One Goal

by Amy Bass

  This, McGraw thought, has to change. It has to change right now. As the coach, he had to change it. He had no doubt he could succeed at making this better; this was one of his strengths. Soccer was the connector. He had to make them see that.

  “I want you guys to come over here in the middle and sit,” he called as he walked over. They looked up, unsure of what he meant. He started pointing, moving players around, making sure they mixed up. Ali here, Jonny there.

  “You!” McGraw roared, pointing at Shobow. His voice had yet to descend into its usual midseason rasp. “Come here—sit.”

  Shobow hopped up almost instantly, not only because Coach just told him to, but also because he realized what McGraw was trying to do. He wanted to bring them together. He wanted to help them be together. This, thought Shobow, was good.

  McGraw continued to point, calling each of them out, until he was satisfied with the reconfiguration. Now they are speckled, he thought. Perfect. It was time to take an old-school idea of team and apply it to these players who sat before him. He wasn’t trying to save the world; he wanted to win. And to do that, he needed to build relationships, something he was good at. On the field, at least, he needed them to shed their identities—white, black, Muslim, Catholic, Franco, Somali, native, immigrant—and become something new: a team.

  “Okay, this is how it’s gonna be,” McGraw started. “It has to be this way—this is how a team plays. This is how I want you to be on the field and off the field: together.”

  The players looked at one another and began to relax. Almost immediately, McGraw noticed a change in their demeanors, their bodies, their faces.

  “To play the game, you’re gonna have to play together. It’s the only way to play,” he continued.

  He noticed some of them starting to smile. He was on to something. Keep going, he thought. Take it all the way.

  “You’re going to have to talk to each other, because it’s the only way we’re gonna win,” he continued. “Sometimes our communities don’t understand each other, but you can show the adults how it is supposed to be. By playing together, that’ll send a message that our cultures can get along.”

  But he knew it was going to take more than suiting up together. Learning how to be teammates, if not friends, was a process on and off the field.

  “This is how I want you to look everywhere you go,” McGraw continued. “Everywhere. If you’re going to the store, if you’re going to class, you guys have to do it together. High fives in the hallway. You need to hang out together. You don’t have to sit together in the cafeteria if you don’t want to, but you need to stick up for each other and be together. It’s a brotherhood.”

  Wow, thought Shobow, stretching out his thin legs. From his new location on the grass, the sun on his back, he liked what he was hearing. He wanted his team to be united. A new sense of team spirit came across him, a deeper sense of connection. It was encouraging to hear Coach talk about this, to see him face it head-on. Shobow knew from his friendship with Jonny how important this was.

  McGraw finished his speech. It was time for practice. The players got up and started walking onto the field to warm up.

  “Good job, Coach,” Shobow said to McGraw in a low voice as he walked past him, keeping his eyes down out of respect. “That was good.”

  McGraw smiled, satisfied. For the next decade, it would be almost impossible to talk about Blue Devils soccer without referring to the day McGraw created his so-called speckled team, his constant sideline cry of “Together! Together!” taking on new meaning.

  “How would you guys say it?” he asked a few Somalis on the team one day. “How would you say ‘together’?”

  Pamoja ndugu, a few replied. It was Swahili, one of the many languages of the refugee camps. It meant “together brothers.”

  It became their rallying cry. “One, two, three!” they shouted before every game, huddled together, hands in the middle, McGraw at the center. “PAMOJA NDUGU!”

  “We were waiting to be together,” Shobow says, his eyes bright at the memory.

  The new team motto created a needed break from the past. Soon everyone on the team, not just the Muslim players, understood Ramadan, that it was one of the five pillars of Islam alongside Shahadah (profession of faith), Salat (prayer), Zakat (charity), and the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). Muslims around the world observed Ramadan, staying up late each night to eat. It lasted thirty days, ending with celebrations on Eid al-Fitr, when many of the African players on the team would go to Old Orchard Beach to splash in the ocean or hang out on the boardwalk, a few extra dollars in their pockets from their parents.

  “I remember when I was fasting, some of the players were not eating in front of us,” Shobow says of Ramadan that season, noticing how his teammates discreetly unwrapped their power bars behind the bench and kept their water bottles out of sight. “They had to wait. We didn’t tell them to wait. Coach McGraw didn’t tell them to wait. They decided to wait. If they wanted to drink, if they were thirsty so bad, sometimes, yes, they did drink—but never in front of us.

  “That is respect,” he continues. “That sense of knowing another person. I felt it. We were one team at that time, from that point. It was a big difference.”

  Like Shobow, McGraw felt the shift.

  “They needed somebody to say, ‘Break the ice, let’s get it going.’ So by the time they were seniors,” he says of Shobow’s team, “they were going to movies together, going out to play video games or foosball.”

  He saw a difference on the field. They played better, more in tune with one another. But what really struck him was the change off the field.

  “What was nice was to see them walking together,” he says. “I see it more today in school, I see them hanging out more together. They meet in the hallway and they acknowledge each other.”

  But there were touch-and-go moments, times when McGraw feared that a racial confrontation might break out when tensions ran high. He remembers one intense practice in particular after his “speckled” talk. Jonny McDonough and Subeer Osman were running across midfield, right in front of him, competing for the ball, getting physical, throwing elbows, grabbing each other’s shirts, before finally falling to the ground. When they got up, McGraw froze as the two growled at each other. But they shook it off and continued to play. After practice, McGraw spoke to the team about it.

  “I was sure Subeer was going to lose his head, and Jonny was going to punch him, and there was going to be a fight,” he said. But there wasn’t; they laughed about it and moved on.

  Subeer is now part of Blue Devils folklore, the center of a story that has lived long after he graduated in 2010. Following McGraw’s directive to hang out together, Subeer and teammate John Roy—Gish’s nephew—made plans to go to a movie one night.

  “I’m heading out,” John called to his mom on his way out of the house.

  “Well, what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m going to get Subeer, and then we’re gonna—”

  “THE HECK YOU ARE!” she yelled. “You are NOT leaving this house because I’m NOT gonna allow you—there’s NO BEER!”

  “No, no.” He laughed. “His NAME is SUBEER.”

  Despite these lighter moments, McGraw knew he could not let up, especially as more Somalis came out for the team. He had to continue to work hard to make the team come together. In many ways, he figured things out with the team long before Lewiston figured them out as a community, capitalizing on the players’ investment in the game and the support from their families and groups like SBYA. Just as Jackie Robinson’s first at-bat predated the Brown v. Board of Education decision by almost a decade, revealing what integration actually looked like, for many in Lewiston, soccer showed the way. Once refugees, these players—now brothers together—had a home, a team, and one goal. Winning.

  Chapter 9

  Lewiston Pure

  There is no such thing as a part-time player in Lewiston. After practice or a game, the kids go out and pla
y again. Coaches never need to ask them to work on a skill; it’s a given that they are never done.

  “Our opponents?” says Abdijabar Hersi, one of McGraw’s assistant coaches and the first Somali hired by Lewiston High School’s athletic department. He laughs. “They’re part-time soccer players. When people ask me, ‘Why is Lewiston so good?’ I say, ‘It’s a part-time soccer player against a full-time soccer player.’ And there’s a big difference, you know?”

  Coaching kids who prioritized soccer kept McGraw and his staff on their toes.

  “I had to expand my game beyond just the hockey and baseball and basketball players that would have come out, that made soccer their second,” says McGraw of the shift. “I had to change, I had to up my game to stay with them. Because they knew a lot.”

  At just about any waking hour of any given day, there is some version of the game being played.

  “It’s aaaaaaalllllll day, all the time,” Hersi continues. “Downtown, I see them dribbling around the street. Same thing if you do basketball—imagine if I walk everywhere and just dribble. Imagine! Same thing with the soccer…It’s important to get touches in, you know? As much as you can.”

  But it isn’t just pickup games. When Abdi H. tried out for the high school soccer team in 2012, he had been playing organized soccer for several years. From local recreational leagues to the SBYA teams, kids began coming to McGraw ready to play at the next level. Abdi H. had no doubt he would make varsity his freshman year, just as Shobow and Ali Hersi had.

  Players took many paths to McGraw’s team. Even Seacoast United, the elite pay-to-play league, began recruiting Somali players for its U-14 team. Understanding the difficulties, both cultural and financial, of taking on immigrant kids, Coach Ron Graham diligently worked with Kim Wettlaufer and Jama Mohamed, one of the SBYA founders, to make it happen. He didn’t just have to figure out how to pay for it; he had to make sure the families were comfortable with it. Graham visited the homes of prospective players with Mohamed, talking with parents to gain their trust before asking if their sons could play.

  Carpools, donations, and the waiving of substantial registration fees cleared the way for Lewiston kids to play for Seacoast. Colleen Whitaker, whose son Nathan played U-14, served as team administrator and remembers working with Wettlaufer to get the required birth certificates, parental permission slips, and proof of insurance. She, along with her husband Matt, created an extensive rideshare network with pickup points to get everyone to practices and games. Whitaker made name tags for each player, and a roster that included each player’s photograph, name, and number, so other parents could root for them. She learned about prayer rituals and Ramadan, and that the kids from Lewiston played soccer because they wanted to, not because there was a “soccer mom” carting them around, cheering them on, and signing them up for various leagues. Initially surprised when these kids showed up for daylong tournaments with nothing—no snacks, no water bottles—she began carrying around an enormous duffel bag filled with gear she’d collected, everything from mouth guards to shin guards to protein bars.

  She also got in the habit of sending the family dog to her in-laws when the kids from Lewiston slept at her house before an early-morning game departure. No dogs, Ibrahim Hussein told her. They are najis, unclean.

  While players like Abdi H. and Maulid honed their skills with Seacoast, Austin Wing climbed through the ranks of the Lewiston/Auburn Youth Soccer Association. In the summer, he took part in McGraw’s camp, McG United Soccer Academy, where Eric Wagner was one of his coaches. Wagner’s eyes light up at the mention of Austin, whom he describes as “old-school Lewiston—Lewiston pure.”

  “He’s Lewiston original, he just embodies the Lewiston that is great,” Wagner says of the goalie, often the only white kid on the field. “All the great things about it—the welcoming, the hard work ethic, the good humor.”

  At an early age, Austin knew that he wanted to play goalie. When he was four years old, he always hung around the net. Loath to run, he hated ball-handling drills. But one of the key skills he could transfer from the t-ball field to the soccer pitch was his ability to stop a ball. “Everybody else would be scared of it,” he remembers. “I’d be the only one standing in front of it.”

  Austin loved McGraw’s summer camp, where the coach wanted kids to have fun and get comfortable with the ball. Campers played games like Around the World, taking the ball from “country” to “country” to meet new people. Austin also started training with McGraw’s summer goalie clinic, working on getting more aggressive and not being afraid of players coming in on crosses. He learned how to move out of the box more, stealing the other team’s scoring opportunities, rather than sitting back and waiting for the ball to come to him.

  As Austin approached middle school, he discovered there were soccer players in Lewiston who weren’t on his L/A team and didn’t go to McGraw’s camp. When he mowed his grandfather’s lawn on Walnut Street, he watched them play pickup games in the Colisée parking lot and SBYA games at Drouin Field. These kids looked like a mini version of the English Premiere League, he thought.

  “You come to the middle school and play with these other kids who have been playing soccer all of their lives, in different countries and pickup games on the streets, and you see all these different moves that you’ve never seen before,” he says of playing with his future high school teammates. They racked up amazing scores in middle school, winning by ten or more goals, and focused on controlling the ball more, passing it quickly. A key to their success, Austin knew, was eighth-grade coach Abdullahi Abdi.

  “If Paul Nadeau is the father of Lewiston soccer,” McGraw says, “Abdullahi is the second father.”

  McGraw first met Abdi when his son, Ali Hersi, made the varsity squad his freshman year alongside Shobow Saban.

  “He could slot a ball like no one else,” McGraw says of Ali. “He could find a hole anywhere.”

  Ali came to practice late one day, and McGraw made him run laps. Abdi came over and introduced himself. He pointed to his son.

  “Do not let him get away with anything,” he said in his soft voice, touches of Africa laced through each word. “You do what you need to do—I support you.”

  These days, McGraw keeps Abdi on speed dial.

  Growing up in Somalia, Abdullahi Abdi was the consummate athlete, good at just about everything he tried. Soccer was his first love, but he also excelled at middle-distance running until a motorcycle accident injured his right Achilles tendon. He turned to coaching, eventually becoming president of Somalia’s track and field program, which led to an increasingly important role on the country’s National Olympic Committee.

  When civil war broke out, Abdi sent his children and his wife, Nadifo Issak, to live in Mandera, a corner of Kenya tucked between Ethiopia and Somalia. He stayed behind to work, visiting them when he could.

  “It just wasn’t safe for us to stay,” says Halima Hersi, his daughter.

  In 1996, Abdi traveled to Georgia as manager of Somalia’s Olympic team, composed of a small delegation of runners. In the months leading up to the Games, the Somalis hit a snag when the Barrow County Chamber of Commerce voted they could not train at the local high school track, as had been arranged. While the Chamber claimed that the reason was money, letters to the editor of the local newspaper about the images of a U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu a few years earlier countered any Olympic spirit the rural county claimed to have.

  Despite such troubles, the Olympics remain one of Abdi’s proudest memories. Abdi Bile’s sixth-place finish in the men’s 1,500 meters is Somalia’s best Olympic performance to this day.

  After the Olympics, Abdi stayed in Atlanta. He worked hard—at a print shop, at a gas station, at coaching—so he could send money to his family and start the process of bringing them to the States. They moved to Nairobi to begin the transition. In 1998, after two years of paperwork, Abdi secured visas for his family to join him.

  The family, gratef
ul to be reunited, settled in Gwinnet County, about an hour from the large Somali community in DeKalb. But after Issak visited friends in Lewiston, she mentioned the prospect of moving. “Lewiston is safe,” she told her family. “You’re going to like it.” The family agreed, moving to Lewiston in 2006, where Abdi eventually got a job as an interpreter at Geiger Elementary School.

  “We are diverse!” says Halima with a laugh, noting that while she and her older brothers—she’s the only daughter—were born in Somalia, her middle brothers were born in Georgia, and the youngest was born Lewiston, just like her own children. Her eldest daughter, Sundus Ali, speaks fluent Somali, something Halima is proud of. At just six years old, Sundus started running for the city’s recreational youth track team, coached by Kim Wettlaufer, because her grandfather told her she looked like a runner. Halima remembers her father always bringing her along to play with her brothers when she was younger, encouraging her to shoot baskets and run laps. Sport was important for everyone, he believed. Not just boys.

  The track is one of the places where Somali girls, many of whom have brothers on the soccer team, shine as athletes. They don’t play much soccer, although during halftime at summer games, they will kick a ball around with one another. Abdikadir Negeye knows that the girls are increasingly interested in playing but recognizes that it isn’t common within Somali culture. The SBYA has fielded girls’ teams since 2008. Initially, the group received some criticism from local religious leaders about girls playing. But there is nothing that prevents them from playing, Negeye assures anyone who asks, noting that their biggest challenge is finding the appropriate clothing for girls to wear on the field.

  During her daughter’s summer track practice at Don Roux Stadium at Lewiston High School, Halima likes to sit in the sun on the bleachers and study, writing careful notes from the textbook open next to her, frequently looking up to watch Sundus. She has worked on and off as a school interpreter but wants to finish college and become a guidance counselor. She feels the pull of life in America, wanting more for herself and her family. She loves her four children, but her parents instilled in her a need to better herself, so she tries to balance family with work and education. She sees some aspects of her culture, such as modest dress, as an extension of her character, but she also wants to explore new paths.