Ranching, rodeo and football: How Kain Medrano built his own success at UCLA

Kain Medrano woke up at 4 a.m. There was hay to bale, fences to fix or cattle to chase down – all on his grandparents’ ranch in Pueblo, Colorado, nearly 1,200 miles from UCLA.

His family had homesteaded the land four generations ago and, as Medrano experienced, the nearly 1,500-acre ranch still required constant maintenance.

“If you want to be successful, you’ve got to do all this stuff behind the scenes,” the Bruins linebacker said. “That’s what my grandpa taught me. He was like, ‘Even though we’ve got all of this, I had to work for a lot of this. Grandma had to work for all of this. Your great-grandparents had to go through a lot to get this land.’”

It was a year-round endeavor. The school week in Pueblo was only four days long, so Medrano and his younger sister spent Fridays on the ranch or accompanied their grandfather to auctions where he sold cows.

“I think it’s important to expose your kids to all kinds of different lifestyles and see how different people make their living and what’s important to them,” Medrano’s mom, Alexa, said. “My dad was always so very patient with the kids. He taught them how to be patient with the livestock, the horses, the cattle.”

Medrano may not be saddling horses or watering livestock at rodeos – another endeavor he undertook with his grandfather – but he still toils as though he’s on the ranch. And that’s turned him into a top hand on the UCLA football team.

Becoming a linebacker

The redshirt senior is second on the team in total tackles this season with 55 and third in tackles for loss with seven. He’s part of the seventh-best rushing defense in the country that gives up only 98.1 yards per game. He returned an interception for a touchdown in UCLA’s 27-20 win over Nebraska and stripped the ball from Iowa quarterback Brendan Sullivan a week later in a 20-17 victory for the Bruins’ third consecutive Big Ten win.

Bruins quarterback Ethan Garbers couldn’t hide his excitement for his fellow team captain during the Nebraska postgame press conference, interjecting when Medrano explained that he used to play receiver.

“I was just going to say that,” Garbers said, wide-eyed and eager to praise his teammate.

Medrano played receiver at UCLA until then-head coach Chip Kelly asked him to switch positions ahead of the 2020 season based on his physical attributes and skills. It was his first time playing linebacker after being recruited as a receiver – but as someone who has always wanted to be part of the action, he agreed.

“He’s been that way since he was little,” Alexa Medrano said. “Always wanted to be a part of whatever was going on and always very ultra-competitive. If you told him that somebody was going to beat him, he would do everything in his power not to let that happen.”

He was hooked when he started playing flag football at 4. Track and field and basketball came later – in addition to a brief rodeo stint that peaked when he competed in the Mutton Bustin’ World Championships in Las Vegas as a first-grader.

The event earned him his first belt buckle and it was something that he himself had won, not just a buckle given to him by his grandparents. His rodeoing ended shortly after but he still toured with his grandfather, who was a steer wrestler, team roper, bareback rider and bull rider before becoming a judge for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

“That was something that will stick with me forever,” Medrano said. “There were summers where I would just travel with him and I was in the clown shows that they would do during the rodeos or I was back behind the bull shoot trying to help.”

Getting attention

Football remained in the picture, although there were times when navigating the recruiting system seemed as challenging as grappling with a steer.

Medrano excelled in sports at Pueblo East High, yet college recruiters weren’t venturing into the mostly agricultural area. Most flew into Denver International Airport, two hours north of Pueblo, and stayed in that vicinity.

The Medrano family was determined. Alexa and her husband, Mark, sat down with their son during the spring of his junior year as he identified five schools where he could see himself playing. His parents enrolled him in football camps at all five schools.

They sent him to stay with his uncle in Idaho so he could attend Boise State’s camp. Mark traveled for his job, so he dropped Medrano and one of his teammates at camps while he went to work for the day, then picked them up afterward.

Medrano, who was a three-star recruit, found motivation in other Pueblo football players like Derion “D.I.” Ibarra, who was a star running back at Pueblo East and went on to play at CSU Pueblo.

“Seeing how good of athletes they were but not given the right opportunity to showcase it, I think me and my dad saw that and saw the potential that was there,” said Medrano, who as a senior at Pueblo East caught 66 passes for 1,211 yards and 21 touchdowns and recorded 80 tackles and six interceptions.

“D.I. and my dad saw that there was all this potential in Pueblo, but you just don’t get the exposure that everybody else did. So we had to make it for ourselves.”

Ranching mentality

Six years of college football at UCLA have passed and Medrano, at 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, is looking at a professional football career. The hard work and lessons learned from waking up before sunrise to help oversee 100 head of cattle and a handful of horses in Pueblo still apply.

“With rodeo and the ranching lifestyle,” Alexa Medrano said, “you’re competing in something that you can’t control all the circumstances because livestock has a mind of its own. Learning from it and how to control what you can control is the main thing.”

Medrano went back to Pueblo over the summer to help put on a football camp and sends video messages of encouragement to the Pueblo East football team, which is this season’s undefeated 3A Southern champion.

A return to ranching isn’t entirely off the table, either. Medrano keeps a map of his grandparents’ ranch in his apartment and thinks about having a big house with a barn, chickens, horses and miniature cows – because they “have got all that personality,” he says.

“Something in remembrance to my grandfather and my grandma,” Medrano said. “It taught me what hard work is. You know that saying, if you’ve got a scratch or a boo-boo, you just rub some dirt on it? That was my life. Put your head down, work.”