Hakeem Valles was four seasons into his college career at Monmouth and still looking for his first catch when, early in training camp, he went to the coaching staff and asked for a position change.
A wide receiver his first three years at the school, Valles was stuck behind one of the Hawks’ best players, Neil Sterling, and in no position to overtake him on the depth chart. At tight end, well, it didn’t take long for Valles to impress.
A few days after the position change, during Monmouth’s first scrimmage of the summer, Valles ran a simple leak route that had his coaches nodding in approval.
Later that night, as they watched film of the play from practice, Monmouth assistant head coach and tight ends coach Jeff Gallo said the group mused about Valles’ NFL potential.
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“We ran like a play where we kind of leaked the tight end to the backside flat and the speed he did that coming across the ball, I think myself, offensive coordinator, our whole offensive staff said, ‘Yeah, this is what it looks like. This is what an NFL kid looks like, now let’s see if we can get him in all the other areas to look like an NFL kid,’” Gallo said. “I know I looked right at the (offensive coordinator) and said, ‘Yep.’ He was different than the other kids we had at the position and he was similar to some other kids that had been at least in NFL camps. Probably a little twitchier than those other guys.”
Valles caught the first pass of his college career a few weeks later, against Delaware State on Aug. 30, 2014. A week after that, he scored his first touchdown.
He finished that season with 18 catches for 255 yards, had 22 more receptions the next season, and after two years of bouncing between active rosters and NFL practice squads, appears on the verge of landing a job with the Lions when they cut their roster to 53 players on Saturday.
Heading into Thursday’s preseason finale,Valles is third on the Lions with seven catches for 79 yards, and his receiving skills are unique to a tight end room that has no accomplished pass catchers.
Luke Willson, Levine Toilolo and Michael Roberts, the Lions’ top three players at the position entering training camp, combined for just 31 catches last season.
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“I’m still on just a day-by-day grind cause you’ve got to take the highs with the highs and you’ve got to take the lows with the lows,” Valles said. “I’ve had a couple decent games, and they were decent games, but I made some bad plays, too, in those games. You’ve got to just stay even keeled.”
One of the more unknown players on the Lions’ 90-man roster — playing at Monmouth, an FCS school, will do that — Valles (pronounced: Vuh-LESS) is also one of the most interesting.
He grew up in the blue-collar town of Sicklerville, N.J., where his father worked for the New Jersey State Police and his mother taught autistic children in preschool.
He went to high school at a prominent New Jersey boarding school, the Peddie School, where tuition runs $60,600 — he was accepted to the school through A Better Chance, a non-profit program that helps place academically-gifted students of color into prep schools across the country — and his classmates were the sons and daughters of CEOs, Wall Street moguls and even Cambodian royalty.
Valles, who was elected class president as a senior, said attending the Peddie School helped open his eyes to a world of possibilities beyond south Jersey.
“It’s a big socio-economic difference,” he said. “But a kid like me, getting to hang around kids like that — all my friends were some of the most humble kids I’ve ever met, but it was eye-opening to now notice this is actually what I can do in life. Or I can I actually do things, and go to their summer homes and, ‘Oh wow.’ It was nothing but motivation in that sense.”
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A star basketball and football player in high school, Valles, who played quarterback and safety as a prep, missed his senior football season with a torn shoulder labrum that caused schools like Boston College, UConn and Delaware to stop recruiting him.
Monmouth maintained its offer after hosting Valles for a summer camp, and Valles signed with the school as a wide receiver.
At Monmouth, Valles quickly found his niche off the field, leading the school’s famous Monmouth Mob cheering section in basketball, but languished on the field until he joined Gallo’s room of tight ends.
“I primarily lived my first three, four years in (the shadows of Sterling, now a tight end with the New York Jets), and then going into my fourth year, I wanted to get a fifth year in college,” Valles said. “I know I wasn’t going to get one if I didn’t actually play or do anything, so I went to my tight end coach and asked him what he thought about me moving to tight end.
“I was like, ‘I still want to play.’ Like, ‘I don’t care if I’m playing center, guard or punter, I just want to get on the field,’ and there was a void at tight end.”
Gallo joked that he and Valles spent so much time together during Valles’ first year at the position that the two were practically “married to each other.” They watched film together, sometimes until midnight. They ate meals together as Valles tried to pack on pounds. And by the fall of 2015, Valles had settled in as a legit receiving threat at the position and NFL scouts were starting to take notice.
“He kind of sat me down that (first) offseason and was just, ‘Look, I’m going to be real with you. You have what it takes to be an NFL tight end,’” Valles said.
That talk served as both motivation for a player who did not catch a pass his first three college seasonsand confirmation of what he always thought he’d become.
Valles signed with the Arizona Cardinals as an undrafted free agent in 2016, split his time that fall between the Cardinals’ practice squad and active roster, and joined the Lions last September after he was waived in Arizona.
The Lions thought enough of Valles to pay him more than the practice-squad minimum salary last year, and when injuries struck late in the season, they promoted him for a Week 17 win over the Green Bay Packers, where he played 18 snaps as the team’s No. 3 tight end.
"Thought I played pretty well in that last game," Valles said. "And then went into the offseason and just been working my tail off this offseason. We got back, new coaching system, kind of new program, new culture and all of that, and it’s been awesome. Just been kind of taking every day just rep by rep, play by play, just trying to earn a spot, earn a job."
On Thursday, four years to the day that he caught his first college pass, Valles will try and leave one last impression in his bid for a roster spot.
Along with his seven catches so far this preseason, he's impressed coaches with his willingness to block, and in last week's win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he was rewarded with a bigger role on special teams.
Valles, who had his first daughter earlier this month, said he's got his blinders on when it comes to making the team, but he knows what's at stake this week.
“You always got to have that 1-AA chip on your shoulder and I plan to carry that with me my entire career,” Valles said. “But yeah, I guess you got to pinch yourself, and a guy who, I got my first catch my senior year of college and now we’re here, it’s pretty cool.”
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