Topic: News: Vineland native Aaron Adams wins national weightlifting championship

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Vineland native Aaron Adams wins national weightlifting championship
By Scott Chappelear

Aaron Adams was in the right place at the right time and heard the right thing.

Because of a PA announcement that Adams heard and responded to in middle school, nine years later the Vineland High School graduate is preparing for his senior year at Louisiana State University-Shreveport and the 2009 World Weightlifting Championships in Goyang, South Korea after winning the U.S. National Weightlifting Championships in Chicago last month.

"I was in middle school, and there was a. É gym teacher at the school," Adams said from Shreveport. "They had a little weightlifting club after school, to keep kids out of trouble. They made an announcement over the loudspeaker. I was a wrestler at the time, my dad was my coach, and I felt like I needed to get stronger. He thought it was stupid, but I got pretty good."

Obviously.

Adams began wrestling in second grade, and was a 130-pounder for Sacred Heart as a junior. But weightlifting was becoming a bigger part of his life, and he was having plenty of success with more than a dozen titles at competitions around the state and country.

So he made the choice to quit wrestling, and less than two years later earned a full weightlifting scholarship to LSUS, one of the powerhouse programs in the country and home to the USA Weightlifting Development Center.

"It was a nice little juggling act I had to do for a while," said Adams. "My freshman and sophomore years I could have made the junior world (weightlifting) team, but it was the same weekend as districts and I went there instead.

"It's weird, I always thought since I was in second grade I was going to get a wrestling scholarship. Once (weightlifting success) became a reality, I just went where the best athletes were, people better than myself. In weightlifting and life in general, it's a different atmosphere down here and I'm glad I got acquainted with it."

Adams credits his LSUS coaches and teammates with helping him continue an almost meteoric rise through the sport.

Already a multiple U.S. record-holder at the junior level and member of several national junior teams, he became the top-ranked junior in the country last year while breaking junior national records for the 62 kilo weight class in the clean and jerk (150 kilos) and total weight (261 kilos including snatch) at the U.S. Junior Nationals in Chattanooga last February.

Just over a month later, he captured his first national collegiate title as a sophomore. He repeated the feat this April on his home campus but, now a 21-year-old, his eye was already on the national championship in Chicago in June at which the Pan-American Championships would be held simultaneously.

He wasn't in the top flight of lifters at the competition. But his combined weight of 259 kilos for the snatch and clean-and-jerk had been on the board throughout the ÔA' session before he found out it had held up for the national title and earned him fourth in the Pan-Am meet.

"I was done and posted my number before the best guys went," said Adams, who had left the arena to go out with his family and rushed back to take the podium. "There were three other Americans in the A session, and I beat all of them. That's the first time that happened.

"Pan-Am is above and beyond, some of the best lifters in my weight class are from South America. I can't understand a word they're saying, but the most important thing to all of us is the same thing. It's indescribable. My friend Kendrick (LSUS teammate Kendrick Farris), who was in the Olympics, he compared it to the Olympic Village."

While Adams has traveled to far-flung places like China, Colombia, the Czech Republic and Greece for competition and notes that he's learned pick-up lines in four languages along the way he has never achieved this level of success in international competition.

He is now ranked No. 5 in the country and currently set to be a member of the U.S. team that travels to Korea later this year. But even in the unlikely event he gets bumped after the secondary qualifier later this summer, he's not worried about the future even the possibility of being a part of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London or how far he might still have to go to be a contender there.

Adams doesn't think a lot about the past either, though it's still amazing to think how a single decision changed his life so radically. But he's one to live in the moment, and most of them these days are pretty great.

"I look for those key things, small and insignificant to most people," Adams said. "It's hit me a couple of times, but I really try not to do that. I try to keep myself in the moment as much as possible. I still think about it, what would have happened if I'd kept wrestling and not done it. But I try not to think about that either, it's in the past.

"I'm 45 or 50 pounds off the world record, that's a load. It takes time É or a really good day where gravity isn't working. I don't see why (I can't do it), it's a matter of how much you can push your body without it pushing back. I take it one day at a time, there's no reason to rush."