“Wait, isn’t that for the unathletic kids?” DeAnna Price, then a Troy Buchanan High School freshman, remembers asking her brother’s friend. Price had joined the track-and-field team to beat her mother’s 800-meter record. But the friend insisted that the all-state softball player should be a thrower.
Unconvinced, she wound the discus back and launched it more than 20 meters (68 feet). She ended up going to the Missouri high school championships that year.
Your guide to a healthier, happier you
Sign up for the St. Louis Wellness newsletter and get practical tips for a balanced, healthy life in St. Louis.
Fast forward to July 2019, at the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championship, where Price, then 26, won the hammer-throwing event by launching the steel ball 78.24 meters, breaking the U.S. record. That September, at the World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, she became the first American to ever medal in the event internationally. Right now she’s the fourth-best women’s thrower in history.
You’d never know that the day before the USA Track & Field event, Price was suffering hip spasms, an ongoing issue that caused her to go from throwing 77 meters to struggling to make 65. She considered ending her season early: “I hit a pretty hard mental block. It wasn’t an injury that was, like, ‘Ow, this hurts.’ I couldn’t turn—it felt like I had a harness on my hips, two handles on my hamstrings, and someone was pulling me back. I couldn’t figure out what was happening,” she says. “I was so scared.” Luckily, a functional movement doctor with a magic touch whom Price flew to the Des Moines event helped her regain enough mobility to make that record-breaking throw.
Over the years, a dislocated shoulder, broken arm, and torn knee ligament have tested Price, but she can accept those injuries. “If I got hurt, there was a reason why, because I wasn’t doing something right,” she says. “It was like my body’s own punishment, telling me, ‘OK, you’re not doing this correctly. What do you have to do now?’ I want to be better.”
It’s a mindset she credits to her competitive athletic family. “I started playing softball, gosh, right out the womb,” Price jokes. Word has it her great-grandmother was one of the first women to play on a baseball team, and her father even proposed to her mother on a softball field. Among her favorite memories is a tradition she and her father enjoyed: stopping at a gas station in Old Monroe to pick up Chester’s Chicken gizzards and Sun Drop before discus practice.
Throughout high school, Price practiced throwing—in addition to softball, basketball, and volleyball—with coach Gary Cooper, the father of that friend of her brother. At their first practice, she knocked herself in the forehead with the 8.8-pound hammer’s handle. “I just dropped it and said, ‘Listen, I’m going to go to college for softball. I don’t want to do this. I can’t even throw this thing,’” she recalls.
Then softball was taken out of the Olympics, and despite receiving recruiting pitches from the likes of UCLA and Princeton, she took a partial scholarship for hammer throwing to Southern Illinois University–Carbondale so she could be close to home. Her freshman year, she competed in the 2012 World Junior Championships, in Barcelona. By time she graduated, she was just the fifth woman in NCAA history to win back-to-back hammer throw titles.
She’s now a volunteer assistant coach at SIUC, alongside her now-husband, J.C. Lambert. Lambert became the university’s assistant throwing coach—walking away from his own athletic career—when Price was a senior. Four years into their relationship, Lambert guided Price to eighth place at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
“He was training for the Olympics as well,” she says. “He gave up his Olympic dreams to make mine a reality.”
Having a coach as a husband, Price says, means “I don’t get away with much at all. From the morning when I wake up, it’s ‘Did you take your vitamins? How much water have you been drinking?’ We try to do 100 abs to 200 abs a night so I have a tight core, because that ball is heavy… The weight is about the weight of a cast-iron skillet. It wants to drag you out of the circle. You have to throw this thing in basically a 7-foot-diameter ring with two door openings—all within 30 seconds,” she says slowly, as if processing just how difficult it sounds. “But it’s fun!”
With training facilities closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple installed equipment in their Carbondale home’s garage. Practices consist of drill work, right-arm throws, and arm turns. But it’s not just about the muscle—Price needs the right mindset.
“I might be exhausted at practice with cones lined up as markers. [Lambert] will come up to me and say, ‘OK, third round at the Olympic Games, Anita [Włodarczyk] is ahead of you. Gwen [Berry] is ahead of you. Wang Zheng is ahead. You’re sitting in fourth or fifth place right now. You have to beat that cone if you want to be in medal contention,’” Price says. “That way, we know we’re mentally ready for those situations. Then it just becomes second nature: ‘OK, game on. Let’s go.’”
This sport “takes a lot of patience. It’s doing that extra 5 percent,” she says. “There are three questions I ask myself every morning: Who do I do it for? What’s the purpose? Why? And the answers change every day.” Look at photographs of Price after winning gold in Qatar, an American flag draped over her back, and you’ll see the questions scribbled in Sharpie on her forearm. “As long as I can answer those three questions, I know that I’m doing the right thing,” she says.
This spring, a doctor finally diagnosed her hip problem: a partial labral tear. Given the long healing time for such an injury, she was going to be competing in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics hurt. With Tokyo postponed, she’ll be able to revisit fixing the injury that nearly got to her.
“I wasn’t done,” says Price, “and I’m still not done.”
For now, she trains.
