Player Guidance for Melee-Focused Druid

Hi, all! 🙋‍♂️

Just started a Strixhaven campaign using 5.5e, and one of my players wanted to play against type, so I wanna empower the heck out of that! They're a bit on the inexperienced side, so I wanna shy them away a bit from multiclassing, just to make things easier on them.

Are there any really good subclasses for a melee-focused druid? TIA! 

If you are sticking to official content, the Moon Druid is about the only melee-oriented subclass (by Wildshaping into stronger beasts to attack). The rest primarily focus on spellcasting. If you are allowing third-party content, you could take a look at Circle of the Old Ways from the Crooked Moon part 1 book. Its features are based around buffing a Druid who is using Shillelagh and a Shield, giving them a nice array of buffs for a melee character in the form of things like extra AC, Extra Attack, extra damage to your attacks, and damage dealt back to melee attackers. It's a very nature-based melee attacker with a really cool bramble-and-thorn theme.

Perfect! Thank you!