Local earns way onto college hockey squad

Melissa Guillermo left home at age 14 to follow her passion for ice, pucks, sticks and net.

The 20-year-old North Las Vegas resident played peewee hockey with the boys on the Las Vegas Flames and Mustangs hockey teams in elementary school. By the time she reached middle school, she tried out and earned a spot on the California Selects, an all-girl travel team out of Southern California.

Guillermo traveled with the California Selects, keeping Las Vegas as her home base. She was recruited by Culver Academy in Indiana to play for the all-girls team, and she left for school after the eighth grade to attend the prep school.

She is now in her second year at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where she is a forward on the women's team.

"I was totally up for the change," said Guillermo of leaving home for Culver Academy. "It was hard at first, but all the other kids were going through the same thing."

Her interest in hockey came at age 10 with a chance ticket to the Las Vegas Aces, a junior team. Team member Wally Lacroix threw a stick over the boards, and Guillermo won the tug-of-war with another kid for possession of the stick. She had Lacroix sign it after the game.

"I had never seen a hockey game before," Guillermo said. "It's ice and we're in the desert."

She gave up soccer, playing on a boys baseball team and the violin that year to play hockey.

"She marched to the beat of a different drummer," said Pat Guillermo, Melissa's father and a Hawaiian native. "When she said hockey I almost fell off my tree."

The Guillermos made hockey a family affair. Pat coached peewee hockey and went to 4 a.m. family hockey pickup games with his daughter on Sundays.

"My kids introduced me to everything," he said. "She was the one in the family who wanted to learn to ski at age 4."

Playing hockey with the boys never deterred Melissa Guillermo from the game. As she got older, she was glad to find a girls team, because the boys she played with grew bigger and stronger.

"When they saw the ponytail ... they went out of their way to knock her down," said Pat Guillermo of the players on the opposite teams. "She held her own until the very end."

Women's hockey also is different than watching or playing men's hockey.

"You don't get the fighting. With the boys, it's a macho thing. The girls play just as hard, and they have the contact in the corners, but they don't have the macho thing," Pat Guillermo said. "It's a finesse game for them."

"We were on the same level," Melissa Guillermo said. "Now I don't miss it, because I would get killed out there."

Playing hockey at a young age gave her the chance to do and see things many middle school students would never experience.

"We got to see parts of the country we had no point to travel to," Melissa Guillermo said. "There would be no point for me to fly out to the East Coast, Albuquerque; Flagstaff, Ariz."

By the eighth grade, Melissa Guillermo knew where she stood in the nation's rankings and had "realistic goals" about where hockey could take her, Pat Guillermo said. She set her sights on college, where she is now a business communications major.

There are no plans for the national team. Melissa Guillermo will graduate from hockey the same day she graduates from college.

"I've always been the type of person to go out and try something new. I never heard of boarding school until hockey drove me to that direction," she said. "If I could do it again, I would do it again. I wouldn't have it any other way."


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