Riviera Prep’s Esteban Lluberes is Miami-Dade County’s Boys’ Basketball Player for 4A-2A

Esteban Lluberes, his coach at Riviera Prep insists, would have averaged 30 points per game for just about every other team in Miami.

Instead, the guard will just have to settle for being the Miami Herald’s Miami-Dade County Boys’ Basketball Player of the Year for Classes 4A-2A.

“He was just always programmed to play the right way and make the right pass,” said Anthony Shahbaz, who coached Lluberes for four seasons at Riviera and emphasizes a balanced, defensive-minded approach.

The senior’s intelligence showed on both the stat sheet and the court.

In his four years of high school, Lluberes led the Bulldogs to their first final four in 2019 and first state championship game this year, while averaging at least 14 points and four assists per game in every season he played.

As a senior, he averaged 18.3 points and 4.4 rebounds per game to earn first-team all-county honors from the third time and he mostly missed out as a junior because Riviera canceled its season for COVID-19. Even when he was in eighth grade, he hit those 14-point and four-assist thresholds -- a sign of just what an important player he’d be for the Bulldogs for years to come.

“The biggest thing I learned was my leadership,” said Lluberes, who has signed with Division II Lynn University in Boca Raton. “Throughout the whole years of me playing basketball in my high school career, I’ve been more of a leader. I talk way more. When I was a freshman, I didn’t talk at all. I was a little quiet kid.”

For his final season, Lluberes had to change, though. One of Riviera’s best players left the team in the middle of the season, leaving Lluberes to shoulder more of a scoring load. The result was him setting a new career high in points per game, while guiding the Bulldogs to their best season ever.

With a 67-66 loss to Tallahassee Florida State University in the Class 3A championship, one point was all that separated Riviera from its first state title.

He was still always more than a scorer, though. Shahbaz typically would give Lluberes little challenges to juggle in every game, something like: ‘Try to throw a certain amount of alley oops,’ or, ‘Assist on a certain number of dunks.’ It kept him balanced as a point guard, even when the Bulldogs needed him to lead as a scorer.

“That was the game within the game for him,” Shahbaz said. “He’d always come to be me and be like, Hey, coach, what’s the game within the game tonight? What are we looking at here?”

It meant Riviera, even after losing an entire season last year and dropping three straight to final four teams in the first month of the season, could regroup to make some more history for a program on the rise and no one has been more important to the rise than Lluberes.

“We had a chip on our shoulder,” Lluberes said. “We kept reminding ourselves that we didn’t have a season last year, so this is going to be a big year.”

This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 12:30 PM.