Gulliver lacrosse senior prepares for future by helping teammates get ready for 2021
Marcelo Arteaga’s final season of high school lacrosse came to an abrupt end in March, but his time helping Miami Gulliver Prep was far from over.
During the month-long wait between the Florida High School Athletic Association suspending its spring sports and outright canceling their seasons because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Arteaga kept in touch with the Raiders’ underclassmen.
“He’s pushing these guys now already for next year,” Gulliver coach Jim Piggot said. “I said to him, ‘If I had a team of Marcelos...’ He’s already forward thinking. I think some of it also might be helping him with the coping process as well.”
Arteaga, a defensive midfielder, was poised for a breakout final prep season before going on to play collegiately at Johns Hopkins. Add in the fact that the FHSAA divided teams into two classes this year, and Gulliver Prep had a more direct path to contending for its first state title in the sport.
He never got to see it through, but he tried to stay optimistic during the waiting.
“I just have to look forward,” Arteaga said.
That meant prepping next year’s team as much as he could. He made sure to pass on any wisdom he had to those who will be filling his shoes next year.
“It makes me feel a lot better knowing that I’m not leaving the program empty-handed,” Arteaga said. “I’m leaving them with lessons and tips on how to get to the next level.”
‘I fell in love with it’
Arteaga will be playing at the next level even though he was a late bloomer to the sport. He started playing lacrosse in seventh grade after taking the advice of his middle school football coach.
“From the first game,” Arteaga said, “I fell in love with it.”
And, it turns out, he’s pretty good at it. Arteaga was a standout for the Florida SweetLax club lacrosse team in addition to playing for Gulliver. He utilized his athleticism from his years of playing football and soccer to hone his craft as a midfielder.
“With lacrosse down here, Miami lacrosse players aren’t known for their stick skills and lacrosse IQ as they are their athleticism versus a kid from Baltimore or New York where they have high lacrosse skills and IQ,” Piggot said. “... These coaches saw his athleticism, his drive, the way he plays. That’s what they’re looking for in a Florida kid.”
And that led to him receiving a scholarship offer from Johns Hopkins, one of 75 schools to offer men’s lacrosse at the Division I level, in the summer before his freshman year at Gulliver.
“There’s no better feeling,” Arteaga said. “All the hard work paid off. It was a reward.”
Four years later, Piggot said, Arteaga is still plays with the same mentality that he did when he first started the sport.
“100 percent full-tilt 100 percent of the time. Non-stop,” Piggot said. “His motor just keeps going and going and going. He just pushes himself.”
‘A feeling of incomplete’
Arteaga individually, and Gulliver Prep overall, was hoping to have one more push toward contending for a state title this year.
Arteaga missed Gulliver’s first five games of the 2020 season while playing as the starting goalkeeper for the Raiders’ Class 4A state champion boys’ soccer team, and thought the team was finally starting to play to its potential when the season stopped.
“It was really tough,” Piggot said. “It’s still tough. It’s just a feeling of incomplete. “I should be doing something. What should I do? What could have been?
“Obviously, there are so many other things that are going on in this world right now that pale in comparison and make this insignificant in a way,” Piggot added. “However, the time, effort, energy, blood, sweat, tears, arguments, hugs, all that type of stuff is just missing. All that we’ve put in through the years to get to this point. This team was really excited about where we were going to go and what we were going to do. Now it’s just the unknown. You’ll never know.”
A few of their usual roadblocks were out of the way, as well. With two classifications for lacrosse this year, Gulliver no longer would have had to worry about some of the state’s heavyweights — namely Ponte Vedra and Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas (which beat Gulliver in the regional finals twice in the last three years) — once the postseason began.
“It’s still a tough road,” Piggot said. “A lot of the smaller schools like us are better than a lot of the bigger schools. However, the big road blocks aren’t there. 100 percent. We saw ourselves getting there. It was realistic. It was manageable. It was obtainable.”
Until it wasn’t.
“I was devastated,” Arteaga said. “I never thought that during my four years that my senior year, the one year that I was looking forward to the most, would just end like that out of nowhere.”
While the official season ended, Arteaga and Gulliver’s seniors got one final game. Piggot and Ponte Vedra coach Tom West set up a two-day virtual lacrosse competition in early April to give their players one final act of normalcy in a lost season.
“It just showed that they really care about our senior class and they didn’t want it to go unnoticed that we gave all we gave for the past four years,” Arteaga said. “He wanted to give us closure. That’s what it did.”
Now, it’s on to the future.
More notables
▪ Plantation American Heritage has two seniors set to play collegiately. Attacker Zak Bitar is going to Rochester Institute of Technology. Attacker Kadin Schillo is going to St. Leo University.
▪ Miami Belen Jesuit midfielder Rafa Bru, one of the Wolverines’ eight seniors, signed with Colby College.
▪ St. Thomas Aquinas, which won the boys’ lacrosse state title in 2017 and was the 2019 state runner-up, had 13 seniors on its roster.
▪ Fort Lauderdale Calvary Christian attacker Jason Thomfohrde, who will play at Division II Limestone College, was second in the state with 51 goals scored in eight games. Pembroke Pines Charter’s Jan Smith was 10th with 35 goals.
This story was originally published May 22, 2020 at 1:26 PM.
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