Hurricane Headliners: Devoux Deysel

It was a moment of pride for the Hurricanes, but in particular for Deysel, who had been nursing a nagging injury and wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to compete at the conference championship meet.

He competed – and delivered, his throw of 70.49m giving him the ACC title.

“It was nice to be able to get some points for the team. I’ve been injured for three weeks now, so there was a chance I wasn’t going to be able to throw because nationals is the big goal in the end,” Deysel said. “But I’m glad I got to compete and make coach happy and get the 10 points for the team. A win is a win. It wasn’t my best performance, distance-wise, but taking the circumstances, I really can’t be mad at it.”

With the conference championship meet now behind him, Deysel – a graduate student who won two Division II national championships while competing at Angelo State – will turn his focus to the NCAA East Preliminaries, which begin next week in Lexington, Kentucky.

His goals are simple. He intends to keep improving as he navigates qualifying so he can put himself in position to win another national title, this one on a much bigger stage.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to move on from D-II unless I could break the D-II record, which I eventually did at my last meet at nationals last year,” said Deysel, who set that mark with a throw of 79.14m last May. “I think I definitely made the right decision later to come here.”

Challenging himself has long been a way of life for Deysel, who hails from South Africa and played a plethora of sports there as a child.

There was golf, rugby, cricket, squash and yes, track and field.

But it wasn’t until he noticed one of his father’s old javelins in the garage that he decided to give that particular discipline a try.

It didn’t take long for him to realize he might have a knack for the event.

“I just threw it and was like, ‘I can throw this pretty far,’” Deysel recalled with a laugh. “So, after that, my dad was my coach when I was younger. He helped me, and then eventually, I moved to the city. We grew up on a farm, so I moved away from home for better coaching. I still played rugby, but in the end, the big idea of continuing jav was that it would give me the opportunity to come here [to the United States], get a degree and get my master’s.”