He had not advanced beyond the junior varsity three years into his baseball career at Free State High, so Tye Carter decided to go out for track with the modest goal of earning a varsity letter.

He and friend Tanner Pfortmiller went with the sprints coach on the first day of practice, when jumpers, throwers and distance runners each went with their group’s coach.

Carter recalls it being about “a week-and-a-half” into track season that he and Pfortmiller reported to throws coach Darrell Andrew and informed him they wanted to try the javelin.

At that point in his life, Carter said, he never had thrown the javelin and didn’t know anybody who had thrown it. What happened from there is the sort of story reserved for fairy-tale books, not high school track and field record books.

Free State senior Tye Carter competes in the javelin throw during the Sunflower League Championships Friday, May 15, 2015, at LHS.

By the time Free State’s season had ended, Carter had set the school record in the event and later won the Class 6A state title, despite rarely throwing the javelin in practice over the second half of the season in order to protect sore ribs.

During that whirlwind ascension from college-bound football player to state-champion thrower, Carter informed the football coach at Hamline University, a Div. III school in Minnesota, that he no longer planned to attend the school to play football and scheduled visits to Div. I schools, where he intends to throw the javelin.

Carter already has visited Nebraska and is in the process of scheduling visits to Colorado and Kansas University. Johnson County Community College began recruiting him after seeing him compete at a meet.

Carter recalled his and Pfortmiller’s first meeting with Andrew, a week-and-a-half into the season:

“Where have you been?”

“We’re sprinters, and we don’t know what we want to do yet.”

Andrew showed them the basics of how to throw and kept an eye on them as they joined this season’s unusually big group of javelin throwers that day.

“I threw a few times, and when we were getting done, coach Andrew came up to me, asked me what my name was again, and said I reminded him a lot of our record-holder (Nick Witmer, 2006), said I had the same body type,” Carter said. “He told me I needed to stay up there.”

Instead, Carter alternated days between the sprinters and javelin throwers.

Carter said he threw 130 feet that first day.

“I thought, ‘This is hard. I don’t know if I can throw farther than that.’ The guys who were on varsity were throwing 150, so I thought they were super-good,” Carter said.

Then in what he said was his first time throwing the javelin in a meet, he won with a mark of 147-1 in a dual vs. Lawrence High. The victory made him decide to give up sprinting and devote all of his training to the javelin. Still, the inner-dialogue colored with surprise and a hint of self-doubt continued: “I thought, ‘I probably can’t throw farther than that.’ Then the next meet, I threw, like, 165, and I was, like, ‘I probably can’t throw farther than that.’ Then the next meet I throw 182: ‘I definitely can’t throw farther than that.’ And then I throw 187, and I was, like, ‘There’s no way I can get to 190, and then I throw 193, get the (school) record, and at that point was when I thought I could get better.”

Carter set his school record of 193-2 on May 1. It was then he suffered an injury to his ribs throwing, which limited him in practice for the remainder of the season.

Of all the remarkable accomplishments this past week by Lawrence athletes in high school state championships — the LHS girls track won the state title, Free State won the state baseball title, Free State finished second in boys and girls in track — Carter’s was the one nobody could have seen coming just a couple of months ago.

It will be interesting to see how far he can launch the javelin once he refines his technique and practices it daily in the years to come.

“I think this kid could be throwing 220 or better just with a little experience, a little time,” Andrew said. “The thing I like most about him is he’s willing to do anything you ask him to do. He’s a real competitor.”

All those years throwing a football as a quarterback in youth sports and a baseball as a shortstop in younger years, an outfielder and pitcher in high school, Carter never knew it was a spear he was meant to throw all the while.