Overview:
Griffin Arnold’s strong arm as a football passer has also earned him a scholarship from Pepperdine University as a baseball catcher
It was the worst of times for young Griffin Arnold, sophomore quarterback of last year’s Santa Barbara High School football team.
And it steeled him into being his best.
“He’d been complaining about stomach pain for weeks,” Dons’ coach Nate Mendoza recalled. “His fatigue was also really starting to show.”
The pass-rushing behemoths of powerhouse Newbury Park High made it worse by putting a target on Arnold’s chest.
They sacked him five times under the Friday Night Lights of Oct. 3, 2025.
They knocked the daylights out of him on many of the passes that he did get away.
“Griff was taking a lot of shots, getting hit in the ribs as he was throwing,” Mendoza recalled, “and he was making just remarkable throws.
“He’d had a huge game stat-wise against San Marcos the week before, but I thought this was his best game.”
Nobody knew until the following Thursday how remarkable his 23-for-34, 241-yard passing effort was in the valiant, 31-21 loss at Newbury Park.
Mendoza was watching the Dons’ junior varsity game six days later when Arnold’s father, Andrew, called with alarming news:
They had rushed Griffin to the emergency room. Doctors found a papaya-sized tumor wrapped around his intestines.
“Looking back now,” Mendoza said, “you’re like, ‘Wow … With as much stomach pain as he was having — with such a large tumor in his stomach — he was taking shots and still having a really good game.”
Doctors eventually diagnosed his condition as non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Arnold took the news with a stiff upper lip. He was determined to remain his best.
“I was shocked … It was definitely a moment of just shock,” he told Noozhawk. “I was pretty quiet when he told me.
“But very quickly my mindset was, ‘Let’s get through this … I’m gonna get through this as fast as possible.’
“It was never really about things going south.”
Comeback Kid
The Dons lost the last three games of the 2025 season without him.
They’ve been heading back north ever since his return.
They capped a recent four-game winning streak by beating Moorpark in their Conejo Coast League opener, 38-24, behind Arnold’s 466-yard, four-touchdown passing performance.
“Fearless,” Mendoza said of his 16-year-old quarterback. “That’s a good word to use for Griff.”
Friday’s contest at Ventura marked exactly a year to the day that Arnold was first rushed to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
The Dons lost a 24-21 heartbreaker despite his 24-for-36, 281-yard passing performance.
In seven games this season, Arnold has completed 164 of 231 passes for a stellar accuracy of 71%, 2,208 yards and 20 touchdowns.
The amazing turnaround has deeply touched a coach who’s known and mentored Arnold since he was a young boy, playing sports alongside his own son, Lukas.
Mendoza admittedly worried that he’d never see him back in a Dons’ uniform.
“You definitely thought that early on,” he said. “He was battling for his life early on, quite honestly.
“It was especially scary when he was at UCLA in the early stages. It was touch and go for a couple weeks.”
Arnold spent two weeks in UCLA’s pediatric intensive care unit before returning to Cottage Hospital for more treatment.
But Mendoza got swept up in Arnold’s positive outlook when he, wife Jamie and son Lukas visited him in the hospital.
“It was the time I felt — and I know his parents felt the same way — that, ‘I just know this kid, and he just always battles,’” Mendoza said. “He battles and he’s not scared of anything.
“That’s when I started to tell him, ‘You know, Griff, they’re going to write a story about you … It’s going to be about the best comeback story of all time.’”
It was a collaboration that drew in the entire community.
It Takes a Village
A meal train was set up for the family. A GoFundMe account was established to help the Arnolds with the mounting medical bills.
Griffin returned from his first hospital stay on Oct. 29 to find his house decorated with balloons and “welcome home” signs.
“It felt like I had a community behind me, pushing me forward,” he said. “That was one of the main things that helped me recover so fast, wanting to get back out there and play for the community that had supported me so much.”
Arnold also could see his jersey atop a long pole, planted like a battle flag on the Dons’ sideline during the livestream telecasts he watched from his hospital bed.
“We’re all really good friends outside of football,” he said of his teammates. “We’re all super-close.
“It’s super-fun how I’ve grown up with pretty much all of them my whole life.”
He spreads the wealth among them. Five Dons — senior Fin Congdon, juniors Cade Mault, Nate Meister, and Everett Rabb-Preston, and sophomore Keegan Roessler — entered last Friday’s game with at least 20 receptions apiece.
“Griff’s really good at surveying the field,” Mendoza said. “We like to run a lot of different formations and motions, and a lot of responsibility is put upon the quarterback in that.
“I just see him as a real natural, cerebral leader.
“He pushes his teammates,” he continued. “I’d never coached a quarterback like that who’ll get into them at practice just because he wants to get it right.
“He doesn’t do it for any other reason than he wants the best for the team.”
Those teammates had his back — his head, to be precise — when he began losing his hair in clumps from the chemotherapy.
“Griffin had some buddies come over and they had a shaving party,” his mother, Valerie Arnold, reported in the diary she kept on the website CaringBridge.org.
“Several of his friends who couldn’t be there joined in and showed their support by shaving their heads, as well.
“They learned that buzz cuts do take some skills.”
Rita Forrest from Walter Claudio Studio came to the rescue by “cleaning all the kids up.”
Griffin felt his greatest support, of course, coming from Mom and Dad.
“I can only imagine what they were going through,” he said. “They weren’t showing it to me necessarily, but talking to them about it now, I think they were definitely sweating about it more than me.
“My parents were sacrificing a lot.
“We’re down at UCLA, and they’re walking back and forth from the hotel late every night.”
Arnold was sent home to recuperate on Oct. 29.
A few more sacks were to come, however.
Facing a Setback
He awoke to his darkest day a week before Thanksgiving. The growing pain within his abdomen led to fits of vomiting.
“Even at his worst down at UCLA, Griffin would report a level 6 out of 10 of pain,” Valerie Arnold said. “Now with this abdominal pain he was reporting at times as high as a 10.
“After a CT scan it was confirmed that Griffin had a bowel obstruction.”
Doctors drained fluid from his stomach to reduce the pressure. It had no effect.
“Around midnight, it was clear this was not going to resolve itself,” his mother said. “Griffin ended up undergoing emergency surgery.”
Doctors removed a portion of his small intestine that was impacted by scar tissue and the remaining pieces of the tumor.
The operation proved successful, and the battle resumed.
His mother kept the stats.
“Twelve days at UCLA … 48 days spent at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital,” Valerie said. “Eleven lumbar punctures.
“X number of chemo bags … I didn’t keep count of those.”
But the biggest number on her list was 109:
“The days from when Griffin went into the ER until ringing the bell,” she said.
He was surrounded by family as he sounded his victory over cancer on Jan. 26.
“We did the scans and the results were coming back amazing,” Arnold said. “There was little to no tumor left, so I knew that I was going on the right path.
“And then before my last round of treatment, they ran some tests and I was cancer-free.
“That was a moment of relief and happiness.
“It was like, ‘OK, that chapter’s closed … Let’s go meet those goals that you made, and go support your team’ … and everything.”
Field of Dreams
He reached one of those goals last Sunday when he accepted a baseball scholarship to attend Pepperdine University beginning in the school year of 2028-2029.
Arnold, a catcher by trade, returned to the high school’s Eddie Mathews Field within weeks of ringing the hospital bell.
“I never was really fully back during baseball season,” he admitted. “I made a decision with my family and coach (Steve) Schuck that I’d focus on just getting back to hitting and playing some field before catching.
“That’s definitely a physically demanding role, and a mentally demanding role, too.
“I felt it was best if I spent more of my time and energy just coming back in ways I could help the team.”
The baseball team found a way to help him with its annual “Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation’s vs. Cancer” fund-raising game of March 27.
The players dedicated a portion of the proceeds to help allay their teammate’s medical expenses.
“I am so proud of their unselfishness and the giving of their time and energy,” Schuck said.
Regaining strength was Arnold’s first goal last spring. He had lost 50 pounds from his 6-foot-2 frame, dropping to 130 from 180.
Mom’s cooking got him back on an upward course.
“She makes a really good pesto pasta, and I ate a lot of it,” he said. “She makes some really good garlic bread to go with it.”
It fueled him for the “busiest summer of my life.”
“I was kind of bouncing around a lot,” Arnold said. “Football was five, six days a week.
“I played in some Sunday baseball games.
“It’s definitely a challenge playing multiple sports, but it’s a great time if you love it enough.”
He realized he was back to being the old Griffin Arnold during an early summer game with his club baseball team, the Conejo Valley-based SoCal Giants.
“I had two triples, and I threw a guy out from catcher,” he said. “I was back up to 180, 185 pounds and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I was dreaming about.’”
Frosh Start
Mendoza realized he had a quarterback to dream on during a 7-on-7 game in Santa Ana in January 2025.
He’d just learned that Laird Finkel, his star quarterback from the previous fall, was transferring to Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth.
“We were like, ‘OK, what are we going to do here?’” he recalled.
He threw Arnold — his freshman, junior varsity quarterback — into the fire of that first offseason contest.
“I don’t think he was even 14 years old at the time,” Mendoza said.
“It was raining, and it was just one of those moments of like, ‘Here he is, he’s got these older guys to perform in front of’ … and he did just that.
“It wasn’t perfect every play, but he just competed, man … He competed.”
It was enough to earn the respect of his older teammates.
“It was like, ‘Hey, we’re rolling with Griff now,’” Mendoza said.
They rolled to a respectable 3-3 record that fall until the sophomore quarterback couldn’t stomach the pain any longer.
Arnold had completed 93-of-150 passes for 1,249 yards and 14 touchdowns with just one interception to that point of the season.
He won the Gary Blades Player of the Game Award after throwing five touchdowns in the cross-town game against San Marcos — his dad’s alma mater.
“It must definitely be a weird feeling for him,” Arnold said, noting that his dad had played both football and baseball for the Royals in the 1990s. “He’ll always be the Royal.
“He’ll seem a little on the fence, but as soon as that first snap of football goes, he’s full-on Dons.”
Family is at the core of Arnold’s triumphs over cancer and in the athletic arena, Mendoza said.
“Griff’s got a lot of family here in Santa Barbara between his cousins and his aunts and uncles,” he said. “And you just know his mom and dad are special people.
“When you’ve got a player with all the intangibles that Griff has, you know it comes from a strong foundation like that.”
It keeps you grounded when the hits start coming.
