Excelsior High’s Shanice Love is having a season that most athletes can only dream of.

Unbeaten all season, she broke the ISSA Girls’ Champs Class One discus record, the national junior record twice, as well as the Penn Relays high school mark.

Love, who will turn 19 in June, hopes to add an IAAF Under-20 championship medal to her accomplishments before moving on to Florida State University (FSU). She is not surprised by her success. If anything, she was expecting it.

“I am not surprised by these results,” she told the

Jamaica Observer recently in Philadelphia, after throwing 54.72m to improve on her NJR 54.70m set two weeks earlier in Kingston. It eclipsed the Penn Relays record 54.29m set in 2013 by Holmwood Technical’s Gleneve Grange, which was also a NJR then.

Love was also named the high school girls MVP for individual events at Penn Relays.

A second place at Penn Relays last year, beaten by Edwin Allen’s Paul-Ann Gayle, was what stoked her drive for success this year.

“I have been training very hard from last year. I came second here and I said I would break the record at Penn Relays and I wanted to break it and I worked towards it.”

After much promises early in the season and wins at Champs (52.73m) and CARIFTA Games Under 20 in Grenada, the big breakthrough came at a meet put on by the MVP Track Club at the National Stadium where she threw 54.70m to break Grange’s 54.29m.

“When I threw 54 metres, it was not really a surprise, but I was kinda shocked,” she said. “But then again I was training hard, so the results were showing.”

Still she is not satisfied as her ultimate goal is at least a place at the IAAF Under- 20 championships in Poland in July.

“I put the work in and I am expecting more and better things and the Under-20 World Championships is next for me,” she said, while going on to explain that she and Coach Michael Vassell have been plotting the path.

“My coach and I are now planning and I know that I have to throw 52.00 metres or better to get into the finals in Poland and then to get to the top eight.”

She gushed enthusiasm when talking about Coach Vassell, whose move to Excelsior three years ago, she said, was the launching pad for her.

Love said she started throwing four years ago when a coach who was supervising the summer workouts at Excelsior urged her to try the throws instead of the track events.

After some drills it was decided that she would do the throws, but the hiccup was that her coach then was not equipped to teach her the proper technique. She told the

Observer it was slow progress and she finished fifth place in Class Three at Girls Champs with a throw of about 33 metres.

The arrival of Vassell changed all of that. Good results came her way and she made the team to CARIFTA Games in 2013 for the first time.

“Mr Vassell made all the difference for me” she said, “he is a really good coach, very patient, but he makes me work hard.”

With the Penn Relays out of the way, the focus is now on the all-comers development meets where she will work on her weaknesses and prepare for both the National Junior and Senior Trials.

At FSU she will join a number of other Jamaicans and will be the third-straight discus national junior record holder to head to Tallahassee, following in the path of Kellion Knibb and Grange.

She will pursue a business degree at FSU, she said, and one of the reasons she chose the northern Florida-based school was the weather and the facilities there.