This future Army athlete has plenty of motivation to serve his country and compete for the Black Knights.
Adis Hamidovic, a senior at Bloomington North High School in Indiana, has committed to throw for the Army track and field team. He’s determined to follow in the footsteps of his mom, Sara, who played multiple sports for Army in the early 2000s. He’ll join a Army track program led by coach Mike Smith, who has been named Patriot League Men’s Coach of the Year five times since coming to West Point in 2014.
Hamidovic is one of the best throwers in Indiana and could be set up for a big performance this weekend at the IHSAA track and field finals. He took first in the discus (185 feet, one inch) and third in the shot put (56 feet, 7.5 inches) at last week’s regional meet. He enters Friday’s finals ranked third in the discus and 11th in the shot put.
Sara is bursting with pride over the choice her son has made about his future.
At the same time, it’s hard to keep from crying when she talks about exactly where his decision could lead him. She knows firsthand — and it scares the hell out of her.
But serving in the military is the family calling, it’s patriotic duty stretching back generations. It doesn’t make it any easier, but for them, the benefits outweigh the risks. What happens for Adis after graduation is potentially far more troubling.
He wants to be the best in the ring at every meet. That standard will also apply to his military career.
“I want to get sent someplace dangerous,” Adis said. “That’s what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. Track is second to me whenever I’m at West Point. Soldier first.
“My goal is to go infantry and then try to get a spot in the Rangers and hopefully work my way up to Special Forces. I’ve always wanted to get deployed and do something like that. Those are the people I idolize.”
Sara is right up there with them, a big reason why he’s following in her footsteps.
“My mom is the most impressive person I’ve ever met,” Adis said. “I’ve never met someone who has the work ethic to get things done and do it right. She doesn’t cut any corner.
“My mom, the bar is so high. Everything. 100 percent never slacks off, and it’s honestly a little bit annoying sometimes, because it’s like, ‘Gosh, just take a break.’ No, she never stops.”
Mom played for Army volleyball, served in Iraq
Sara threw and played volleyball while at West Point before graduating and being sent to Iraq for two tours as a combat engineer, with the rank of captain, working in a convoy security escort in Ramadi in 2005-06. They were attached to a battalion of Marines, whose responsibility was finding and removing improvised explosive devices.
“My particular platoon was a security element for them,” Sara said. “So, lot of times, we’d have gun trucks securing the route clearance vehicles or moving people and equipment from point A to B.”
Engineering was her chosen career path, and her time served in the military helped her get a head start on her company that specializes in cleaning up environmental hazards.
“It teaches you what you’re made of, like nowhere else,” Sara said. “You’re pushed to your limits mentally, emotionally, physically. Every way. They have a huge emphasis on leadership and creating leaders of character. People that are honest, have integrity, are hard-working. That’s what they strive for and that’s how I raised him.
“If he screws up, he learns. He likes that and he likes the push. He likes having a really regimented lifestyle. I think he excels more in that. At West Point, I learned exactly what I’m made of because you’re just riding at your limit for four years straight.”
It also opened her eyes to why her family continues to volunteer for military duty and why West Point is a great place for her son.
“It is super tough,” Sara said, “I was there and I felt called to serve. We are absolutely, incredibly fortunate to live where we live. To be Americans and to have what we have.
“I have been to 45 countries and we are very, very fortunate. There are very few people in this day and age called to defend that. So, yes, as a mother, it is the absolute scariest thing on the planet to think about him going away and getting hurt. Or worse. But as a patriot, I’m in full support.”
Prepared for military life
Adis had interest from Purdue and Miami (Fla.) but he never really pursued anything other than West Point. It’s been like that since he was 3.
It started with an obsession of construction equipment when he was 18 months old. Then, it was being a soldier.
“I do not remember a time when I did not want to go to West Point and be in the Army,” Adis said. “I came from a military family. It’s just something that I’ve always wanted to do but I don’t really know what started that. She didn’t indoctrinate me into it.
“I’ve always just thought that’s what I owe for living in such a fantastic place. I never wanted to be the person who is seeing all these guys going off to war and serving their country and that’s not me. I needed to do something like that.”
Generations of their family have served. And generations of those back home have worried about them.
“Absolutely. Bad things happen in war, for sure,” Sara said. “I don’t think a lot of people can tell you what would happen to them in really high-stakes situation. How they would respond, how they would behave, how they would feel. And I intimately know that.
“And I think that makes normal, everyday civilian life seem, comparatively, substantially easier.”
There’s nothing easy about what Adis is about to go through. She knows and she’s prepared him in how she’s raised him.
“I think early on, I always knew it was going to be hard,” Adis said. “But I didn’t know how it was going to be hard. I just imagined physically, boot camp and stuff like that was going to be hard but the mental and the discipline and getting your homework done is the hardest part about it.
“I think the standards my mom holds me to have prepared me for that. I feel almost like I’ve been going to West Point for the last 18 years.”
Different brains, same mentality
Adis started going to the Indiana Track Club when he was 8. About the same time, North head coach Justin Helmer was picking up the phone and calling the former Cougar great to see if she might be interested in coaching throws.
“My initial response was, ‘Not only, no. but hell no,'” Sara said. “Then I said let me think about it. Adis and I sat down, and I said I think we can make a run at getting you a full ride (scholarship) if you wanted.”
She took the job. But there was more to it than that for a single mom trying to get a time-intensive business off the ground.
“My career is extremely demanding, so it’s been tough, during the day, to carve out time for us to spend together,” Sara said. “So, this has been something amazing that we’ve been able to spend every day at practice. And we’ve also traveled all over the US for meets.
“It was an opportunity to earn something together.”
Adis grew up at North’s throwing rings, seven months at a time for 10 years now. Though strangely enough it sometimes feels like 20 when their lines of communication do not connect.
“It’s been a challenge for sure,” Adis said. “The only thing I see where there’s a struggle with it is, you go to practice and your mom’s the coach. You go home and she’s still the coach and she’s still telling you what you did wrong in practice.
“At 10 p.m. at night, she walks into the room to show me film and telling me what I need to go to fix. We’re both different in how our brains work. She’s way more detail oriented, and I’m more just do it.”
If he’s Nike, she’s adidas. Or something like that.
“It’s tough. He and I on the Myers-Briggs personality chart, we are exactly polar opposites,” Sara said. “I am very analytical-engineer brain. He is very free form, life-of-the-party kind of guy.
“We think completely different, so it’s led to a lot of challenges, particularly in practice. It’s much better as a senior. But in meets we have the exact same mentally and that’s just win. He’s an extremely fierce competitor in meets. He just gets really amped up and violent in the ring, which is the way I threw.”
Adis has started watching more throwing videos and will come up relaying the point what the coach or athlete is trying to teach.
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying for 10 years,” Sara said. “Yeah, he’ll say, but it’s different. I understood it.”
Ready to compete for Army track and field
Adis was far better at discus coming up, reaching into the 170-foot range last year and making it to state for the first time. He didn’t bother with shot put after going just 47 as a sophomore. But something’s changed.
Discus is still good to him. He threw a career best 189-8 that’s just nine inches off the school record at an invitational earlier this season. But his shot put has recently jumped into the upper 50s.
“I’m probably better at shot than discus,” Adis said after a recent practice. “I was so bad at shot and I went 58 today. The technique finally clicked. And I was way more receptive to coaching.
“I love shot put. The amount of growth I’ve experienced is exponential.”
There’s more to come as one of 200 admits to West Point’s prep school, which gives Adis, young for his class, Sara said, another year to get ready for the real thing.
“When he got that letter with the offer of admission,” Sara said. “I never felt so proud of anything ever.”
“It was pretty sweet,” Adis added. “I knew I’d get in, but it was a weight off my shoulders. Freshmen year, I was slacking off in my classes and not getting good grades. I was like, I was not going to be able make it here. But I cleaned it up, big weight off my shoulders.”
Not too surprising considering how good Adis is at that feat on meet day.
“Whenever I compete, I watch videos of special forces,” he said. “It gets me so hyped up. Whenever I compete, I don’t think about technique. I’m not really a graceful competitor; I just get mad like my mom. Those pictures you see of her, grinding, that’s exactly me.”
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana track star following mom’s footsteps as an Army athlete
Reporting by Jim Gordillo and Matt Allibone, The Herald-Times / The Herald-Times
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jim Gordillo and Matt Allibone, The Herald-Times | USA TODAY Network
