Before Camryn Rogers was the reigning Olympic champion in the hammer throw, she was a high schooler in Canada hoping to be recruited by Coach Mohamad “Mo” Saatara at UC Berkeley.
“Cal was kind of known as this throw school. Mo was known as a really good throws coach, and Berkeley almost felt like this sort of untouchable place,” Rogers said. “Like, if you get recruited to Berkeley, then you are really, really good.”
She described getting her first message from Saatara as an “I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening moment,” and she said committing to Cal at the end of her official visit was an easy choice.
The rest is history: Rogers finished her career at Cal as a three-time NCAA champion, NCAA record thrower, and World Silver medalist in the hammer throw. Since graduating, she has become the reigning World and Olympic champion in the discipline.
Rogers isn’t the only thrower from Cal to reach such heights in recent years. Saatara coached four athletes at the Paris Olympics, including discus world record holder Mykolas Alekna ’25, who won silver in the event. And in the past 11 years that Saatara has coached the Bears, his throwers have taken seven school records, produced 34 NCAA qualifying and 26 NCAA All-American marks, and won four NCAA championships.
There are many things about Cal that could contribute to a good throws program: the temperate weather is near-perfect for training, and the diverse population at the school allows international and domestic students alike to feel at home. But according to athletes and observers alike, the most important piece is the current man at the helm of the program.
“Certainly, the single biggest factor in how good they’ve been recently is Mo,” said Jeff Faraudo, a longtime sports reporter for the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News. “He’s just an extraordinary coach.”
Cal’s history of great throwers
Cal has produced several great throwers over the school’s history: in fact, the school’s first-ever national champion in any sport was Jack Merchant, who won the shot put and the hammer throw at the 1922 NCAA Track and Field Championships and went on to compete in the hammer throw at the 1924 Olympic games.
In the following years, standout throwers would come through Cal every decade.
From 1930 to 1942, Cal javelin throwers won the NCAA title five times. But despite having a few standout All-American throwers like Dave Maggard ’62 (who later became Cal’s athletic director) and Bruce Kennedy ’73, Cal didn’t get its next NCAA title until 1988 when Kari Nisula won Cal’s first discus national title. Ramon Jimenez-Gaona ’93 was a three-time NCAA runner-up in the discus, but it was another dry spell until Martin Maric ’09 won the next NCAA title in the discus in 2009.
Cal did not win another NCAA title in the throws for a decade.
“It’s been a really big history, but it’s been spotty: a couple of guys, a couple of girls here and there over a period of time, and then it would kind of, you know, go away for a while,” said Saatara. “Because track and field has such limited resources, it’s been sort of a situation of investment. At the end of the day, if you invest in the event group, you can draw really good athletes.”
Saatara joined Cal in 2013 after coaching at the University of Michigan and the University of Northern Arizona. He admitted that he hadn’t been thinking seriously about Cal because of the recent lack of success.
“It was a program where the throws had not been a major focus for quite a long time,” Saatara said. But he and his wife had grown up in California, and coming to Berkeley seemed like a good opportunity.
Since then, he’s developed the program into one of the top throwing powerhouses in the country, with Rogers ending the NCAA throws title drought in 2019.
Mo’s coaching style
Saatara’s athletes credit the program’s success to his coaching style, which is tailored to the individual athlete rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all program.
“His willingness to learn and to change along with his athletes is quite amazing,” Rogers said. “Mo is always learning and trying to figure out, you know, how his athletes operate, how they think, and what works for them and what doesn’t. Then, ‘what [is] the best thing for them competitively?’ Like, ‘are they a relaxed thrower? Do they need to be stressed?’”
Saatara knows that his athletes develop differently: sometimes, he will tell athletes to plug their ears during practice if a piece of advice he is giving to one won’t be helpful to another.
Rogers also emphasized the support that Saatara gives his athletes, a trait she realized when he stuck by her side after she failed to live up to her national ranking as a freshman.
“He was like, ‘Camryn, we’re a team,’” Rogers recalled. “It speaks so much to his character and the belief and faith he has in you as you’re growing and coming into your own as an athlete.”
Discus thrower Elena Bruckner, one of “Mo’s pros,”—professional athletes who train under Saatara—said it’s this flexibility and support that helped her make a comeback after a disappointing college career at University of Texas.
“He doesn’t just coach this one perfect system and say, ‘fit into this box, if you don’t, you’re the problem,’” she said. “He really works to find out what works best for each one of his individual athletes.”
Texas had a rigid “one perfect system” for everyone, Bruckner said, and it didn’t seem to work for her. When her coach there said she couldn’t stay to train after graduating in 2021, she reached out to Saatara, who threw his unrelenting support behind her.
“He was on board from the start,” Bruckner said. “He was up for the challenge, and wanted to buy into it with me.”
It took time and hard work: Saatara broke her throw down “to the studs” in that first year and she wasn’t performing well. But she trusted him, and eventually it started coming together: she placed third at the US at the 2023 US championships in the discus, making the World Championship team. In 2024, she placed 6th at the Olympic Trials in the discus, just missing out on a spot in Paris.
A culture of excellence
His first year at Cal, Saatara said he focused on developing a “good culture.”
“That’s where everything starts,” he said. “If you have a good set of standards that you work by, and you establish expectations of what success is and what goals are for success, it kind of sets the tone for everybody.”
Saatara said that Cal has a simple program, without the fancy equipment or locker room some other high powered programs have. It’s a team made up of international and domestic athletes, stand-out high schooler throwers and walk-ons. But Saatara’s expectations of success leads kids of all abilities to be able to reach a very high level.
“I think what’s really impressive about what Coach Mo has done is that you look at his group of throwers, and we don’t all look the same,” said Bruckner. “We’re not all the typical build and body of what you would see in a top, elite thrower, but he’s found ways to find success with each and every one of us.”
Rogers said that the culture of “like-minded excellence” inspires the group to continuously work to get better.
“I think that’s a very sort of special feeling to have,” Rogers said, adding that it’s the high regard in which they hold their group and their training that sets them apart from other schools.
And Saatara does it all: from structuring the throwing and lifting workouts to recruiting to traveling to international meets.
“That man is busy. That man needs a break. He needs a nap,” she joked.
But Cal might not let him. After all, he seems to be the key to their success.
“As long as they have him—and they better figure out a way to keep him—they’re going to be elite in the throws,” said Faraudo.
