Sergio Salcido sat alone on the Carrier Dome steps crying. Tears rushed down his cheeks as he broke down.

Earlier that day, in the fall of 2012, he heard a pop during a routine drill in practice. He crumpled to the ground and flipped the ball to a teammate. But then he got up, circled to the back of the line and tried to play through the pain. He didn’t know what it meant but his aching knee was swelling up.

Just several feet from Sadler Hall, his freshman dorm, Salcido told his dad about the injury over the phone.

Salcido was already a walk-on Syracuse’s coaches didn’t believe in. A 5-foot-7 player from Florida didn’t fit the Syracuse lacrosse prototype anyway. Making the team a week prior, just midway through his first semester at SU, could have been enough.

But it wasn’t.

Two days before Salcido received surgery on his torn right ACL, he got a tattoo on his bicep that read “Faith.” That’s what he’d need while spending the winter trudging through snow on crutches, spending weekends at relatives’ houses in the central New York area and completing his freshman year as a redshirt in 2013.

“I didn’t come this far just to come this far,” Salcido said. “I realized ‘You’re here now and this is what you wanted. This is a true test to see how bad you really want it.’”

The ACL injury was just another hurdle for Salcido to leap over. The undersized midfielder played sparingly and never scored a goal in his first two seasons at SU when healthy. But now in his junior season, Salcido has started every game and broken out with 28 goals and 23 assists. His quickness has forced defenses to construct slide packages based on him and his outside shot has made them pay if he gets just a sliver of space.

Lucy Naland | Senior Design Editor

On Saturday at noon, Salcido will have a key role in the biggest game he’ll have played when No. 8 seed Syracuse (12-4, 2-2 Atlantic Coast) takes on top-seeded Maryland (15-2, 5-0 Big Ten) in the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament in Providence, Rhode Island. And again it’s an opportunity to prove people wrong.

 

What Desko thought wasn’t anything new. Collegiate coaches would call Salcido’s high school coach, Ryan Healy, during Salcido’s senior year. When Healy told the coaches about Salcido’s plan to play at Syracuse, they’d contest that he wasn’t good enough so he should play at their schools instead.

Even Salcido’s parents considered what would happen if lacrosse at Syracuse didn’t work out for their son. He only applied to one school and getting in was no guarantee. “Wouldn’t it suck,” if he couldn’t make it to SU solely because he didn’t have the grades, Salcido’s father, Moses, would tell him.

“In the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘Sh*t, if this doesn’t happen, what’s plan B?’” Salcido’s mother, Nancy, said.

But Salcido never budged. When he was accepted, he ran into the backyard, jumped up and down and started screaming. It didn’t matter that he’d have to walk-on.

Salcido even had a full-ride scholarship offer to Providence and had offers from several other schools. But since elementary school, he had a poster of the Powell brothers, Syracuse lacrosse legends, hanging on his bedroom wall. His mother was from Utica, New York and still had family in the area, too.

He attended multiple recruiting camps at SU and made a point to talk to the coaches while he was there so they would remember him. He knew he’d be considered less than players from traditional hotbeds.

“I think he was just so far behind everybody,” Desko said. “Any time you get players from certain areas like Florida, they don’t have that tradition of a lot of great high school coaching.”

Lucy Naland | Senior Design Editor

When Salcido would talk about his top college choice with other local players, they would laugh at him. Once he made the team, they didn’t think he’d get any playing time. Once he tore his ACL, people thought that might have been the end.

“It kind of pissed me off,” Salcido said. And he turned it into fuel.

To get where he wanted required the highest level of training possible. He began working out with Jon Davis at Davis Training Systems in Orlando as a junior in high school.

“I knew from the first week of training with him, he wasn’t just there to kind of lift weights,” Davis said. “He was there for a real reason.”

Davis jokes that he gets mad at Salcido because Salcido always wants to get his workout done as early as possible. Salcido schedules his sessions via an app and the earliest time slot is around 9 a.m. “Where’s the 8:30 time slot?” Salcido often says to Davis.

During the past several summers, Salcido worked out twice a day and did shooting or stick skill exercises in between. Before his workouts, he’d eat a breakfast often consisting of oatmeal, a six-egg omelet and egg whites.

The workouts were designed around building strength and bulk. Davis helped Salcido hone in on back and shoulder exercises to improve his weak links. Now, Salcido has one of the hardest shots of any Syracuse player, Desko said.

“We were training him when no one knew about him,” Davis said. “When everyone doubted him.”

In his first three years at Syracuse, Salcido still hadn’t made the splash he hoped for. The only playing time Salcido saw as a redshirt freshman was on the wing during faceoffs.

By 2015, he got a little more time as a backup midfielder, but still wasn’t on the field enough to make a difference. He wasn’t getting a chance to show the skills he used when dominating in high school. And he let his parents know he was frustrated by the situation.

“There were times my husband and I were like, ‘I’m not going up there,’” Nancy Salcido said, “‘because if he’s just going to complain he’s not getting playing time, it’s not fun as a parent to sit there and listen to him complain about it.’”

When he was struggling to get playing time, Salcido asked his dad to call the coaches. But this wasn’t high school and his parents recommended that he ask the coaches for advice.

Winter Park (Florida) High School head coach Andy Sinclair called Salcido a “pest” because he was always asking questions. Now, Salcido was doing the same thing to Syracuse’s coaches.

Liam Sheehan | Staff Photographer

And after four years at SU, it’s paying off. Salcido is the one with the answers instead of the questions. He tied a career-high with six points in the ACC championship game to lead the Orange to victory over Duke. He scored Syracuse’s ninth goal on Sunday against Albany in the first round of the NCAA tournament to give his team the lead for good.

Growing up, people told Salcido he wouldn’t make the team at Syracuse. Then they said he wouldn’t get on the field. His coaches at Syracuse told him to work on his stick skills and get stronger. He’s done all of that.

Finally, Salcido is one of the Orange’s most important players.

“I’m the one getting the last laugh now,” Salcido said.

Published on May 20, 2016 at 5:27 pm

Contact Paul: pmschwed@syr.edu | @pschweds