‘We feel her presence’: Lourdes soccer dedicates season to seniors after boating accident
The support for Katy Puig has come from far and wide.
Country music star Zac Brown, actor Kevin James, soccer icon David Beckham and the Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro, Nikola Jovic, Erik Spoelstra and Chris Quinn are among those in the sports and entertainment worlds who have taken some time to send their well wishes to Puig, a soccer star at Our Lady of Lourdes Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Miami.
“I just want to send you love and healing from Georgia,” Brown said in a video. “I hope you recover soon and come out of the darkness. I’m sorry that this happened to you. You have a long life ahead of you so you have to come see me at a show when you get all better, OK. Hope to see you then.”
Puig, the 2021-22 Miami Herald Class 7A-5A Girls Soccer Player of the Year, remains hospitalized after sustaining severe injuries following a boat crash in the Florida Keys on Labor Day weekend — an accident which claimed the life of fellow Lourdes student Lucy Fernandez.
Puig is responsive, according to her father Rudy, but has yet to fully regain consciousness as she recovers in her room at Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital in Jacksonville, where she was transferred in October.
“It’s really tough,” Rudy Puig said. “It’s her senior year and she was on top of the world academically and athletically, socially and everything [before this happened]. She’s achieved a degree of consciousness but it’s on the lower level. But since Day 1, she’s improved greatly. The goal is for her to emerge from this little by little.”
Rudy Puig, like everyone else at Lourdes and beyond, is praying for his daughter’s recovery.
When that day comes, she will have plenty to catch up on.
Not only are celebrities sending her plenty of love.
Puig’s teammates and coaches at Lourdes are documenting every possible detail of their current season so she doesn’t miss a moment of what would have been her senior season.
They pitched in and bought a GoPro to record all kinds of messages and happenings on and off the field to make Puig feel as if she were there. The school is also live streaming its matches so Puig is able to see them from her hospital room if and when she’s able.
“We feel her presence here, and the girls are all bringing her to the field,” Lourdes coach David Fique said. “It’s given the girls a reason and a push at the start of the season. They not only want to win for this class, but for Katy. She’s very strong so they want to take her personality into everything that they do right now.”
On Sept. 4 while coming back from a birthday party on Elliott Key, Puig was among 12 teens — six from Lourdes, five from Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Coconut Grove and one from Miami Westminster Christian — who were on a boat that hit a channel marker and capsized in the Intracoastal.
Puig was among four girls airlifted to Miami-Dade County hospitals. Fernandez died the next day from what the medical examiner said was drowning.
According to family friend Alex Fraga’s post on a GoFundMe that was started for Puig shortly after the accident, Puig suffered head trauma and was knocked unconscious before friends saved her from drowning. She was transported to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital where doctors performed emergency brain surgery to remove a blood clot.
Puig remained there until October before being transferred to Jacksonville.
Puig’s family posted some good news Thursday on an online journal they’ve been keeping updating Katy’s progress. Katy was declared to have officially emerged and cleared the Disorders of Consciousness program at the hospital. She was able to follow some basic commands from doctors and will be transferred to a more traditional rehab program intended to increase her ability to walk, verbalize and swallow.
“The doctors are very aggressive [with treatment] and determined for her to get better,” Puig’s father said. “Thankfully, she’s never been on any kind of breathing tube or anything. [But] the brain is so unpredictable. It can take weeks or months to heal.
“There are so many stories about recovery. There’s a lot of hope and drive. She’s come a long way already from what doctors initially thought…The most important thing right now is to get her back on her feet.”
The rest of the girls who were on the boat, many of whom have known each other since they attended Epiphany Catholic School (a middle school adjacent to Lourdes), have recovered from their injuries and, in some cases, returned to compete in either soccer or cross-country for their respective high schools.
Puig’s teammate Coco Aguilar, a first team All-Dade forward last year, broke a bone in her arm in the crash. She recently played her first game this season and scored a key goal to lead the Bobcats to a win over Fort Lauderdale soccer powerhouse St. Thomas Aquinas.
But for many including Aguilar, recovering from the emotional trauma will take much longer.
“The healing process has definitely begun and overall, as a school, we’re doing better than we were two months ago,” Lourdes athletic director Maura Herholz said. “The school and the actual sisterhood have really supported the kids through this. We’re moving forward, but there are constant reminders that trigger stuff.”
Herholz said the Monday after the accident was “gut-wrenching” for the school and their community.
That night many in the community came to the school’s campus to join in prayer for the victims of the crash. The following day when classes resumed, there was another prayer service in the school’s gym just for students and faculty.
“All the students came into the gym and laid flowers for [Fernandez],” Herholz said with a pause as she recalled the day. “The kids just let out their emotions. I’ve never heard something like that. We had a mass after the service that Tuesday and have had a few more since. Each is another step in the healing process.”
Honoring Fernandez’s memory and keeping Puig foremost on their minds has also helped.
Lourdes players are all wearing Puig’s No. 19 on their warm-up shirts before matches this season. The sleeves on their game jerseys all have “KP19,” for Puig’s initials and her number on one arm, and the letters, “LLL”, which stand for “Love Like Lucy” in honor of Fernandez, on the other.
“On the field, Puig never gives up and we know she’s not going to give up when it comes to this either,” said Lourdes senior goalkeeper Gabriella Paredes, a close friend of Puig’s.
Recently, before a team photo shoot at the school, players lined up and one by one, waved, laughed and recorded themselves dancing — all fun messages to send to their ailing teammate.
The Bobcats, who are 4-0-1 so far with wins over some of the state’s best like St. Thomas Aquinas and Cape Coral Mariner, continue to make and record memories for Puig.
“They want her to see everything that she’s missed,” Herholz said. “They want to make sure she’s part of the entire process all the way through.”
Neither Puig nor the Bobcats have been alone through this shared time of recovery.
Lourdes recently played a match against Carrollton at the University of Miami’s Cobb Stadium as both schools came together in a show of support for each other.
Players and coaches from both teams joined each other for a prayer before and after the match and many of the girls, understandably emotional, embraced each other.
“It was a shock and didn’t feel real (when we found out about the accident),” said Lourdes senior Rebecca Sampedro. “As time went on, we just kept on being there for each other and we just have to keep being strong for each other.”
Puig’s cousin, Nina, who plays for Carrollton, shared hugs with Aguilar, Sampedro and Paredes, all of whom have known the Puig family since childhood.
The three of them, along with Katy, have formed the core of a Bobcats class that won a state title in 2020 and advanced to back-to-back state finals over the past two seasons.
“[Katy would] want us to keep playing hard,” Aguilar said. “It’s always been the four of us since the beginning and Katy’s one of the strongest people we know.”
According to Puig’s father, there continue to be small, positive signs of recovery. But she still has a long road ahead.
Puig, who needed to complete just two courses to graduate early before the accident according to her father, is far from alone on this journey.
Her parents continue to take turns making the commute north to be by her side as much as possible.
As of November 30, the GoFundMe started for Puig’s family had raised more than $570,000, with donations from all over the country.
“As a coach and just as a human, you never want to see this happen especially to such a strong individual,” Fique said as he fought back tears. “Her way to fight through adversity and be positive makes her an amazing human being who cares for others big time.
“We just want her to recover. We are all very positive and you see it in the players and the way they’re acting. She’d want us to keep going.”
This story was originally published December 1, 2022 at 10:18 AM.
