North Jersey Female Athlete of the Week delivers her best throws to repeat as double-champion

Layla Giordano has always been an athlete.

"I don't remember a time when I wasn't doing multiple sports often at the same time,'' she said. "I was in basketball in second or third grade, I played soccer, softball and even tried lacrosse for a season as a kid.''

But except for basketball, none of them stuck, until she got to middle school in Northvale, found volleyball and began to throw the shot put.

"By the time we were in seventh or eighth grade, people could tell that (twin sister) Maya and I were two of the best athletes in town,'' she remembers. "We were just bigger, stronger and faster.''

The sisters did every sport together, and from their first day at Old Tappan High School, they were varsity athletes, first in volleyball and then in basketball and track. And that's when the "experts" began to weigh in about their athletic futures.

"About the only coaches who encouraged to keep doing three sports were Coaches Landeck (OT volleyball coach Melissa), the Dunns (basketball coach Brian and throws coach Peter) and Burns (OT head girls track coach Dave),'' said Layla. "Every other club coach and a lot of people said to succeed at the next level, we had to pick one sport.''

The sisters resisted.

"We knew we were capable of getting there in any of three sports and out competitive spirit, athletic ability and work ethic would take us where we wanted to go,'' she says.

The fact that the Golden Knights won often in each sport didn't hurt either. The volleyball team reached the state finals in the twins' sophomore and the basketball team won league titles the last three years and made the Bergen Final Four twice. But by the end of sophomore spring, it was clear that Layla's athletic future lay in the throws.

She didn't even throw the discus until her sophomore year, but two months later, she won the state group 3 title with a monstrous 139-6 throw that at the time was the fourth furthest throw in Bergen County history. That helped the Golden Knights win their first ever outdoor track title. And even though she "only" finished 10th at the State Meet of Champions a week later, she hasn't lost to a New Jersey athlete in any meet since.

She broke the Bergen County record of 144 feet in her first meet as a junior, throwing 146-9 and has broken it four subsequent times to date, winning the New Balance National championships in Philadelphia with a toss of 170-4, third longest in state history. She also came back from a sixth-place finish in the group 3 shot put, to win the State Meet of Champions in that event as well.

By last June, the colleges were swarming. Duke, Harvard, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio State were among the dozens of high-powered universities seeking her talents, but the decision to go to Princeton was pretty easy to make.

"This was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up,'' said Giordano, who will major in financial engineering, a business and engineering hybrid degree that will likely lead to Wall Street after graduation.

But there's a few weeks of high school track left and some goals yet to accomplish -- the state record of 182-8 in the discus for one, and perhaps becoming just the second girl to go back-to-back in both the shot and discus at the SMOC.

She's already achieved one long term goal, set when she first entered Old Tappan and looked at the gym wall. "I saw the wall and said I want to be remembered like those kids on the wall,'' Giordano said. "I'm always looking to get to the top of the list and I wanted to up there with all those other great kids from Old Tappan.''

Was that ever in doubt?

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Layla Giordano

Sport: Track and field

School: Old Tappan

Class: Senior. Age: 17

Accomplishment: Won both the shot put and discus at the Bergen Meet of Champions for the second straight year, setting a Bergen County record in the shot of 50-0 and throwing a season's best 167-4 in the discus.

Also nominated: Savannah Czornomor of Passaic Tech, Emily Ignacio of Leonia, Eliza Mullen of Ridgefield Park, and Erika Stewart of Park Ridge for softball; and Julia Tozduman of Lyndhurst, Kylie Castillo of Ridgefield, Mika Tampadong of Becton, and Alexandra Samperi of Hasbrouck Heights for track and field.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bergen Record Female Athlete of the Week: Layla Giordano, Old Tappan