Meline Almasian, or Mel, is one of the few freshmen girls that made the WA girls’ varsity soccer team this fall. Almasian has been playing soccer since a she was younger–first starting with travel soccer and now being positioned as a striker for WA.

She says she does not want to take this opportunity to play on varsity for granted, since she worked really hard to get to there.

According to Almasian, when tryouts started, the girls were all separated into different groups. One group for varsity players, and then another group for Junior Varsity (JV) A or B, which is where she started off. However, as tryouts went on the varsity captains pulled her up to the varsity group, where she stayed.

“I didn’t really expect to be put on varsity. I was hoping to make JV A, but it just happened that way,” said Almasian.

So far, Almasian has enjoyed playing on the same team as the sophomores and upperclassmen, especially since she was already familiar with them.

“One year I played up with the people who are sophomores now, so I knew most of the people on the team. I also knew some of [them] because of my brother, who is a junior,” said Almasian.

As for school, although it is pretty early in the year, Almasian has not found it all that difficult to balance her school work with the many hours of a varsity sport. However, she does admit that a few nights call for her to stay up a bit longer.

In the coming years, Almasian shoots to make varsity for the next three years, and she even hopes to play college soccer. She also wants to do track and field this spring, since she did it in middle school as well.

Senior captain Karly Bigham speaks quite highly of Almasian and her style of play.

“Mel is definitely one of the fastest girls on our team this year […] [she] has already shown a lot of improvement this year, [even though] she was a great player to start,” said Bigham.