In late November 2021, Ruben Mesalles sat on the couch in a Solis apartment next to his captain, Eliot Hamill. St. Louis had just punched Duke men’s soccer in its home Koskinen Stadium, taking a 4-3 victory that knocked the Blue Devils out of the NCAA tournament. The Billikens’ final goal — the last forfeit of Mesalles’ freshman season — tasted as bitter as a College Cup tally can get: It was an own-goal by Duke.
Mesalles looked at his captain and said, “I don't know if we’ll ever have a season like this again.”
Freshman year, for Mesalles, had brought nothing but change. He bid farewell to a high-school captaincy for a rookie role on an all-star team. He quieted his attacking instincts and learned to play defense. He heard tough love, he wore Duke blue. He got used to winning, and then losing hit him like a truck.
Three years later, a senior Mesalles has mastered nearly everything that was so novel to his younger self. He plays defense as well as anyone in the ACC. He embraces tough love and is used to wearing blue. He has lost 13 games but let most of them roll off his back. He remains well-acquainted with victory, and has broken off from uncertainty. When Mesalles graduates in May with a degree in political science, he knows he’s moving to Utah to play for the MLS team Real Salt Lake. After 5,280 minutes of playing time on soccer fields all over the country, Mesalles has built a solid confidence in his talent.
Yet once again, he finds himself in the throes of transition. Mesalles balances on the precipice of his college career’s end, fast approaching the time of year when any game could be his last. He’s figuring out how to captain a team, which means raising his quiet voice. The one thing around which there exists no doubt is that he will never have “a season like this” — with Duke — again.
Like father
For years, he was small.
“The coaches always said that he had a left foot like silk, but he was teeny,” Juame Mesalles, Ruben’s father, told The Chronicle. “He was teeny, teeny until the age of 14 years old, and that was always a handicap for him.”
By the time he hit his growth spurt at 15, Mesalles had been playing soccer his whole life with the extra discipline required of an athlete without the advantage of size. Now, nearly 22 years old, Mesalles stands at 6-foot with a strong build and a noticeable athletic presence. His grace and technique, however, still define him as an asset on the field far more than his size does.
From the left side of the field, Mesalles gets a full-screen view of Duke’s offense. In his hybrid position as a defensive midfielder, he uses what his father has dubbed his high “soccer IQ” to make the right play, passing the ball to the teammate who can make good on a shot. In the 14 games of his senior season, No. 12 has just one goal and two assists. He is crucial anyway.
Mesalles always takes Duke’s corner kicks, because he’s the kind of guy who knows how to make a plan.
Much of that stems from a family ethic focused on football. His “very Spanish” family is “full of pros,” including Juame, who played on the Spanish national futsal team, and Ruben’s grandfather, who played in La Liga. The Mesalleses live in Florida now, but Ruben grew up between Sheboygen, Wis., and Tarragona, a city in northeast Spain.
His parents understand soccer, so they have always been willing to make sacrifices for it. In Wisconsin, Juame and Maria drove their son to practice an hour and 20 minutes away, every day, in order to make sure he was playing with the best possible team. When IMG Academy offered Mesalles a scholarship at age 12, his parents moved to Sarasota, Fla., to stay close-by. Now that he’s at Duke, Juame and Maria rent an AirBnB in Durham for the duration of the soccer season so that they can attend nearly all of his games.
When Juame watches his son play soccer, he barely blinks; his eyes do not leave the soccer field, not even for a moment. The Spanish-born businessman currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of American Orthodontics, a successful international manufacturing company. His career demands intelligence and work ethic and he, in turn, demands the same of his son. Juame calls it as he sees it: He won’t sugar coat Ruben’s mistakes, but he won’t hide his pride in his son, either.
“We are Americans, but we didn’t grow up here,” Juame said. “We don’t give compliments easily.”
“You don’t, I do,” Maria countered.
Juame had to agree with his wife. “If he does well, I’ll tell him, if he doesn't do well, I tell him, ‘You missed that, you didn’t do that.’”
Like father, like son: When Mesalles watches his team play soccer, he doesn’t take his eyes off of them, not even for a moment. After nearly four seasons in Durham, Mesalles sees Duke soccer as a part of himself. He loves this program with a high-volume, sacrificial, band-of-brothers kind of love — he wants his team to take over the world — and so he keeps his eyes on the soccer ball, always.
‘The best in people’
Mesalles believes “Good soldiers follow orders.” He lives his belief.
Though goalkeeping runs in the family line — both Juame and his father tended goal in Spain — Mesalles always played offense before college. Comfortable in the midfield, he used that “left foot like silk” to pass assists and send shots flying into the back of his opponents’ net. Duke head coach John Kerr, however, saw in him a defensive ability that he needed more desperately than he needed strikers; Mesalles started college with the likes of Peter Stroud, Shakur Mohammed and Thorleifur Ulfarsson running the soccer field, and they all conjured plenty of goals.
It’s not easy to give up the part you have played your whole life, but Mesalles never complained, even while he found it hard. Hamill, a senior goalkeeper on Duke’s 2021 roster, remembers Mesalles handling with poise the remarkable shift from an attacker to a defender.
“A lot of people in that situation would have had a much worse attitude,” Hamill said. “It was a very mature perspective, to be able to get over that, and get over your own ego and just be grateful to have the opportunity that he had.”
Hamill guarded Duke’s goal for three seasons after sitting on its bench for two. He started as goalkeeper all throughout Mesalles’ freshman and sophomore years, so he was always just a few yards away. As a captain himself now, Mesalles tries to emulate the way Hamill looked out for his younger teammates. He cares about them and remains stubbornly encouraging of his freshmen, while always looking to help them improve.
“There were plenty of times where I’d get on [Mesalles’] back a little bit about defending, and caring more about the defensive side of things,” Hamill said. “Naturally, he’s very attacking-minded, but he really grew over a pretty short period of time.”
Mesalles grew quickly, but growing hurts. As a freshman, he struggled with the pressure of playing an important role he had never played before, on an important team with an important coach who constantly pointed out his mistakes. In Duke’s 2021 meeting with North Carolina, the Blue Devils held the Tar Heels scoreless in Chapel Hill, taking home an easy 3-0 victory. Mesalles, however, played poorly: North Carolina sent balls to Hamill diagonally over the freshman’s head, and he drew a red card.
“The next day, they battered me in film,” Mesalles recalled.
Kerr and Brady needed him to learn how to defend a long ball, but the film review felt like a reproval.
“I didn’t really know how to deal with the criticism,” Mesalles said.
It did harm his mental health as a first-year varsity athlete, already averse to the spotlight, to feel that he was always doing something wrong.
That feeling has gone, now, and it took nothing more than Mesalles’ internal dialogue to catalyze his change of mind.
“The more I spoke to them, the more I was like, they really just care, they want the best out of their players,” he said. “I just look for the best in people. They criticize you if you’re good, or if they care about you,” Mesalles said. “It still sucks to hear bad things about your game, but it’s out of a place of love, at least.”
Maybe his father, maybe something innate, has given Mesalles the coachability that defines his success.
‘Something to say’
The senior has always handled criticism with grace, but now he takes it like a pro. This season, Kerr instructed Mesalles to connect more frequently on headers; in any game this year, you can find him playing soccer with his head. A good soldier. Now, he looks to a promising soccer future built on a foundation of his being “very coachable.” Kerr told him to play defense, so he mastered it. Kerr told him to hit the ball with his head, so now he does it all the time. When he became captain, Kerr told him to speak up.
He’s working on that one.
Mesalles plays soccer quietly. He’s the kind of athlete who makes everything happen without getting much of the credit on the box score. He is not excessively modest — he knows his talent — but he does not search for compliments, does not vie for the spotlight. It sort of makes him uncomfortable, which is why he stopped using his wildly popular Tik Tok account (he has 110,200 followers and 5.3 million likes).
He is not shy, but his composure can be mistaken as timidity.
“Unlike other players, he does not have to shout or to react to things,” Juame said.
Hamill described Mesalles as the pinnacle of a leader-by-example, as did graduate student and current co-captain Luke Thomas.
“He’s always somebody that we can rely on,” Thomas said. “He’s really dependable. When games get tense, or in those tough moments, I think people really look to his experience and his composure, and people feed off of that.”
“I think that that type of energy is just naturally contagious,” Hamill said.
As a rookie, Mesalles commanded the attention of his peers, even if he never meant to. His dedication to his teammates emanated from the way he handled the ball on the field and from the personality he shared with them off of it. When you think of a natural leader, you might imagine a guy with a megaphone, or a military general or a point guard. You might imagine that the player with the highest number of goals on a stat sheet leads his team. You might look to the man always preparing a speech, or the soccer player who actually wears his shin guards.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Ruben Mesalles is that he is none of those things, and yet he commands with ease.
“When he does speak, it holds plenty of weight because he’s not someone that’s just speaking to speak,” Hamill said. “When he’s saying something, you know he has something to say.”
A grin broke over freshman Julius Suber’s face when he talked about his captain after Duke’s road victory against Elon.
“It was a joy to have someone that excited to have freshmen, and he just ushered us in, being very supportive,” Suber said. “He’s also just a really funny guy, so it was really easy to be around him and just kind of follow his footsteps.”
Still, as a senior captain, Mesalles is expected to use his voice, literally, on the field — to direct his teammates, yell at the offense, call out open men. His vantage point out wide gives him that full-sized view of his team, and his soccer IQ means he knows the right moves. Kerr told him to speak up, so, like a good soldier, Mesalles has turned up the volume.
“Now I find myself barking and talking super loud, which I don’t really love,” Mesalles said. “But it's a good role, and I’m having to keep people accountable — as well as myself, more than ever.”
“He’s definitely been more vocal this year,” Kerr said. “He’s really stepped out of his comfort zone.”
“Coming here has brought him all the things he didn’t want to do in life: defending, having a voice, being the captain,” Maria said of her son.
A ‘blueprint’
Hamill works on Wall Street now. When he looks back at his college soccer career, he sees how all of his successes in the finance world stem from the lessons he took from Duke soccer.
“You learn so much about who you are and how you fit in and what it’s like to really, really work hard, put your head down and make sacrifices,” he said. “Work together, work with a team, find your role and fit into a larger picture.”
Mesalles does not welcome uncertainty (“I am in no rush to leave,” he said of Duke). The senior followed a “blueprint” for the first 22 years of his life nearly to a tee: He worked hard at soccer and earned a spot at his dream school. He worked harder at soccer and earned his job as captain and his job in the MLS; he even worked hard in school, which he does not like (he has an active countdown for his remaining days of classes) and will graduate in May with the degree he wanted.
This is a soccer player who defers to his coach even when he does not agree with him. This is a captain who is learning how to lead, and who is well-equipped by his innate ability to see the best in other people as well as in himself. This is a young man with discipline.
In September, Mesalles flew from his sister’s wedding, which ended at 3 a.m. in Barcelona, to San Francisco, where he played 90 minutes in a match against then-No. 2 Stanford on the same day. His legs started to give out after 80 minutes, but Mesalles helped Duke tie the game.
Discipline and soccer always take Mesalles far, which is why he plans to continue with them both. He already has another blueprint for the next chapter of his life — look for him as the financial manager of an MLS club in 15 years.
Mesalles expects, by virtue of discipline, to build exactly what he has designed.
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Sophie Levenson is a Trinity junior and a sports managing editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.