UPDATED: Feb. 5, 2018 at 6:42 p.m.

T

he first thing they noticed were his feet.

Nick Mellen was working through a series of footwork drills during the summer before his freshman season at West Genesee (New York) High School. His two future coaches, assistant Bob Deegan and head coach Mike Messere, looked on as the rising freshman’s feet rapidly bounced off the dots beneath him.

Five dots were set up below Mellen in the same shape that would appear on a deck of cards. Players tapped each dot in a given sequence as fast as possible. Deegan watched Mellen blaze through the drill twice before turning to Massere.

“This kid is going to be a freshman?” Deegan asked.

He was, and he’d only been playing lacrosse for a few months. After picking up the sport as an eighth grader, Mellen started as a freshman for a program that has won 15 state titles since 1981 and usually starts strictly juniors and seniors. He played varsity in lacrosse, football and hockey his freshman year, something Messere, who’s coached at the school for more than 40 years, couldn’t remember happening before. A year later, after his third season playing lacrosse, Mellen committed to Syracuse.

It all happened fast. That’s how things went for the first six years of Mellen’s lacrosse career, in which he started 16 of 17 games as a freshman with the Orange. But in the 5-foot-9, 178-pound defenseman’s sophomore season, one when he was tabbed a preseason Inside Lacrosse All-American, everything stopped. His career was put on hold due to an injury to the labrum of his left shoulder. Mellen had surgery in fall 2016, and he medically redshirted that season to fully recover. After spending his whole career trying to catch up mentally while being ahead physically, Mellen was forced to wait. It’s been more than a year and a half since Mellen played in a game, but now he’s healthy again.

“Looking back, honestly, I definitely gained something from (being out),” Mellen said. “It made me who I am as a player today, kind of started fire under my belt.”

Over the past year and a half Mellen’s had time to sit back and study the game that his high school coaches knew he could excel in, even if he didn’t understand it yet. Deegan addressed Mellen’s lack of experience in a banquet at the end of Mellen’s senior year. He knew the athlete leaving him was one of the best at the high school at the time. But he needed to play more.

“Your best days are ahead of you,” he told the Syracuse commit.

Three years later, Mellen has positioned himself to achieve the balance coaches have always wanted him to find.

• • •

As an eighth grader, Mellen became an integral part of the lacrosse team at Camillus Middle School, a school in the West Genesee district, before he learned the game’s intricacies. The rules weren’t important yet anyway, considering Mellen played by his own set.

From the start, coaches gave Mellen a long pole and he played long-stick midfielder, where he could utilize his athleticism and avoid the advanced stick work required on the offensive end. He could get beat and recover before the player had time to release a shot, said his former coach at Camillus, Eric Howes. He’d mastered the art of the recovery so well that Howes had to tell his other players not to copy Mellen. They simply weren’t athletic enough to do so.

On faceoffs, Mellen played on the wing and his job was simple: Scoop the ground ball and run it down to an attack. In one game, Howes remembered Mellen snatching a ground ball, darting toward the cage to draw a defender and dishing the ball off to an attack for a goal. He did it again and again and again — four or five straight times before the opposing coach called timeout.

Mellen’s aggression made him the elite defender he was, but only when he controlled it. In a game against Fayetteville-Manlius in Mellen’s eighth grade season, he ran alone down the sideline. With no defender on him, he dropped the ball. He picked it back up, continuing down the field until the ball hit the turf again. When Mellen dropped the ball a third time, a defender challenged him for the groundball. Mellen trucked him and jogged to the penalty box to serve an unnecessary roughness penalty.

Once in the box, Howes turned to Mellen.

“You looked more upset because you were dropping the ball and took it out on that poor kid than anything else,” Howes said.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” Mellen replied.

A year later, Mellen strolled the sideline of a summer tournament in New Jersey with Howes and Deegan. Deegan quizzed Mellen on the rules, specifically how many seconds he had to enter the restraining box after crossing midfield. Mellen guessed 30. The answer was 10.

“It was weird,” Mellen said. “I didn’t know what lacrosse was, I never watched many games of lacrosse my entire life. I was always a football and hockey kind of guy. I mean, I don’t know, I guess they kind of showed me the light at a pretty late age, to be honest.”

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In high school, Mellen slowly matured both on and off the field, his coaches said. Deegan and Messere taught him the composure required in defense. The West Genesee defenders completed one drill called “Miyagis,” named after The Karate Kid sensei Mr. Miyagi. The drill teaches players patience and precision with their checks, just as Miyagi teaches Daniel to strike tactically in karate.

The drill simulates a defender throwing a check on an opposing player by having a teammate stand with his hands out at the width he would normally hold a stick. The defender then swiftly swings his stick through the gap between the teammates hand, usually in a figure-eight shape.

Messere emphasized to his players that they are “surgeons, not woodchoppers.” Early on, Mellen chopped. He remembered his coaches preaching “aggression with intelligence,” meaning players should be aggressive, but think before they strike. It was a lesson Mellen always heard, sometimes followed, and never forgot.

As he moved from long-stick midfielder to close defense at the start of his sophomore year, his job became more complex. Often covering the best attack, Mellen was instructed by Deegan not to slide off his man unless he was in certain situations. He was to counter his attack’s top move and force him to use his second or third dodge. He couldn’t run out and attack his opposition anymore, the players were too good. No longer could he succeed on aggression alone.

He needed to slow down.

“Nick had surgical strikes,” Messere said. “He was tough because his aggressiveness,” Messere paused. “(Controlling his aggression) was hard, which was nice because he was one of those players you had to pull back all that time. … It’s easier to coach a kid like that than a kid you have to force and push out there.”

As Mellen grew into a lock-off defender, Deegan warned him not to be caught “bird dogging,” a term used often used by lacrosse coaches referring to a defensive player sagging off his man to chase the ball. In practice, Mellen knew his role, but in games, he wanted more. He pushed out toward the ball to try for a play that wasn’t his to make.

Before a game against Jamesville-Dewitt during Mellen’s junior or senior year, Deegan warned him not to take his eyes off its star attack. In the first quarter, he didn’t budge. But as the game carried on, Mellen wandered off his man and toward the ball handler, even if it wasn’t his assigned attack. And as Deegan had predicted before the game, when Mellen turned back to locate the attack, he wasn’t there. Instead, he was catching a pass and burying it in the West Genesee cage.

Mellen looked to the sideline, where Deegan stood.

“Do you believe me now?” Deegan asked his star defender.

“He had to go through that,” Deegan said in January. “… He had to go through that happening to him before he realized, man, that can happen that quick.”

No matter how much Deegan told Mellen to counter his opposition, the young player still occasionally gave into the instincts that had made him prodigious in the first place.

When Mellen was a senior at West Genesee, he played in the Section III title game in the Carrier Dome against Auburn. Ball movement forced Mellen to cover the man with possession as he often did, only this time it wasn’t Auburn’s top attack. So, he hacked, hoping to jar the ball loose. The referee threw a flag. The ball was still in the player’s stick, so he swung again. The referee launched his second flag. Again, Mellen chopped. This time the ball hit the ground, along with a third penalty marker.

Mellen shrugged his shoulders in the box as both coaches asked a question everyone involved knew the answer to. He needed the ball by any means necessary.

The next day, Deegan and Mellen talked it over. Mellen apologized for his immaturity and called the play “stupid.”

Less than a year later, when Mellen knew he would start in Syracuse’s opener as a freshman, he sent a letter to Deegan. He thought back to the “patience with intelligence” phrase his coach had repeated so many times over the years. Deegan taught him the little things, not to exchange words with the opposing attack, but be a gentleman instead.

“He grew up a lot,” Deegan said. “Like everybody, it takes you awhile to figure some things out. He figured out this is what I have to do.”

In the game, Mellen played with a different demeanor. He led the defense with four caused turnovers. Two came off blocked passes, where he allowed the offense to decide what they would do with the ball before he made a play on it. He countered the attack just as Deegan told him to but didn’t always see him follow through on. On another turnover, he poked the ball out of the attack’s dangling stick. He didn’t scoop the ball immediately.

Instead, he tapped the ball around the attack and, this time, he scooped up the ball and carried it into open space.

• • •

The pain in Mellen’s left shoulder wouldn’t go away. He played the end of his freshman season, and even pressed through the beginning of the fall, with the injury still lingering. He decided on surgery, hoping it would fix the issue and he’d be ready for the spring.

Then, spring came. Still, he wasn’t better. Finally, the athlete who had never had an injury of this magnitude conceded. He didn’t want to miss the season, but he understood this was the best decision for his career in the long run. So, he decided to be patient.

“It was tough, it was really crappy,” Mellen said. “I came in and my goal was just to, like, take over. My goal was to be the guy … My freshman year going into sophomore year, I was hoping to be that leader on the field. I was hoping to be the guy that guys looked up to on the field, and that was taken away from me.”

Months before Mellen officially redshirted, Syracuse assistant athletic trainer Troy Gerlt forced him to do something Mellen never does: nothing at all. The best thing for Mellen to do, Gerlt said, was lay low and allow his surgical wounds on his left shoulder heal.

Once he was cleared for rehab activities, Mellen inched back to full strength. When healing from shoulder surgery, Gerlt said, it’s important to build the small muscles around the shoulder and lats to keep the shoulder intact. Mellen began with simple stretches and bodyweight exercises, some simulated the throwing motion he would need to rebuild into his muscle memory.

In one particular exercise, Mellen put both hands out about shoulder width apart and pulled his arms back, a standing row without the weight. He pulled, squeezing his shoulder blades together. The exercise helped build his lats and rotator cuff muscles.

He completed that exercise and “millions more,” Mellen said, laughing. From there, he worked his way to the weightroom, where Gerlt watched as Mellen churned toward his old self. Mellen progressed from the body weight rows to rows with a barbell, adding weight as strength increased.

The weight used to be the first thing players and coaches noticed when Mellen worked out. Former SU defender Scott Firman remembered Mellen pushing weight on-par with upperclassmen numbers before he ever donned an orange jersey. Mellen said he used to be someone that walked into the gym and “cranked out bench,” not really thinking about the importance of stretching.

He starts differently now. Before every workout, he stretches and gets his body loose before working in the exercises that have built his solid frame.

That spring, Mellen finally had a stick in his hand. Gerlt noted that he first threw short passes with a traditional lacrosse stick, which can be more than 20 inches shorter than the long pole normally used by defenders and that Mellen has always played with. Practicing with the short stick took unwarranted stress off his shoulder until he was ready for it. Slowly, throughout the spring, the passes got a little longer.

Eventually, Mellen worked back to his old drills. He played wall-ball to keep his stick skills up, re-tuned his checks with Miyagis and utilized the ladder to regain the foot speed, which allows him to lock-off the other team’s top attack.

Around that time, in early-April and during his rehab, Mellen reached out to Deegan again.

“I go through every day thinking about the first practice coming up in the fall,” Mellen wrote. “I can finally suit back up. I believe I wouldn’t have the mindset if it wasn’t for everything you had done for me and said to me and for that I thank you.”

Banner photo by Paul Schlesinger | Staff Photographer

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, Bob Deegan was misnamed in a previous version of this post. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

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Published on February 4, 2018 at 8:14 pm

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