Les Sherrill knew it the whole time. Doing something about it was a matter of timing.

His daughter, Hannah, played three years of tennis. She joined basketball and water polo teams, having fun sharing experiences with teammates but never excelling. Finally, in the middle of her junior year at Le Jardin Academy, Les took his girl to the park and picked up a coconut. He showed her the basic shot put technique and urged her to give it a try.

His girl’s effort, as she remembers, was less than stellar, maybe 25 feet. Not much, but the feeling of it leaving her fingers changed her life.

“My dad always talked about how he thought I would be good at it, but he never once pushed me,” Hannah Sherrill said. “It wasn’t until he actually put the coconut in my hand and made me try that I realized how much I loved it. Just the second I threw it I knew that this is my new passion.”

She quickly left the coconut behind and got a shot put, discus, hammer and weight. She won the shot put and discus in the first meet she entered and has been winning ever since.

She has broken virtually every ILH record available to her in both the discus and shot put and has the state-meet discus record in her sights on Friday and Saturday at Keaau.

In the discus, she has thrown farther than Campbell’s Joan Gano’s mark of 160 feet, 3 inches (achieved in 1982) many times in practice, but her farthest effort in competition is a 159-09 at the Ralph Martinson Invitational this year.

“In practice I am throwing that far,” Hannah Sherrill said. “In competition, my technique kind of falls apart because of the nerves. All I need to throw far is hit the position right and it will go.”

Beyond that, she has the second-longest spin in the nation behind Shelbi Vaughan of Texas. Vaughan’s national mark of 191-6 is the gold standard and safely out of Sherrill’s reach for now. Vaughan has been throwing since elementary school and is poised to become the first high school girl to exceed 200 feet.

Because Sherrill is the only track and field athlete at Le Jardin (competing for Pac-Five), her progress has become a project for Hawaii’s entire track and field community. Kailua lets her practice on its rings, and she has a personal throwing coach who works at the University of Hawaii’s office of student services. But her mentor is no desk jockey googling “how to throw a discus” before each lesson.

Leslie Coons is a two-time American record-holder and five-time All-American from her days at USC, and she competed in the Olympic Trials five times. She first worked with Sherrill in June of last year and found a big, strong girl who could throw the discus about 60 feet but looked like an amateur doing it.

“It is going to be up to Hannah how far she throws,” Coons said. “But she works tirelessly and she is a very smart girl. She is still a young thrower, but she really wants to understand. She wants to know everything about the sport.”

Hannah Sherrill will go to the University of Washington in the fall, after turning down the other powers in the Pac-12. She was pretty set on going to USC and had exhausted all of her official visits when she got an email from the Huskies’ coach. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to look and fell in love with the program immediately.

Despite her admiration for strength coach Tommy Heffernan and the track and field program, the University of Hawaii was never an option because Sherrill wanted to get off the rock from the outset. As much as she loves her native Kailua, there is an entire world to explore. She will compete at the Junior Nationals in Bloomington, Ind., this summer, with an eye toward the 2016 Olympics.

And to think, two months ago she was the strange girl next to the public restrooms at a park in Halawa every day spinning on the sidewalk and unleashing a weighted disc as far as most people can throw a Frisbee.

And it all started with a coconut. Had Les Sherrill waited just a few months more, it may have never happened. Had he started too soon, it may have fizzled out before it began.

“It wasn’t planned or anything,” Les Sherrill said. “It just happened that one day and the best thing is for her to find her passion. Some people never find it.”