The Weightlifting Club at Weber State University includes some very talented athletes, like WSU visual arts instructor Molly Morin, who qualified for the weightlifting Master’s Pan-American Games and the Master’s World Championship held in Finland this year.

“Both of those are international weight lifting competitions,” Morin said. “You have to be able to lift a qualifying weight in a competition in order to petition to go.”

Morin said that qualifying for the championships was one of her greatest achievements since joining the Weightlifting Club. However, Morin almost didn’t get a chance to qualify.

“I qualified at noon the day before I had to compete,” she said. “I hadn’t planned on being able to qualify for those bigger meets that fast. I hadn’t had any rest from my last practice. I had to make weight really quickly and it was a little crazy.”

Morin had to qualify in the Master’s Bracket, which is for individuals over the age of 35, then according to her weight and gender, a set amount of weight was calculated for her to lift. She qualified with a total weight of 117 kilograms, which is a little over 257 pounds accumulated through both events.

Morin was one of the early members of the club, having joined when she first heard about it through club founder Matt Barker.

“We were both working out at the gym together. I was doing my thing; she was doing hers,” Barker said. “But when we started talking, she got really interested, and since then, she’s been an active member of the team.”

The club consists of individuals who participate in Olympic-style weightlifting where, using two different moves, competitors attempt to lift the heaviest weight with the best form.

“In competitions we do two movements, the Snatch and the Clean-and-Jerk,” Morin said. “Your overall score is easy to calculate. You take the cumulative weight for those two movements and that’s your total. So the goal is to lift the most weight possible overhead as correctly as you can.”

Despite qualifying, she will not be going to the championships this year. Instead, she will stay in Ogden in order to support her team during the National University Championships, which will be held at Weber State this fall.

“There is estimated to be around 300-400 athletes competing this year,” Barker said. “We’re hoping to have 8-12 qualifiers to compete, which will be most of our team.”

Weber State’s qualifiers, along with every qualified student in the nation, will gather in Ogden from Sept. 24 to Sept. 27 to compete at the Wildcat Center.