Photo: Gaston High School junior Kodie Bogle finished second in the javelin event at the AAU Nationals last week in Des Moines, Iowa. Pictured with Kodie are dad Jim and mon Tonya. (submitted photo)
By Chris McCarthy, Publisher/Editor
It’s evident that Kodie Bogle does not shrink while competing on the national stage.
The Gaston High School junior finished second in the javelin event at the AAU Nationals last week in Des Moines, Iowa. Bogle’s throw of 190 feet and four inches eclipsed his previous PR of 189 feet and five inches set at the American Jav Fest in East Stroudsburg, Penn., in June. Bogle won the event on his sixth and final throw for a distance.
In May, Bogle threw for 178 feet set at the Adidas Outdoor Nationals at North Carolina A&T University. At the NSAF Nike Invitational at the University of Oregon in May of 2022, Bogle earned a silver medal in the javelin event at 166 feet and seven inches.
“I really don’t get nervous,” said Bogle in an earlier interview with The Messenger. “I just get ready to go to work and see what I can do.”
Bogle was selected as MVP of the 2023 All-Messenger Track and Field Team after winning the
Class 2A state championship for the second year in a row. His gold-medal-winning and personal-best throw of 174-06 was more than 22 feet farther than the best effort of the state runner-up and bettered his 2022 gold medal throw by more than nine feet. In addition, Bogle took home three medals at the 2A Section 3 Meet – the gold in the javelin, the silver in the triple jump and the bronze in the high jump. As an eighth grader in 2021, he finished as state runner-up with a 150-11 throw.
“The way I’ve been trying to teach him is to focus on doing his best instead of beating the other guy,” said Kodie’s dad Jim, a longtime coach at Gaston and Etowah high schools. “As long as he works hard and does what he’s supposed to do, Kodie might be throwing over 200 [feet] by the time he’s a senior.”
For the past three years, Kodie has been training with Curtis Thompson, a world-class javelin thrower based in Birmingham who won the U.S. Olympic trials and competed in the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Due in large part to Thompson’s coaching, Jim said Kodie’s rapid progress was just as much mental as physical.
“Instead of me or his mom or his coach telling him to get out there and practice, Kodie now does that himself. It wasn’t that he wasn’t motivated before; it’s that now he understands the reasons behind his workouts. Now he trusts his technique and his training and keeps his composure as opposed to muscling through a throw.”
Kodie has an impressive athletic pedigree. Both dad Jim and mom Tonya played college basketball, while older brothers Jordan, Jeff, Jimmy, Jared, Jackson and Jason competed in either football, basketball or track and field while at Gaston. Sisters Jana and Morgan both played basketball and volleyball in high school. Kodie also plays football and basketball for the Bulldogs.
Tonya was the longtime girls basketball coach at Gaston and coaches the Snead State women’s basketball team the past two years.
“It’s tough being the son of a coach,” said Jim. “You could tell he didn’t like what I asked of him sometimes, but he never bucked me, and when he started seeing his improvements, he started to buy in to what we were doing. You can’t have confidence if you haven’t put in the work.
Kodie’s primary goal for the 2024 track and field season is not defending his state title.
“I want to set the state record [for javelin,]” he said. “If anyone throws farther than me, I’m going to work a little bit harder to beat that [throw].”