full- or part-time work. For a year, Henry, 30, has worked as an office manager for Hollis Brand Culture, a multimedia design company in San Diego.

Depending on the season, she works anywhere from 15 to 30-plus hours a week, doing accounting and billing and ordering supplies. Her boss allows her to bend her duties around her athletic schedule. "Whenever I need to go, I can leave," says Henry, who's been dubbed The Hammer by co-workers. "The great thing about this job is I can be mobile. I can do things online."

For eight years, Henry has subsidized her hammer quest with a string of jobs. The first was for the Oregon Research Institute. She drove around trying to buy beer without an ID for a study. Then came a summer internship with the Eugene Emeralds baseball team and a year as a grocery store cashier. She then moved to San Diego, where she spent 2½ years as a ticket agent with the Padres, worked at Costco and took two hotel jobs before she landed her current job. She also works game days as a guest service agent with the San Diego Chargers.

Henry gets help from sponsors (Oiselle and Adidas), her national federation, the USOC (she trains at the Olympic Training Facility in Chula Vista), a recent grant and family, but it doesn't cover the costs of daily life. "You have to balance 'How much debt am I going to go into?' versus 'How much do I love my sport to keep pushing?' " she says.

So far, love for the hammer is winning.

It may be an obscure sport to many, but to Henry, it's beautiful. She whirls the steel ball over her head by a wire, goes into a spin and then lets it fly. It's power plus grace. This year, she has the fifth-best U.S. mark at 71.08 meters (just over 233 feet, 2 inches).

Since graduating from Oregon in 2007, the three-time All-American has kept pushing to make her first Olympic team. She's come up short at three Olympic trials (2004, '08, '12) but was having her best season so far in 2015 until finishing a disappointing ninth at the USATF Championships on June 27, missing a berth in this year's world championships.

"Not the weekend I was aiming for," she says. "But I will live to fight another day."

In high school, she had no idea the hammer throw would become her life's focus. As a hurdler, she attended a heptathlon camp and was standing on the long jump runway when she saw a girl throw the hammer. She asked a coach if she could try it. She was captivated by the speed and power of the event.

"Literally from the moment I picked it up, I loved it," she says. "The spinning aspect, that I could go fast. And that I'm throwing something to destroy something."

Henry broke the Washington state high school record as a senior. She remembers thinking at one point, "Wow, I can be really good at this."

And she's gotten really good -- by training five to six hours a day, stretching, lifting, throwing and then recovering through rest and massage.

"We don't get much time in the outside world," she says, laughing. When she does have free time, she likes to read history books, go to the beach and volunteer at a hospital visiting kids.

Mostly, though, she continues to train and work to fund her dream, with the goal of making the U.S. team for worlds or the Olympics. "Will I be disappointed if I don't ever make one? Yeah, but I'm also optimistic," she says. "I've done a lot of great things in my career, and I can't be disappointed in myself. I tried every step of the way to be the best that I could."