One Goal

by Amy Bass

  During preseason, McGraw wakes up around four o’clock. He has a hard time sleeping, his mind plotting and planning morning practices. Freshmen and sophomores were at eight o’clock; juniors and seniors at nine-thirty. At five p.m., he mixed everyone up and started again.

  Preseason days are long, finally ending around ten p.m. on the last day, when McGraw posts the roster on the glass doors of the gymnasium entrance. As word spreads about the roster, players descend upon the school. They snap photos of the white sheets through the glass, the flashes reflecting back at them. A chain of texts erupts, the roster making its way from phone to phone. There always are a few surprises. “Expect the unexpected,” McGraw says. He has listened to his assistants, had long conversations with Coach Abdi. These white sheets represent the team he thinks has the best shot to bring home that elusive state championship trophy.

  The 2015 Lewiston Blue Devils.

  Chapter 12

  Inshallah,

  We Got This

  It was a good thing.

  That’s what McGraw says when asked about the preseason loss to Scarborough before the official start of the 2015 season. Because of the way the conferences work within Maine’s Class A soccer, Lewiston couldn’t face Scarborough until the playoffs. Although he would scout a few games across the season, McGraw wanted an early look at the Red Storm, still believing with every bone in his body that they’d be coming for them. Lewiston would return to the state final, he insisted, and Scarborough would be waiting.

  “That’s the team we’re gonna have to beat,” he’d told his players on that terrible bus ride home almost a year ago. “And they’re gonna be very ready and very motivated.”

  He shared his premonition with Mark Diaz, head coach of Scarborough and someone McGraw and his assistant coaches had a great deal of respect for. “There’s no way in hell you’re going to lose to Cheverus again,” McGraw said. “We have that in common.” But it scared McGraw. While he worried about everything—from Ramadan to academic eligibility—facing Scarborough was the only thing he truly was afraid of. Unlike Lewiston and its string of playoff woes, Scarborough was no stranger to winning, having taken the state title in 2012 and 2013, 2008 and 2009, 2005, and for four straight years in the 1970s.

  Could Lewiston beat Scarborough?

  Not in preseason. On a Thursday afternoon during the second week of tryouts, Scarborough beat Lewiston 2–1. It didn’t count, but it meant something. As always, McGraw chalked it up to a learning experience. He knew he had a talented team—the stars were aligning for an unprecedented amount of talent on the varsity roster. Dek was academically eligible, ensuring a formidable backline with Moe and Zak. Maslah and Q were back. Nuri had stepped up. Muktar was not far behind. Karim’s versatility was unparalleled. Austin was on track to break every goalkeeper record he could. And Abdi H. was, well, Abdi H. But McGraw needed to see what would happen when a top team pushed them.

  “The one thing I was worried about: were we gonna lose composure?” McGraw says, reflecting on the loss. “And we lost composure. We lost composure to a championship-caliber team.”

  McGraw saw what he needed to see. It was what preseason was for. Summer games showed him some surprises; players he didn’t expect to shine sometimes did. The first part of the regular season, he focused on making adjustments. Midseason, he solidified the game plan. In the last weeks of regular-season play, he mentally prepared them for playoffs.

  Against Scarborough, McGraw saw Muktar get lazy or timid—he wasn’t sure which—and the other players get mad at him. He saw Zak lose his temper and get a red card. He saw how Karim reacted when his brother got ejected. He saw how the team responded when its leaders got stressed. But most of all, he saw how the team behaved when put into uncomfortable positions, play after play, from their communication to their strategy to their spirit.

  After the loss, McGraw sat them down on the field to talk. They weren’t leaving, he told them, until every single player understood there would be no finger-pointing, no matter what happened. They had to understand this.

  “You point fingers at your teammates,” he said, a trace of midseason rasp already noticeable, “you’re not really a team player, because you’re selfish.”

  Selfish. Once he spit it out, the rasp replaced by emotion and force, he let it hang in the air. There was no room for interpretation. McGraw could not be clearer: he was not going to tolerate any excuses this season. None.

  “You start making excuses—‘the referees this,’ or ‘their player that’—you’re making excuses for things that are out of your control.”

  Like the players, Gish listened to McGraw. But he didn’t hear him.

  The season opener against Brewer High School on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend was, by all accounts, a rough game. Gish hated it when a game got so physical. This isn’t intent to play, he thought. This is intent to injure. There was a thin line between defending well—gamesmanship—and all-out mayhem. This was leaning toward the latter. One guy took a run at Maslah from thirty yards out, slamming into him, studs up, nailing his knee. No call. When Gish raised objections to an official, he got a yellow card for his efforts. Incensed, he held his tongue for the remaining time on the clock.

  After the game was over, a 4–2 win with goals from Nuri, Abdi H., Maslah, and Abdiaziz “Shaleh” Shaleh, Gish couldn’t let it go. The game crossed the line in the second half as Brewer learned what it could get away with. He approached the other referee, calmly, he thought, taking deep breaths. This was just a fact-finding mission, he assured himself. “That was just a poorly officiated game,” Gish said, his usually earnest-sounding voice with a bit of an edge, his round eyes stretching wide. The ref looked at him, incredulous. Oh, no, thought Gish. He knew: another yellow card. Two yellows make a red. Gish was out.

  In soccer, referees issue cards to note particularly egregious fouls. Refs carry two kinds of cards, yellow and red, in their shirt pocket. A yellow card is a formal warning for unsporting behavior: holding an opponent; delaying the restart of play; entering or leaving the field without the referee’s permission; or arguing with an official. According to the rules of the Maine Principals Association (MPA), the offender leaves the game, replaced by a sub, but can reenter after a period of time.

  A red card marks a serious foul, or when a player receives a second yellow. With a red, a player immediately leaves the game, cannot be replaced, and is forbidden to play the next game on the schedule. Straight reds are serious business, often given because a player exhibits excessive force. Slide tackles from behind, over-the-top tackles where a player strikes an opponent with his cleats, and two-footed tackles are all grounds for red. Spitting, too, can bring out a red, as can holding an opponent to stop a breakaway, preventing an opportunity to score. Inappropriate or threatening language is another surefire way to be sent off the field.

  Gish had just gotten thrown out of a game that was not only over—his team had won. He would miss Lewiston’s next game.

  “You know you pretty much just cost us any chance at any kind of sportsmanship awards this season,” Jason Fuller later fumed at Gish in his office. “You are right in what you say; it’s just how you say it.”

  “You know what? I promise I’m not going to screw this thing up,” Gish replied, thinking about games ahead, the mission they were on. “Not for you, and not for the players.”

  For Gish, it was more than the potential season of this stacked team. It was about behaving like a coach. He admired McGraw’s ability to keep his head, practice what he preached. Gish knew he had to do a better job keeping the peace, never mind holding his tongue after a victory.

  Three days later, Gish, sidelined by the red card, scouted Camden Hills while the Blue Devils beat Skowhegan 13–0 in the first of a string of four shutouts. McGraw tried to keep the score down, replacing Austin with Alex and pulling starters to give everyone a chance to play. But the defense blocked everything Skowhegan had, and the offense didn’t stop, no matter how deep McGr
aw went into the bench, totaling some thirty shots on goal. Abdi H. and Maslah had hat tricks, Karim added two, and Shaleh, Nuri, Muktar, Ben Musese, and Abdirizak Ali each scored once.

  As the Blue Devils got ready to board the bus to Bangor for their third game, McGraw realized that he had a full roster for the first time in the season. Academic eligibility wasn’t the only thing that could bench a player. So-called citizenship infractions could, too. McGraw’s expectations were the law, regardless of circumstances. No practice? No game. Late to practice? Late into game. Mouth off to a teacher? Take a seat. Act stupid? Do some laps.

  One defender sat out the first two games of the season because he’d thrown punches at a kid at the last game of the summer season. Fuller benched another for taking food from the girls’ field hockey potluck in the cafeteria and then arguing with a custodian about it. “Idiots,” McGraw affectionately called them, always shaking his head when he caught wind of their various infractions. He meant it the way the Red Sox did when describing the merry band that won the World Series in 2004. The Blue Devils would play only two games with a full roster for the entire 2015 season, but it didn’t faze McGraw.

  “It’s their responsibility to be able to play,” he says. “If we lose, it’s still on them, not me. They have to be able to play.”

  Years ago, McGraw arrived at practice to find a freshman on a tractor the parks department had left on the practice field. The kid pushed the button and started it, but didn’t know how to turn it off.

  “We didn’t play a lot of soccer that day,” McGraw remembers. “We did a lot of running.”

  Today, McGraw better understands how complicated the lives of some of his players and their parents are. Post-traumatic stress, poverty, confusion, isolation, and instability follow refugees no matter where or how they land. In many ways, their very existence is a victory. Many players’ parents can’t worry about how their sons are getting to practice or if they have a water bottle. They are in a constant battle to recover from the unspeakable things they have suffered as they struggle to make things work in America, especially for their children.

  But McGraw’s role is to teach them about being on a team. When the first Somalis came on board, McGraw learned that they had a different set of responsibilities at home than he was used to hearing about. It wasn’t just about understanding Ramadan or daily prayer rituals; it was about family. While his players didn’t have the same kind of responsibilities at home as their sisters, who cooked, cleaned, and cared for younger siblings while their mothers worked, allegiance to family still came before team. Dressed and ready for practice, they might suddenly be asked by their parents to go to an appointment or stay home with a younger sibling.

  “Sometimes they just randomly call you and say, ‘I need you to come for me,’” says Abdi H. about serving as his parents’ translator. “It’s our parents, so we go do it for them.”

  McGraw didn’t want soccer to create a wedge between a player and his family or his culture. He watched how kids who assimilated too rapidly into so-called American life tended to stray from the straight and narrow. “Keep your culture,” he told them. “Stay close to your parents. We will figure this out.”

  Working full-time for Maine Refugee and Integration Services, the former SBYA, after graduating from Assumption College, Shobow appreciates McGraw’s evolving approach. McGraw understood that it wasn’t the tenets of Islam that made life in America complicated. It was culture, identity.

  “It’s the food, the language, the way we speak, the way we behave,” says Shobow. “All of it.” There are logistical challenges as well. Transportation is a problem when practice takes place at the field on Randall Road, more than four miles from the high school. With parents working multiple jobs, these kids don’t have anyone who can cart them around. McGraw remembers one early-morning August practice at Randall when nine players stumbled out of a cab, making it with seconds to spare after pooling their money for the fare. Another player started for practice every morning before sunrise, walking to the field early enough so he could take a nap, rest, before McGraw arrived.

  Over time, listening to his players, learning from them, McGraw made adjustments.

  “Maybe you don’t come to practice, and then you won’t start, but it doesn’t mean you won’t play,” he now tells them. “It’s not your fault, I get it, but it’s the reality of being on a team. You have to learn the consequences of your actions, because the guy we’re playing against? He didn’t skip practice.”

  But as with any other team, sometimes getting benched has nothing to do with family or culture. Fuller deals with most of the disciplinary actions, taking flak from all sides—parents, the front office, and the coaches of other teams. But there’s no leeway when it comes to rules.

  “I don’t care how good you are,” he repeats often. “We have standards and expectations.”

  In 2014, Fuller could have let the suspended players back on the team for the state final against Cheverus. There was only one day left in their suspension, and the principal left the decision up to Fuller. But he wouldn’t budge. “Part of learning to win is learning how to behave,” he insists. “They are good kids, but it’s part of being a student-athlete. No bending, no matter what the circumstance.”

  It took time for Fuller’s football-loving head to grasp some of soccer’s idiosyncrasies. He didn’t get why every goal had to be celebrated like it was the first one ever scored, with the jumping, the somersaults, and the slides. The memory of the “taunting” call at the Mt. Ararat game still haunts him, agony flooding his usually congenial face at its mention. Fans have to be held back, and players have to take it down a notch, he asserts. It’s part of winning.

  So before the team left for Bangor, Fuller told McGraw that he wanted to talk to the team, knowing it was the first time of the 2015 season that no one was out because of suspensions or injuries. McGraw knew Fuller’s perspective was important. As AD, he had eyes and ears on the whole state.

  The team was used to these conversations. Fuller and McGraw often talked to them about behavior on and off the field. With the changing demographics over the last decade or so, Lewiston’s reputation was more complicated than ever, and they were responsible for taking care of it. The Brewer game showed how ugly it could get, what kind of stuff they needed to be ready for.

  “We constantly have to prove,” Abdi H. told his teammates, “that we are better than our reputation.”

  And not just during games. When the football team had a home game, for example, McGraw encouraged them to go, to support another team, but reminded them to stay together and be gentlemen. Act smart, he’d say. Not stupid.

  “You’re a special team,” Fuller began. “From Kittery to Fort Kent, everybody’s talking about you. You’re a target for everybody. Anything you do is magnified. It doesn’t matter what happens because you’re from Lewiston and you were in the state championship last year.”

  They could not hide for two reasons. One, they were that good. Two, the majority of them were black.

  “There’s a microscope on us,” he warned. “Whatever we do comes back.”

  He looked at the young men before him. Abdi H. Maslah. Karim. Joe. Shaleh. Zak. Q. Nuri. Austin. Maulid. Never in the history of Maine sports had there been such a team. He was sure of it.

  “Guys, the worst enemy here is yourself,” he said, emotion creeping in. “Don’t blow this. Don’t. Blow. This.”

  The team listened. They trusted Fuller, something he couldn’t have claimed just a few years back. His door was open to them. They told him about the kind of stuff they encountered on the field, the guys who told them to go back to Africa or used the n-word. The elbows the refs didn’t see. They shrugged it off, telling him it didn’t matter, that they didn’t care. But he took it seriously, as did McGraw, who always encouraged them to take the high road, no matter what.

  “If you trash talk,” McGraw reminded them before each game, always the same speech, “then you can expect som
ebody else to retaliate. If you say nothing and the only guys you talk to are your teammates, you’re gonna be fine. But if you call someone a name, you damn well better expect they’re gonna call you a name. And don’t come complaining to me if you’re the perpetrator.”

  Finally, they boarded the bus for Bangor, and the usual chaos ensued. Singing, clapping, dancing, cheering. Arriving almost two hours later, the varsity squad prepared to watch the junior varsity game. Thinking about Fuller’s remarks, McGraw reminded them, again, to be quiet and respectful, to just watch the game, and—

  “Coach.”

  McGraw stopped and looked at Karim, shocked. Shocked to be interrupted, for sure, but even more shocked that it was Karim, tall and lean, rubbing the scruff on his chin, his eyes flitting up and down, belying his normally calm demeanor. Karim didn’t speak much. He never has. Unlike Zak, who plays soccer with joy on his sleeve, passionately directing traffic from the backline, Karim plays with quiet confidence, his vast understanding of the game evident in every powerful move. Off the field, his soft nature, especially when contrasted with Zak’s nonstop chatter, means he rarely utters a word, and certainly not in front of a group. But now he had something to say.

  “Coach,” Karim repeated. He looked at McGraw, solemn. “We got this.”

  Coming from Karim, those four words were a veritable speech. They echoed what the team had been saying for months, through the long winter when they kicked balls beside towering snowbanks, at hot summer games while they fasted, and during evenings at Somali Stadium. “Inshallah,” they answered when someone asked about winning a state championship. If God wills.