UVA's Ties to Youth Lax Program Remain Strong

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — For many University of Virginia men’s lacrosse players, summer is a time for internships on Wall Street. Tim Myers made his way to New York City this summer, too, but in a different capacity.

Myers, a midfielder who’s in his fourth year at the University, spent about five weeks working with Harlem Lacrosse in the Bronx, N.Y.

“It was awesome, and it’s so different from what almost all my other friends did,” said Myers, a graduate of St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville.

When he returned home from New York, Myers reflected on his summer experience in a text to Virginia head coach Lars Tiffany.

“Working with Harlem was the best thing I’ve ever done,” Myers told Tiffany. “It gives such a deep appreciation for all that we have and how lucky we truly are. Seeing how important lacrosse is for the kids is just so powerful.”

Harlem Lacrosse was founded in 2008 by Simon Cataldo, who later graduated from UVA School of Law. Cataldo wanted to use the sport as a vehicle to help at-risk students in New York.

The organization’s stated mission is to “provide opportunities, relationships, and experiences that activate the skills and traits to put youth on a path to success as students, athletes, and citizens.” Over the past decade, Harlem Lacrosse has expanded significantly and now serves more than 1,000 students in five cities: New York, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

“It’s amazing what they’ve done,” said Tiffany, who serves on the board of the New York branch of Harlem Lacrosse.

Tiffany’s predecessor at UVA, Dom Starsia, is a longtime member of Harlem Lacrosse’s executive board.

“When I started, it was a middle school program only,” Starsia said. “It was sixth- and seventh-graders, basically, and now over the past 10 years the whole program has matured. Now we have high school programs in every city, and we have kids in college. We have kids graduating from college.

“In the beginning there was nobody going to college. And now this year, I think we had 75 kids going to college. Next year we’re on track to have 150 go to college. And so that piece of it has just been amazing.”

Many of the students who come through Harlem Lacrosse programs go on to play the sport in college, Starsia said.

Wyatt Melzer, who played for Starsia, was the first member of the UVA lacrosse program to get involved with Harlem Lacrosse. As his graduation approached in 2012 and he considered his career options, Melzer said, he felt “like I wanted to do something a little bit different and wasn’t feeling lined up with the finance world.

“I remember Dom in a huddle just saying something like, ‘[Forget] Wall Street. Go be a teacher; go be a coach; go make an impact in someone’s life.’ And it sparked my curiosity to keep exploring that, which led to Harlem Lacrosse.”

In the summer of 2012, Melzer heard from UVA lacrosse alum Drew Fox about a fledgling organization called Harlem Lacrosse that was looking to hire its first full-time employee.

“I packed my bags and was living in New York on a couch a week later,” Melzer recalled.

Melzer worked in various roles for the organization for almost a decade, during which time he’d regularly take groups from Harlem Lacrosse to visit Charlottesville. He encouraged UVA players to get involved with Harlem Lacrosse, and among those who did so was Owen Van Arsdale. Van Arsdale spent four years with Harlem Lacrosse, the first two as a program director and the next two as director of high school programs.

Other UVA lacrosse alumni have supported the program financially and in additional ways, Starsia noted.

Melzer is now director of the Virginia Lacrosse Network, an alumni group that supports the UVA men’s and women’s programs. In his interactions with current Cavaliers, he said, “I’ve always tried to make a little subtle pitch for teaching and coaching in Harlem Lacrosse, just because I felt like it made such a special imprint on my life. I know the impact that a kid from UVA who’s a program director can make on people’s lives.”

His message resonated with Myers, a history major whose mother, Julie, had an illustrious career as head women’s lacrosse coach at UVA. She’s now chief executive officer of the One Love Foundation.

Melzer spoke to Tiffany’s team last fall, Tim Myers said, “and shared a story about when he was working at Harlem Lacrosse, about one of the kids, and that was pretty inspiring to me. And then I reached out to him the next day, set up a phone call, and then he connected me with a few other people [with the organization].”

The more he learned about Harlem Lacrosse, Myers said, the more determined he was to get involved. He’d spent his whole life in Charlottesville—“In this bubble,” he said—and wanted to broaden his horizons.

In New York, Myers was an assistant coach on a team of ninth- and 10^th-grade boys. “You’re more of a mentor than a coach in a way,” he said, “because they only play lacrosse for two hours a day pretty much.”

Myers commuted by subway every day from an apartment in the Greenwich Village of Manhattan to the Bronx. His team practiced at Patterson Playground.

“The structure of the day pretty much for the summer was, they would play lacrosse in the morning and you’d really get to catch up with them, see how everything was going,” Myers said, “and then the second half of the day they’d be in a classroom, because a lot of it was developmental. So there was a finance day and a film day, where they really try to dive into the [nuances of the sport] and not just the highlights of lacrosse, really trying to understand what happened to make a play possible. So I was kind of just another person for them to talk to, and I always would try to make myself available if a kid needed something, or if there was something going on at home.”

Most of his players had picked up lacrosse in middle school and were familiar with the sport, Myers said. “Lacrosse is a tool for them more to connect and to be a part of a community, I’d say. I think that they really enjoy the people that they play with.”

Their lives weren’t always easy, Myers said. “There was a bunch of instances where kids would have to miss a day because they had to take care of stuff at home. And for kids that are 13, 14 years old, it’s incredibly impressive how mature they are and how they go about handling business that they know that they need to deal with.”

With his players, Myers said, he saw “how important the lacrosse piece is. That’s something that I know that I’ve slowly over time taken for granted, and just seeing how much lacrosse means to them was exactly what I wanted to see. Especially in the area that we were in, you were surrounded by people that have lost their way. Then you have these kids that are really thriving to become the people that they want to be.”

When he left Charlottesville for New York, Myers said, the “biggest thing that I wanted was perspective and an appreciation for everything that we might take for granted. And that was exactly what I got. These kids were dealt pretty unfortunate hands, and not once do they complain about it, which speaks volumes about the kids that are involved there.”

Coming from UVA, Melzer said, “it’s kind of a perspective shift. This is a very special thing here, and it’s a reminder that there’s kids that would do anything in the world to be here, let alone kids that are living in homeless shelters and projects in Harlem.”

Melzer, who grew up in Florida, is back in his home state, teaching and coaching the boys lacrosse team at Martin County High School in Stuart, about 40 miles north of Palm Beach.

“It’s very reminiscent of Harlem Lacrosse,” he said, “because I’m dealing with a lot of struggling academic kids and building a lacrosse program from scratch. So it’s a lot of déjà vu, which is pretty cool.”

Tiffany and Starsia are Brown University graduates, and Tiffany played for Starsia at the Ivy League school. That UVA and Brown have been especially supportive of Harlem Lacrosse is gratifying to Starsia.

“I don’t deny that I had something to do with that,” he said, “but the fact is that the guys stepped up and have done what they’ve done and become kind of a vital part of the organization.”

Virginia is one of the schools that Harlem Lacrosse groups visit regularly, and “Lars has always been very generous with his time in terms of being patient with the kids and having them out to practice and being willing to share those kind of things,” Starsia said.

“It’s a gift that keeps on giving,” Melzer said of UVA’s commitment to helping Harlem Lacrosse.

Melzer and Myers had in-depth conversations after Myers expressed an interest in working for Harlem Lacrosse this summer, and they still text each other regularly.

“I’m just checking in and offering my input and thoughts on how he could be navigating this exciting time in his life, which is a big part of my VLN role,” Melzer said. “It’s just icing on the cake that I get to talk to him about Harlem Lacrosse.”

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