HAMPTON, Va. – Coming out of Langley High School in northern Virginia, Damon Dixon wasn't highly regarded as a potential collegiate athlete.
Little interest, no scholarship offers.
So Dixon (Great Falls, Va.) came to Hampton University, the same school older brother Darwin attended. As a freshman, Dixon walked on to the track & field team. As a sophomore, Dixon had worked his way into a partial scholarship.
Now a junior, Dixon is on a full scholarship for the Pirates. Not bad for an athlete who didn't join the high school track team until his junior year.
“When I got out of high school,” he said, “I wasn't really that great at track, I was a little below average, but I had a lot of potential. I had the upside, but at that point the performance wasn't quite there.”
Dixon didn't hit his growth spurt until sometime in his junior year of high school, sprouting from 5-foot-5 to his current 6-foot-3 frame. He played basketball as a freshman and sophomore, but his small size predicated a change.
“Basketball was my core sport,” Dixon said. “But my coach said I was too small in my junior year. After I hit my growth spurt my senior year, he wanted me back on the team, but I was already focused on track at that point.”
Dixon also played football as a freshman, but again, size became an unclearable hurdle.
That potential has come to fruition at Hampton; after earning Second Team All-MEAC honors in both the outdoor decathlon and the indoor heptathlon during the 2008-09 year, Dixon won the MEAC championship in the indoor heptathlon this past February with 4,785 points – winning four of the seven events.
Dixon also finished second in the high jump and the pole vault at the MEAC Championships, tallying 29 points to earn the meet's Most Outstanding Field Performer award.
“I knew I had to do a lot going in,” Dixon said. “So I tried to focus myself as best as I could in order to do what I needed to do.”
Dixon also won the indoor heptathlon at the Penn State National Invitational on Jan. 29-30, tallying a school-record 5,236 points and winning four of the seven events. Dixon finished no worse than tied for fourth in the individual events.
Despite missing the first few weeks of the outdoor season due to a hamstring injury, Dixon is primed and ready to perform as the season draws to a close. At the Murray Neely Invitational this past Saturday, Dixon won the high jump with a height of 1.95 meters, while also finishing fifth in the javelin throw with a mark of 42.64 meters.
With the Penn Relays and MEAC Outdoor Championships looming, Dixon is enjoying the break – the Pirates will not be competing this weekend, while the Lady Pirates will be back in Greensboro, N.C. for the International Friendship & Freedom Games – gearing up for what he hopes is a run at the NCAA Division I Championships.
The decathlon will be part of Dixon's repertoire; even though he finished second in the event at last year's MEAC Outdoor Championships, Dixon feels like the heptathlon is the better event for him.
“I'm better at the heptathlon,” he admitted. “The decathlon's harder, because it's longer, there are more events and you have to deal with the elements. There are also some events in the decathlon I'm not real good at – I struggle at the throwing events.”
That turns the decathlon into a balancing act, Dixon says, where athletes try to get ahead in the events in which they excel, only to maintain once the weaker events come up on the schedule.
That dichotomy came to fruition last May in the 2009 IC4A Outdoor Championships in Princeton, N.J.; Dixon was third the heptathlon field after the first day, taking the long jump and tying for the lead in the high jump. But once the second day started – along with the bulk of the throwing events – Dixon wound up 10th with a season-best 6,287 points.
Dixon hopes to parlay his MEAC success this season into a berth in the NCAA Championships, understanding that he needs to perform well at the MEAC Outdoor Championships and in the IC4A Championships on May 13-15.
“This could be our best MEAC outdoor as a team,” Dixon said. “We've got Predist (Walker), Reggie (Dixon), Aaron (Anderson), myself … and our freshmen (Xavier Fraction and Michael Davenport) have been performing. We don't have a lot of people on our team, but we can go out and get it done.
“I don't see why I should have to accept second place. I want to win the MEAC, I want to win the decathlon, and the high jump and even the pole vault.
“Why not?”
