Growing up in the heart of Amish country, Andrea Melhorn ‘15 began her track and field career as a high school first year at Donegal High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She soon discovered that she not only loved the sport, but also excelled in all throwing events. Once in college, she continued throwing weight and shot put for indoor track; and hammer, discus, shot put, and javelin in outdoor track. Andrea has qualified for Indoor and Outdoor Track Nationals every season since her first year of college. She has placed at Nationals every year, often within the top five, and holds the school record for weight and hammer. In addition, she was picked as the NCCAA Athlete of the Week.
While Andrea has a deep love for track and a variety of other sports, such as downhill skiing, she said that it is the people who make it worthwhile. As captain of the Houghton Track and Field team, she is constantly encouraging and supporting her teammates. However, Andrea takes it a step beyond to truly encapsulate the slogan of Houghton Athletics: “Excellence for the Glory of God.”
As Cara Davenport ‘15, a teammate and close friend of Andrea’s, puts it: “She consistently improves and is always making new goals for herself and setting the bar higher. It’s encouraging and inspiring to see the way that she interacts with the throwers from other teams, and her camaraderie and investment in them epitomizes the team’s mission of outreach to other schools at meets.”
Andrea would like to continue with athletics after her time at Houghton as a collegiate coach. Her coach, Robert Smalley, has been “one of the most influential people in my life at Houghton,” Andrea said. “He is the epitome of a servant leader and I strive to be more like him. He is such an example of what grace should look like; he puts his athletes first.” She wants to coach because she sees sports as “a tool to teach more than just athletic abilities, but also learning about others, yourself, and God. You can teach morals through sports.”
For Andrea, track is not just for exercise, but rather a way she “experiences God’s joy.” Realizing that she can do sports for God puts so much purpose behind why she competes, she explained. Andrea credited part of this realization to a program she did in Spain during summer 2015 called Athletes in Action. The purpose of the program was to spread the Gospel through training with Spanish club teams and competing against them. At the end of the program, she participated in an ultimate training camp involving 24 hours of non-stop intense physical activity, modeled along the same timeframe as the Stations of the Cross. “Experiencing a snippet of Christ’s pain made me understand so much more about the deepness of Christ’s love for me on the cross.”
Majoring in Spanish, she carries her love for athletics into her academics with minors in business and sports ministry. While she wants to eventually go on to coaching collegiately, she has some exciting plans for the meantime, such as working for a fishery in Alaska, as well as trying out for the US Women’s Olympic bobsled team this summer. However, her Lancaster roots still shine through as she hopes to one day “grow old on a farm making warm chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren.”