Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/109499
Haiti Native John Montelus Is Living A Dream By Dan Murphy It's two days after Christmas and there's a blanket of muddy brown snow on the ground outside Everett High School. In Everett, Mass. Upstairs in a long, narrow weight room that overlooks the gymnasium, John Montelus is settling in under a squat rack. Montelus is alone. The room is dark and quiet. The only sounds come from one 45-pound steel plate clinking against the next as he gets to work. Everett High's weight room — built along with the rest of the new school in the north Boston suburb in 2007 — has been something of a second home for Montelus during the past three years. "In his sophomore year he pretty much lived with me up there," said Mike Milo, its proprietor, Everett's offensive line coach and something of a second father to go with the second home. It was in the weight room that Milo helped Montelus is listed as a four-star prospect, the No. 2 player in Massachusetts and the No. 12 offensive guard in the land by 247Sports. photos courtesy U.S. Army All-American Bowl turn Montelus into arguably the best high school football player in New England and one of the country's top interior lineman prospects. Together they put a modern version of one family's American Dream back on track. Montelus was born in Haiti to a mother who played high school basketball and made sure her only son had the best education she could find on the island. When she got a job at the Haitian Embassy in the Bahamas, Eldridge Fabre decided Nassau wasn't a good place to bring a young child. Montelus moved to Canada briefly to live with his father and then returned to Haiti to live with family. In 2006, he and his mother moved to Massachusetts. Without a strong male influence in his life, Montelus saw his grades suffer in Everett. By the end of his freshman year of high school, he developed an attitude with authority figures and was bringing home report cards that left his mother in tears. Then Montelus found football, or more accurately, football found him. "Football helped me change my life," Montelus said. "It turned me into a man, basically." He rarely played during his first year in pads on the freshman football team, but a 6-3,