Melina Sarlo, who’s about to enter her sophomore year at Hofstra University, where she’s playing on its women’s lacrosse team and majoring in business, was a member of the Argentine lacrosse team that recently qualified to play in the World Cup championships next summer in Tokyo.
An all-around athlete whose sports list includes softball, soccer, basketball, volleyball, field hockey, track, and lifeguard competitions, Sarlo chose lacrosse over softball as an East Hampton Middle School seventh grader — attracted by its fluidity and fast pace.
She quickly excelled, as a midfielder, and was called up to the high school’s varsity team as an eighth grader — though Covid erased what would have been her first season.
In her senior year at East Hampton High, she captained all the teams on which she played — lacrosse, field
hockey, and indoor track. Now in her fourth year of lifeguarding at Amagansett’s Atlantic Avenue Beach, she is working out this summer at Body Tech.
A dual citizen — her mother, the former Paula Cuesta, is an Argentine native — Sarlo said during a conversation the other day that the Argentine team was “a mix . . . three of the girls flew up from Argentina, there were five or six who had been born there, but who have come to the U.S. to go to college, and then there were some like me who have a parent who was born in Argentina.”
Besides Argentina, seven other teams vied in the recent tournament in central Florida. There were two from the United States: the national team, on which pros and top D-1 collegians play, that’s considered the best in the world, and a Native American team, Haudenosaunee, whose Iroquois forebears, Sarlo
said, “invented the game.” Along with them were teams from Canada, Puerto Rico, Peru, Mexico, and Jamaica.
Sarlo’s team — she rotated between midfield and defense — went 1-2 in pool play, defeating Jamaica 17-9, and losing to Haudenosaunee and Canada, which, Sarlo said, “is almost as good as the U.S.”
But subsequent wins over Peru and Mexico resulted in Argentina finishing fifth, thus earning it the last berth in the world championships, a D-1 tournament in which the world’s top 16 entries will vie.
Sarlo’s father, Michael, said in an email that his daughter’s team had warmed up for the Pan Am tourney in May by winning the Heritage Cup in Boston, “an international friendly event with no residency requirements for the rosters.” He added that Nico Prandi, an assistant women’s coach at Endicott College, and the Argentine team’s head coach, “does a tremendous job of bringing the players together while also focusing on celebrating their heritage and working to grow the game in Argentina. Several players go to Buenos Aires each year to help run youth clinics and camps. Melina hopes to fit one of those trips into her schedule.”
“Argentina’s 16-8 win over Mexico — ranked 15th in the world — put Argentina, ranked 26th, over the top,” he continued. “The team’s leading scorer is Sam Geiersbach of West Babylon, a professional — and former Top Guns travel club player, as is Melina — who was the M.V.P. of the 2022 N.C.A.A. championship game that the University of North Carolina won.”
Sarlo said she would very much like to go to Tokyo, “but it’s not guaranteed — I’ll have to try out and make the team again.”
But knowing that, she agreed, will keep her on her toes.
