Dana Pounds Lyon
Dana Pounds was the Associated Press Kentucky High School Female Athlete of the Year in 2007 when she played basketball and softball as well as threw the discus for Lexington Christian (future Olympian Tyson Gay was the state’s top male athlete the same year).
Pounds went to the Air Force Academy and won the NCAA javelin championship in 2005 and 2006 (she was fourth in 2004). She participated in the Olympic Trials in 2004 and 2008 but did not qualify for the Olympics. She was the runner-up at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials but missed the Olympic qualifying standard by two inches.
Dana Pounds Lyon will be inducted into the Drake Relays Athletes Hall of Fame during Thursday on the Drake campus. She is the only athlete ever to win three titles in the Drake Relays women’s university-college javelin from 2004-06. Competing as a post-collegian in the 2007 Drake Relays, she threw 182 feet — three feet farther than the winner of the university-college event.
She was a three-time Mountain West Conference champion and was named the outstanding performer of the 2005 Mountain West Conference outdoor meet. As a senior, she had a school and conference-record throw of 195-8 — the best collegiate throw in the nation during the 2006 season.
Lyon also won multiple titles at the North American, Central American and Caribbean (NACAC) Championships during that span.
She served two terms on the Air Force World Class Athlete Program (2006-08, 2012-14) and developed into one of the nation’s top throwers, ranked No. 2 in the U.S. from 2005-08. She claimed the national title in the javelin at the 2007 USA Outdoor Championships and capped that year with a fourth-place finish at the Pan Am Games and a spot on the World Championship team in Osaka, Japan.
Lyon was inducted into the U.S. Air Force Academy Hall of Fame in 2015. She was an assistant coach with the Air Force Academy from 2017-22 working with throwers as well as managing the strength/conditioning program for the team.
Her husband, Capt. David Lyon, was killed in 2013 when a car bomb exploded near his convoy in Kabul. He was a 2008 Air Force Academy graduate and was serving in a combat advisory capacity with Afghan National Army commandos when he was killed.
