After kidney infection, Seneca Valley's Audrey Wolfe hopes WPIAL javelin title gets ‘foot in the door’ at Penn State
SLIPPERY ROCK — Audrey Wolfe wasn’t feeling well not long after the Butler Invitational.
The Seneca Valley senior javelin thrower returned home from the busy meet and came down with a fever.
“No one knew what was wrong,” Wolfe said at last week’s WPIAL Track and Field Championships. “It progressed. It got worse, and then we went to the ER, and they sent me home. They said it was fine, I just had a virus.”
The symptoms didn’t relent, and Wolfe landed in UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for four days, eventually being diagnosed with a kidney infection.
“Everyone thought I was dying. It was bad,” Wolfe said.
Wolfe, who aims to walk on to Penn State’s track and field team, was supposed to meet a Nittany Lions coach at the Penn Relays, in Philadelphia, something she thought could have been “a turning point in my career,” she said.
Instead, the illness held her back. But last week’s effort might have been the big break she needed. Following consecutive fifth-place WPIAL Class 3A finishes in the javelin as a sophomore and junior, Wolfe came out on top with an effort of 140 feet, 5 inches.
“I also swim, too, and it’s not just the medal,” Wolfe said after stepping off the podium at Slippery Rock University's Mihalik-Thompson Stadium. “It’s not the hardware. I don’t care about that. It’s the fact that I need to prove to myself — not to anyone else, just to myself — that I know that I can be the best, and this was really affirming of that.”
Wolfe felt she had also had an advantage having not solely thrown off runways this season. She said she had two meets like that, but “the rest (were) in deep mud, it was horrible.”
The title venue allowed for her to post her best results. And she qualified as the fourth seed for this weekend’s PIAA Track and Field Championships at Shippensburg University.
Track and field, she said, is as much of a results-based sport as there is, which could help her case with her collegiate goal.
“You don’t have to have someone come see you,” Wolfe said. “You just have to share them your number, and that number is really significant, because before that, I was just under 140 (feet) the whole time, and hitting that milestone really shows that I still have improvement to make.
“I’m not just bottoming out my senior year, and just kind of finishing out the season however. … I’m hoping that this is really gonna be that foot in the door for me.”
