Mt. Hope’s Ariel Teixeira, motoring past Tiverton’s Amanda McDermott in January, scored her 1,000th career point in basketball this winter, despite playing just three seasons.

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The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

WARREN –– A soccer coach once told Ariel Teixeira she was too small to play.

The comment upset her at first, and she admits she wondered whether her size really would prevent her from excelling at a sport that she loved.

Those negative thoughts didn’t linger for long, though. Teixeira went on to prove that she had, indeed, been underestimated, as the tenacious 5-foot-4 midfielder went on to earn three All-State soccer selections, twice on the first team, along with being named to the 2007 NSCAA/adidas High School Girls All-Region I team.

“Everyone can say that you’re too small and stuff, but it’s really how you perceive yourself,” said Teixeira, who is preparing to begin her first year at Southern New Hampshire University, where she has received a full soccer scholarship and plans to study sports management.

What’s more, Teixeira’s athletic accomplishments didn’t stop at one sport.

In addition to helping to guide Mt. Hope’s girls soccer team to its first Division I state crown in more than a decade last fall, this year’s Alice Sullivan Scholarship winner scored her 1,000th career point in basketball, despite playing just three seasons. Then, in just her first season of playing the sport, she helped the girls lacrosse team capture the program’s first Division IA state championship this spring, scoring a hat trick in the Huskies’ title win over Cranston West.

“A lot of the things Ariel does, you can’t teach,” Mt. Hope soccer coach Roy Borges said of Teixeira, who scored in a shootout en route to helping the Huskies edge top-seeded La Salle in the Division I championship. “I tell the younger players to watch her and to see the way she looks at the whole field. She’s so finesse and so smart and she makes everybody around her look so good.”

Teixeira’s contributions to Mt. Hope’s soccer, basketball and lacrosse teams went beyond how many goals or how many points she scored. The only senior on the basketball team last winter, she became another coach on the court, says Huskies coach Bill St. Vincent.

“Besides her stats, she is such a great leader,” he said of Teixeira as his team was preparing for the Division II playoffs last February. “We have few experienced players and she acts as a mentor during games and a teacher at practice every day giving one-on-one instructions. She is vocal when needed and also a quiet leader. ‘Just follow me’ is what she offers.”

In her final seasons of basketball and soccer, Teixeira also helped her teams deal with the loss of teammate Kayleigh Raposa, who died in a car accident. Many of the players were hit hard by Raposa’s death, Borges said, and Teixeira and her fellow captains encouraged the underclassmen to honor Raposa’s memory by dedicating the soccer season to her.

Teixeira — who received a number of honors at her school’s senior awards night, including the prestigious Mt. Hope Athletic Counsel Trophy — says that taking a leadership role on her various teams has just come naturally and that she has never minded the added responsibility that comes with being a team captain.

“I just enjoy helping people and trying to make them better,” she said. “It’s not really pressure (to be a captain).You just take that role into your hands and do the best that you can.”

Teixeira’s willingness to help others extends beyond her high school teams. For the past couple of years, she has served as a volunteer coach for the Warren Youth Soccer Association. She says she can see herself in some of the younger players and takes pride in helping them develop their games.

“I see them and they’ve already got so much soccer skill inside them at such a young age,” said Teixeira, who also works extensively with children as a summer camp counselor in Warren. “I can see them becoming such good soccer players.”

It was Teixeira’s commitment to bettering the athletic experience of other young girls on top of what she has accomplished herself both on the athletic field and in the classroom that made her this year’s top candidate for the Alice Sullivan Scholarship, says scholarship committee chairwoman Betty Marquis.

Although she never had an opportunity to meet Sullivan, Teixeira certainly appreciates all of the athletic opportunities that the late pioneer of girls sports helped create for her and other Rhode Island girls. She says she would be honored if she could one day leave a similar legacy.

“My dream was always to be a professional athlete,” said Teixeira, the youngest of Mario and Angela Teixeira’s four children. “OK, that can’t happen for everyone. So being a coach or an athletic director or a teacher — that would be a great way to stay involved, too. I would love to be that kind of person like [Sullivan]. She just had such an effect on girls sports in general.”

cthorn@projo.com