Valeanu Looks to Add Exclamation Point at NCAA Meet

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — University of Virginia graduate student Estel Valeanu’s collegiate track & field career will end Saturday in Eugene, Ore., where she’ll throw the discus at the NCAA women’s championships. But Valeanu, who arrived in the United States nearly six years ago to attend Harvard University, isn’t leaving UVA.

In the fall, she’ll begin pursuing a doctorate in civil engineering on Grounds. A native of Israel, Valeanu already has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Harvard and a master’s in finance from LSU, and she’s nearly completed her requirements for a master’s in civil engineering from UVA.

Her plans after she receives her Ph.D.?

“I’m not really sure yet,” said Valeanu, who’s interested in hydrology and water resources. “I’m still looking at options. I really do enjoy the engineering part, so hopefully I’ll keep doing something more technical. I’m not really ruling out becoming a postdoc and a professor at the end, but I don’t know yet.”

Her focus this week is on athletics. In 2023, her final season at Harvard, Valeanu placed sixth in the discus at NCAAs, and she finished ninth last year for LSU. She’s hoping to leave Eugene this weekend as a first-team All-American, an honor accorded to the top eight finishers in each event.

This is the second straight year NCAAs have been held at Hayward Field on the University of Oregon’s campus, and Valeanu believes her familiarity with that historic venue should help her Saturday.

“I think NCAAs are always stressful,” she said. “But I know how the track looks, I know the circle, I know what to expect. It’s just a great advantage. And I’m also trying to come with a mindset that you can’t lose something you don’t have. You only have it after you compete. So I’m not trying to come with no expectations, but just do your best and the rest will come.”

The NCAA Championships start Wednesday. Eleven Wahoos are competing in Eugene: Valeanu, Margot Appleton (1500m, 5000m), Annika Kelly (hammer throw), Celia Rifaterra (high jump), Jenny Schilling (10,000m) and Carly Tarentino (high jump) for the women, and Will Daley (5,000m), Keyandre Davis (hammer throw), Gary Martin (1500m), Alex Sherman (400m hurdles) and Justin Wachtel (5000m) for the men.

Kelly, a graduate of Princeton University who lived with Valeanu this year, will be making her first appearance at the NCAA Championships, as will Davis. Valeanu’s advice to her fellow throwers?

“Enjoy. Try not to be too stressful,” she said. “For me, I talk to people.”

Valeanu laughed. “My coach told me, ‘If I see you not talking, I know you’re stressed, I know it’s not going to go well.’ ”

Her throws coach at UVA is Brandon Amo, who was an assistant at Harvard in 2022-23, Valeanu’s final season at the Ivy League school.

“She works extremely hard,” Amo said. “She’s one of those kids you kind of have to prevent from [overworking] herself. If you tell her, ‘Hey, we can train seven days a week,’ she’s going to want to train seven days a week. But I think that’s what makes her good. She always wants to learn and wants to get better. She’s definitely one of the most motivated athletes I’ve coached. She definitely makes coaching fun and she always wants to be at the track.”

UVA head coach Vin Lananna said: “Estel and Coach Amo have developed a strong coach/athlete relationship. Our program has benefitted immensely from our outstanding group of throwers, especially Estel.”

At Harvard, Valeanu competed in only one event: the discus throw. Amo urged her to expand her skill set.

“Obviously, she’s super athletic and she doesn’t like to sit down,” said Amo, who’s in his second year at UVA. “She’s always moving around, and I remember at Harvard I was like, ‘You need to do more than one event.’ She only cared about the discus, because at Harvard she got recruited to throw the discus, and that was her event, that was her baby, and I was like, ‘You need to do more events, because it’s gonna make you a better athlete long term.’ ”

Valeanu heeded Amo’s advice at her next stop. At LSU, she added the hammer throw and the shot put to her repertoire. But when she arrived at UVA, she heard another message from Amo.

“I was like, ‘We should just mainly focus on the discus, because it’s even harder at the ACC level,’ ” Amo said. “And she was the first person to remind me, ‘Remember when I was at Harvard, you told me that I had to do multiple events? So I’m doing multiple events.’ ”

At the ACC Championships last month in Winston-Salem, N.C., Valeanu placed fourth in the discus, fifth in the shot put, and 10^th in the hammer to help the Cavaliers capture the team title for the first time since 1987. She qualified for the NCAA regional in all three events, “which is really unheard of,” Amo said.

This is the third straight spring Valeanu has been part of a team that won a conference championship outdoors.

“It was amazing,” Valeanu said. “Competing at a conference meet is just a different feeling. You don’t compete for yourself, you compete for the team, so it’s different kind of pressure that usually helps me throw well. So I was really happy that meet, and the fact that we won was like a great cherry on top.”

Valeanu is from Ramat Gan, a city near Tel Aviv. When she decided to attend college in the United States, she searched for a prestigious academic school where she could excel in track & field, “and Harvard had a really good throws team,” Valeanu said.

The COVID-19 pandemic made her undergraduate experience an unconventional one. After the pandemic hit in March 2020, late in her freshman year, Valeanu went home to Israel and began taking her classes online. She didn’t return to Cambridge, Mass., until September 2021, the start of her junior year.

With two years of eligibility remaining, she landed at LSU after graduating from Harvard in the spring of 2023. If Baton Rouge, La., provided a culture shock for Valeanu, “Harvard was also a culture shock for me, coming from Israel,” she said.

After a year at LSU, Valeanu said, she decided it wasn’t an ideal fit for her, and she began looking at other options.

“She is a UVA-type kid,” Amo said. “She’s very big into academics. I think that’s probably the most important thing for her.”

Valeanu narrowed the list of schools she was considering to two: Virginia and Rice, each of which offered an academic program that appealed to her. In the end, though, Amo’s presence in Charlottesville proved decisive.

“I knew Coach Amo before, so I was like, OK, it’s less risk,” Valeanu said, “because every time you go to a new place, you have to meet new people and understand your place and everything around it. And I ended up just choosing what I knew before.”

Military service is compulsory for most Israelis, and Valeanu spent two years in the Israel Defense Forces before starting college. As a result, she’s older than most of her UVA teammates. That hasn’t kept Valeanu, who turns 26 in August, from forming strong friendships in Charlottesville.

“A lot of people in my situation come with a closed mind and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m so old, I could never be friends with 18-year-olds, they don’t know anything, blah blah blah,’ ” Valeanu said, smiling. “But when you come with an open mind, you realize these are actually great people that I would be friends with. One of my best friends is 19, and as long as you come open-minded, you can be friends. It’s not like being 17 with a friend who’s 11 years old.”

She’ll continue training with Amo while pursuing her doctorate at UVA, and Valeanu hopes to represent Israel at the Olympics one day.

“I think she has the athletic tools and she has the work ethic,” Amo said. “As long as she doesn’t try to burn herself out with managing a Ph.D. and training, I definitely think that that’s extremely realistic.”

Valeanu has fallen hard for Charlottesville.

“It’s just a great community,” she said, “and also close to nature. It’s not a big city, but if I want big city, I can just go to D.C. or Richmond or whatever. I just love it here. There’s also—I wouldn’t say a big Jewish community—but a warm Jewish community.”

Valeanu is a regular at the weekly dinners hosted by Rabbi Shlomo Mayer and his wife, Channa, at the Chabad House on Grounds.

“I enjoy going every Friday night, or at least almost every Friday night, if I’m not competing,” Valeanu said. “It just feels like home away from home.”

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