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Damonique Lamons won the girls discus event with a throw of 106 feet, 8 inches at the DODDS-Europe track and field championships in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Friday, May 23, 2014. A day later she took the shot put competion. The Bamberg senior has been selected as the girls track and field Stars and Stripes Athlete of the Year.

Damonique Lamons won the girls discus event with a throw of 106 feet, 8 inches at the DODDS-Europe track and field championships in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Friday, May 23, 2014. A day later she took the shot put competion. The Bamberg senior has been selected as the girls track and field Stars and Stripes Athlete of the Year. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes)

Damonique Lamons won the girls discus event with a throw of 106 feet, 8 inches at the DODDS-Europe track and field championships in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Friday, May 23, 2014. A day later she took the shot put competion. The Bamberg senior has been selected as the girls track and field Stars and Stripes Athlete of the Year.

Damonique Lamons won the girls discus event with a throw of 106 feet, 8 inches at the DODDS-Europe track and field championships in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Friday, May 23, 2014. A day later she took the shot put competion. The Bamberg senior has been selected as the girls track and field Stars and Stripes Athlete of the Year. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes)

Damonique Lamons won the shot put event with a toss of 38 feet, 4.75 inches at the DODDS-Europe track and field championships in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Saturday, May 24, 2014. A day earlier she captured the discus event. The Bamberg senior has been selected the Stars and Stripes Athlete of the Year for girls track and field.

Damonique Lamons won the shot put event with a toss of 38 feet, 4.75 inches at the DODDS-Europe track and field championships in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Saturday, May 24, 2014. A day earlier she captured the discus event. The Bamberg senior has been selected the Stars and Stripes Athlete of the Year for girls track and field. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes)

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany – If you’re a female thrower in DODDS-Europe track, you’re probably not lamenting the closure of Bamberg at the end of this school year.

The school’s shuttering means the athlete that dominated the two throwing events at this year’s DODDS Europe Track and Field Championships won’t be around next year to defend her pair of titles.

Damonique Lamons this summer will head to El Paso, Texas, to complete her senior year and finish up what so far has been a very successful high school track and field career.

“If it wasn’t closing, I would be here for another year,” Lamons said of Bamberg.

Lamons, 17, hopes to add to her list of achievements stateside. Her time at Bamberg, capped at two years, was brief but certainly memorable.

Her medal haul at the recent championship meet helped a thin Bamberg squad of only three athletes clinch an unlikely Division III team victory. In 2013, her first year competing for the Barons, Lamons won gold in the discus throw and silver in the shot put. She can now add another accolade: the 2014 Stars and Stripes female track and field Athlete of the Year award.

“All of us at Bamberg call our blue-eyed star ‘Dom,’” said first-year Bamberg track and field coach John Cogsworth, referring to Lamons’ piercing blue eyes. “Her talents are due to a 100 percent commitment to both events.”

Lamons picked up her first discus and shot put at the age of 13. Her family at the time was living in El Paso, where Lamons joined a junior summer track and field league, a program geared towards developing young athletes.

Lamons had no idea whether throwing would be something she could do or would even like. She liked it enough that she went out for the Chapin High School track team and soon discovered she could toss weighted implements pretty far.

Her natural talent for the sport, along with some strong coaching, led to a district championship in the shot put as a freshman with a throw of 33 feet, 3 inches.

She’s since improved on her marks every year, setting personal records in both the discus throw and shot put this year at 119 feet, four inches and 38 feet, 11 inches, respectively. Those distances, achieved during the regular season, were feet – not inches – ahead of her closest competitors in DODDS Europe.

Lamons credits time in the weight room and repetitions at practice for her improvement.

“You have to divide your time between lifting weights, standing in the ring positioning your body” and practicing rotations, she said.

Cogswell said Lamons’ family is another key to her success; her parents and sister take videos of her during practice and analyze her every move, body position, leg placement and timing of the throwing process.

“They’re my No. 1 supporters,” Lamons said of dad Eric Lamons, a sergeant first class in the Army, mom Tenika, and big sister, Shalicia. “They’ve been at every single sporting event that I’ve ever been in.”

That supportive spirit has rubbed off on Lamons, who this season took freshman Bamberg track teammate and fellow thrower, McKenzie Milligan, under her wing. Milligan was a surprise runner-up in the shot put at the European championships this year.

“I never had a coach who knew anything about shot put,” Milligan wrote in an email. “Damonique stepped up and mentored me through all of it. I cannot thank Damonique enough.”

Looking down the road, Lamons has her eye on attending either the University of Texas at San Antonio or Baylor University – with hopes of making either school’s track and field teams.

Lamons likely will have her pick of colleges with a high school resume that includes: a 4.0 grade point average, National Honor Society membership, junior class president and starter on the Barons varsity girls’ basketball team as well as her track exploits.

Cogsworth expects Lamons’ old coach back in El Paso will take her to “even higher plateaus” next year.

But he’s still sad to see her go. “I do have to say that she is student whom I’ll remember fondly for the rest of my life,” he said. “All of us will miss her smiling face and cheerful attitude.”

svan.jennifer@stripes.com

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Jennifer reports on the U.S. military from Kaiserslautern, Germany, where she writes about the Air Force, Army and DODEA schools. She’s had previous assignments for Stars and Stripes in Japan, reporting from Yokota and Misawa air bases. Before Stripes, she worked for daily newspapers in Wyoming and Colorado. She’s a graduate of the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

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