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This is the second of three stories on the UC student-athletes who achieved All-American status during the 2014-15 school year.
By Bill Koch
Go.BEARCATS.com
CINCINNATI -- One of the few things that Adrian Valles knew about the Queen City when he agreed to attend the University of Cincinnati was that the city hosts a major tennis tournament every summer. Valles is a tennis fan, particularly a fan of fellow countryman Rafael Nadal.
Beyond that, he knew only what Kris Mack, then the UC track coach, had told him during the recruiting process and what he could glean from his research about the school. His relationship with Mack was enough to get him to leave his home in Pamplona, Spain, only to find during his first week at UC that Mack was leaving to coach at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California.
Valles was on his own, more than 4,000 miles from home, wondering what to do next. He could have gone back to Spain to look for another school, but he had come too far to turn around and head home after one week, so he decided to stay at UC.
"I've talked to him a little bit about that, the transition from thinking that you're going to be here with Coach Mack to all of a sudden you don't know if you're going to have a coach," said Sam Kranz, who's in his first year working with UC's pole vaulters and horizontal jumpers. "The big fear from our staff was, are we going to lose this kid? Is he going to search somewhere else? But I think he had an open mind to it. He just said, OK, coaches change. I'm already here in America. My plane ticket isn't until June, so I guess I'll just see what happens."
Said Valles: "Sometimes bad things happen, but if you wait until you are patient, good things will come. A new coach came and right now I'm very happy with him."
Valles has meshed with Kranz to finish sixth in the NCAA Indoor Championships on March 13 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he cleared 17 feet, 10.5 inches. He was one of only two freshmen to compete in the meet. He has already earned a berth in the World Championships this summer in Beijing and is the American Athletic Conference champion in both the indoor and outdoor pole vault, having cleared 18 feet, 6.5 inches at the conference outdoor meet, which was his world qualifying mark and is currently tied for third nationally. He owns the UC record in both the indoor (17 feet, 11.25 inches) and outdoor events (18 feet, 6.5 inches).
Keep in mind that Valles is only a freshman.
"I think he's going to be a major force to be reckoned with in the NCAA," Kranz said. "Next year he'll still have [Tennessee's] Jake Blankenship and [Akron's] Shawn Barber [to contend with]. Both jumped 19 feet and they're juniors, so they'll be here next year as well. But if his progress continues the way it is, he can at least be a competitor with that top-end group and then when they're gone, the door is wide open for him. There's nobody in his age class who really sticks with him."
Valles, 20, is an industrial management major who chose to leave Spain for the United States because, he said, "It was a great place for doing sport and continuing study at the same time. In Europe, sometimes it's very hard to link them, to do them at the same time. The sport is in private clubs instead of universities. There's no connection between them. I went to an agency that helps international students be recruited by universities. Coach Mack, who was the head coach of the track team last year, he sent me an email trying to recruit me."
The Spaniard embraced pole vaulting six years ago after he "watched every athlete. I did every event and then I tried pole vaulting. I was good at that and I started to be focused on it." Four years later, he won the under-18 division in the 2013 Spanish National Championships, so when he agreed to attend UC it was a very big deal for the Bearcats, who knew they were getting an accomplished athlete at a young age with plenty of room for growth.
But not even Valles expected to make such an impact as a freshman.
"I expected to improve," he said, "but just a little bit. I improved much more than I expected. That was a surprise for me. Finishing sixth is unbelievable. In the opening height, I was a little bit nervous, but after I cleared it, I started being more confident. When I got around 5.40 (meters), 5.45, I realized that I was going to be an All-American so I was very happy. I didn't believe it.
"For an international athlete, it's harder to explain. I think for people from America it means more. It's like a dream. But for an international athlete, you don't realize the importance of it until you get it."
Valles understood English before coming to America, but had to learn to be more fluent speaking it. One of six international athletes on the UC roster, he says he talks to his father, Jose Ramos, an attorney and his mother, Iciar, an accountant, a couple of times a week. Having other athletes around him who are also far from home in a foreign land have made the adjustment easier for him. His roommate is long jumper Sergio Acera Villanueva from Barcelona. They knew each other in Spain after competing for the Spanish National Team in the European Junior Championships.
The 6-foot-4 Valles has impressive speed in his approach and grasps coaching quickly, according to Kranz, who says he's also fearless, a basic requirement for top-flight vaulters.
When you break down the sport, Kranz said, it sounds a little crazy -- and dangerous. As Kranz explained it, you're running at very close to top speed and then leaving the ground in the hope that the tip of the 16- or 17-foot pole made it into a little hole in the ground. When pole vaulters allow themselves to be aware of all that, they sometimes slow down just a bit or don't hit quite as hard or get a little soft with their arms. That's when they can get hurt, which in turn affirms their fear.
Valles understands there's an element of fear that can creep into vaulters to create a mental block, but he has never experienced it.
"It's more important to be fearless from the start than being able to overcome it," he said. "Sometimes that's very hard. But it wasn't for me."
According to Valles, the type of training that athletes receive in America versus Europe sometimes requires a period of adjustment, but that didn't bother him either because he had used similar techniques in Spain.
It seems very little bothers Valles, who comes across as a young man who's very sure of himself and casually shrugs off the types of adversity that cause problems for other athletes. He's soft-spoken, pauses carefully as he expresses himself in English, and has very high aspirations. Given his demeanor, it's no surprise that he didn't let the change in coaches at UC drive him back to Spain. He's not built that way.
There's still a lot for him to accomplish in college, but Valles' ultimate goal is to compete in the Olympics for Spain. Kranz says he has a realistic chance to get there if he keeps working and improving.
"There's really not a number that I could put out that I think he's capable of, but I know that that number would be pretty high," Kranz said. "For him to jump this well this early, especially making the transition from training in Spain to now training in America, the culture shock that he must have gone through, he's handled it extremely well."
Bill Koch covered UC athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBEARCATS.com as featured columnist in January, 2015.