At the ACC Championships last month in Winston-Salem, N.C., Valeanu placed fourth in the discus, fifth in the shot put, and 10th 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…