by Amy Bass
With twenty minutes left, Nuri fed the ball through Maslah’s nimble legs. Maslah saw Abdi H. sprinting toward the goal, two Broncos in hot pursuit. Maslah fired the ball to him. Tripping over Townsend, who tried to slide into the ball, Abdi H. popped it into the net without ever breaking stride, powering over to his teammates to celebrate. Three minutes later, Nuri fired a pass to Maslah, who beat Townsend yet again.
Hampden failed to take a shot the entire second half; Lewiston took sixteen. Townsend weathered the onslaught, undoubtedly grateful each time the ball hit the crossbar or a post, but also making spectacular saves. As the clock neared zero, Lewiston’s bench stood, arms around each other. With the final whistle, they erupted. Nuri ran to the sideline, pointing at Karim, who stood tall in his blue windbreaker and black pants. The two leaped into the air and descended in an embrace, joined by Moha, Maslah, Moe, and Dek. Maulid threw his hands up over his head as he danced his way over to the bench, while Q jumped, fist outstretched overhead.
Abdi H. was slow to join in, thinking they still had one game to go. No, he reconsidered. This was something to celebrate. He broke into a run to join his teammates and get ready for the award ceremony. After the Broncos hoisted their second-place plaque, it was Lewiston’s turn. The announcer congratulated the Class A North Champions as each player hugged each coach, the crowd growing louder and more passionate. Finally, the regional championship plaque securely in his left hand, Abdi H. stretched his right hand overhead, his finger pointing number one, before leading the team to the stands to share the moment with family and friends, classmates and teachers. Joy enveloped them, Nuri taking a turn with the plaque to gallop around with his teammates, running to the corner of the field and sliding to his knees.
“This was just earning the right,” McGraw said in their last postgame chat of the season. “Now we’ve got to earn the right to be number one in the state.”
Next they would face Scarborough, just as McGraw had predicted.
“We are playing the best team in the south, and the only team that scored more goals than us in one game,” he continued, letting the preseason loss return for a moment. “They’re totally different, they’re much better, but so are we. So let’s let the games begin and take them on Saturday!”
Karim beamed. He’d play another game; one that the team had waited a year to play. Undefeated and with consecutive playoff shutouts, they felt ready. But on the other side of the playoff bracket, the Scarborough Red Storm had racked up their own shutout run. They’d beaten Lewiston in August, and they were looking to do it again.
Chapter 15
Do Not Retaliate
The regional championship in Class A South was a rematch between Scarborough and Cheverus. In 2014, the Stags had needed double overtime to get past Scarborough to the state final against Lewiston. A year later, they returned on an eight-game winning streak, but knew that Scarborough wanted revenge.
To beat Scarborough, Cheverus had to prevent set pieces from converting into goals. Scarborough’s Matt Caron, a senior, had a legendary throw-in. From his hands, a ball went for miles before arching perfectly before the box, where a teammate could nudge it in. The Stags knew they had to clear those throw-ins if they wanted to win.
Easier said than done.
Ten minutes in, Scarborough’s Josh Morrissey bicycle-kicked a corner past Cheverus keeper Jacob Tomkinson, who had played so well against Lewiston the year before. Eight minutes later, Caron stood on the sideline, ball in hand. Under the lights, his teammates’ white uniforms glowed among the deep purple-blue jerseys of Cheverus. He seemed impossibly far away from where Tomkinson stood. Caron took a few quick steps and hurled the ball over his head, dragging his right foot in perfect form. As he jogged toward the action, players scrambled with eyes upward. Tomkinson greeted the ball at the near post, hands outstretched, right over left, hoping to deflect it. The ball grazed his reach en route to the net, creating the necessary touch for the goal to count. It was the first time that had ever happened to him, Caron later said. He’d never thrown in a goal before. Scarborough held its 2–0 lead until the end, its keeper Cam Nigro making six saves. Cheverus would not return for a rematch against undefeated Lewiston. It would be Scarborough.
On paper, Scarborough and Lewiston had a lot in common. Top seeds. Regional champions. Undefeated seasons. Skillful ball handling. Strong set pieces. Exceptional defense. But there were differences. Scarborough played a physical, forward game, relying on strength and athleticism to get the ball down the field, while Lewiston patiently built plays from the back, setting the pace, anticipating next moves, digging the right spots, and using speed to make up for lack of size.
Looking at team photos side by side, more obvious differences come into sharp focus. A coastal area a few miles south of Portland, Scarborough personifies Vacationland: sandy beaches, the state’s largest tidal marsh, and a year-round population of eighteen thousand, over 95 percent of which is white. At the Bait Shed, diners feast on lobster rolls served in tin cake pans while sitting on a narrow pier overlooking the water. From its perch on Prouts Neck in Saco Bay, the renowned Black Point Inn brings tourists from all over the world. While rooms run upward of $600 a night over July Fourth weekend, they offer a rare opportunity for nonresidents to access the view made famous by Winslow Homer.
For many reasons, the Red Storm, with nine state titles, was a team that people liked to beat. Consistently one of the state’s top soccer programs, Scarborough boasted great facilities and huge parent participation. Much, too, was made of the team’s hair, which encompassed a whole lot of color and some shocking architecture. It was a Scarborough playoff tradition to sport variations on the Mohawk, shaving or trimming all but a middle strip of hair that could be gelled to new heights. Players often added color, too, from cobalt blue to the team’s signature red. In their playoff run in 2014, Garrett King carved an arrow into his vibrant blue Mohawk that pointed directly down his forehead, reminiscent of Aang, the protagonist from Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender.
But those who braved a cold rain in 2014 to watch Scarborough play Deering in the semifinal round weren’t there because of anyone’s hair. Some were there to scout Deering senior Stephen Ochan, a standout player from Sudan. Others, mostly from neighboring Portland schools, braved the elements hoping to see Deering take Scarborough down. When these teams had last met in a regular-season game in early October, people whispered, Scarborough fans had allegedly taunted Deering players with a string of racist cheers.
While Somalis and Sudanese still dominate Portland’s immigrant community, in recent years a spate of asylum-seekers from Central African countries such as Burundi, Rwanda, and Congo have arrived, further diversifying the city’s population. It is a change clearly seen in the city’s three public high schools. First opened in 1874, Deering boasts an impressive list of notable alumni, from actresses Linda Lavin, Andrea Martin, and Anna Kendrick to writer Annie Proulx. Unlike Lewiston, Deering’s diversity is broadly based, representing more than fifty countries and twenty-seven languages.
Deering embraces its global makeup, one of a handful of schools that belongs to the International Studies Schools Network (ISSN), which focuses on global competence. But not everyone sees Deering’s diversity as something to celebrate. While the majority of asylum-seekers get jobs once the required 150-day waiting period lifts, a familiar hostility often paints them as parasitic, draining public coffers.
On October 7, 2014, that hostility bubbled over during a soccer game. While Scarborough got down to the business of shutting out Deering 2–0, fans allegedly hurled racist insults at Deering. Sneering chants of “USA-USA-USA” accompanied the waving of American flags. One parent told journalists that he and his wife heard people yell “Go back to Africa!” and “We’re USA, you’re not!” A group of Scarborough parents sitting nearby, said one observer, clearly heard them but did nothing.
Deering’s coach, Joel Costigan, had dealt with such racial affronts since he took the reins
of the team in 2011. The very first week he coached, a summer game, a player threw the n-word at one of his players. He soon learned that it was part and parcel of his new job.
“Me and Joel and Rocco,” McGraw says, referring to longtime Portland High School soccer coach Rocco Frenzilli, “deal with things no one else in the entire state can even imagine.”
Costigan, a social studies teacher, grew up in Buxton, a small town west of Portland best known as a key setting in The Shawshank Redemption. Studying abroad his junior year in Buenos Aires, taking in Boca Juniors’ games at La Bombonera stadium, he saw firsthand the global obsession with soccer, a sport he played.
For Costigan, building chemistry on a team with kids from twelve or more countries has unique challenges. Not only does he have trouble communicating with his players; they have trouble talking to each other.
“A lot gets lost,” he says about kids who come during the summer with little English in their pocket. He remembers when a player got a yellow card for failing to listen to the referee. “He doesn’t speak English!” Costigan yelled from the sideline. The ref apologized, put the card away, and play continued.
While Costigan draws players from a more disparate population than McGraw, and never had the support of a group like SBYA, he encounters similar complications. A few years ago, he, like McGraw, didn’t understand why “I had to move a couch for my parents” was a legitimate excuse to miss practice. Now he gets that “I have to help my parents” is a way of life, not a choice. He encourages the team, especially the captains, to figure out rules that work for everyone. It was harder to figure out ways to deal with how opposing teams treated them.
“You can see that the words that are chosen in trash talk are specific to our population,” says Costigan, who talks more directly about such things than McGraw.
While the racist affronts don’t surprise him, the lack of consequences does. His second season coaching Deering, an opponent hounded a Somali player. Upset, the player asked Costigan to take him out. Costigan encouraged him to shake it off, but watched as the harassment escalated throughout the game. At one point, the other player took the Deering kid down by his genitals. Even after the kid admitted he had done it, Costigan remembers, there was no card. Not yellow. Not red. Nothing.
“I want consequences for these actions,” Costigan repeats.
It is never a question of if such things will happen, only when. In 2013, a Sanford High School player, a captain, hurled the n-word at a Deering player. The kid wrote a letter apologizing to Deering, and Sanford removed itself from the sportsmanship award voting that year.
“There were consequences,” says Costigan. “That’s what I want.”
For Costigan, as with McGraw, it’s not just about playing soccer. It’s about playing soccer with integrity.
“Are we going to hit them back, sink to their level, rise above, drone it out, come out of the game—what are your options?” he asks his players before a game.
After a few local newspapers wrote about the Scarborough-Deering game in question, the superintendents of both schools announced they’d investigate the matter. While the two denounced any racist taunts that may have taken place, Scarborough’s athletic director, Michael LeGage, deflected the incident as something soccer fans just did. The students, he claimed, were mimicking what they saw at European soccer games on television.
Impersonating international soccer fans is hardly something to aspire to. One parent claims he heard Scarborough fans telling Deering players to “go eat a banana,” a prevalent phrase at European soccer matches. Feyenoord fans once tossed an inflatable banana at Roma’s Gervinho, who hails from Côte d’Ivoire, while a Villarreal fan threw a banana at Barcelona’s Dani Alves, who’s from Brazil. Alves, who’d been readying for a corner, paused when the ref standing next to him failed to react. He then took a giant step forward, grabbed the banana, peeled it, and popped it into his mouth. With a quick wipe of his hands on his shorts, he drilled the ball toward the box. His father, he said later, always advised him to eat bananas to prevent cramping. Villarreal banned the banana thrower for life from El Madrigal Stadium. Alves’s teammate, the legendary Neymar, posted a photograph of himself with his son on Instagram holding bananas.
“Take That, bunch of Racists,” Neymar wrote. “We are all Monkeys, So What.”
LeGage’s FIFA defense rang hollow for Costigan. He was all for an enthusiastic fan base—it was something he tried to cultivate at Deering. But the “USA” chants revealed something far more malevolent than school spirit or a passion for soccer.
At the conclusion of the investigation, the superintendents released a joint statement affirming Scarborough fans focused on Deering players’ “places of origin,” but they absolved the players and coaching staff of any wrongdoing. They pledged that steps would be taken to ensure that such an incident would not happen again. Scarborough’s principal, David Creech, followed with a letter to parents. He asserted there would be zero tolerance for any kind of bias and promised more education regarding respectful behavior so “these recent allegations” would not “tarnish the great reputation our school has.”
For Costigan, it was simply an expression of “our kids wouldn’t do that,” which dismissed the experience his players had on the field that day. To him, there was nothing “alleged” about what happened. He had his own video of the game, which he offered to everyone involved. There were no takers. So for Costigan, the investigation didn’t amount to much of anything because there were no consequences.
During the 2015 playoffs, as the Blue Devils and Red Storm made their way through the brackets toward each other, Lewiston’s mayoral race heightened racial tensions in the city. Ben Chin, a Bates graduate who worked as a community organizer with the progressive Maine People’s Alliance and served on the board of Trinity Jubilee, announced his candidacy. MacDonald, the incumbent, claimed that Chin’s pro-immigrant plans for the city—especially a past stance that noncitizens should be allowed to vote—shut out a lot of the community. MacDonald’s “leave your culture at the door” anti-immigrant stance worked well for him in the past. In 2013, he had used it to ward off a challenge by former mayor Larry Gilbert, who’d espoused a progressive view of the city’s increasing diversity, beating him 61 to 39 percent.
Local landlord Joe Dunne, who the Maine People’s Alliance had dubbed a “corporate slumlord,” made no bones about which candidate he endorsed. On three of his downtown buildings, he posted bright red signs featuring a Soviet-style hammer and sickle, a caricature of Ho Chi Minh, and the slogan “DON’T VOTE FOR HO CHI CHIN.” After a slew of protestors came out against them, Dunne took the signs down and apologized in an ad in the Sun Journal, but not before national media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, took note of the polarizing mayoral campaigns. Chin won the most votes on the initial ballot of five candidates, but came up just short of taking the election outright. He would go on to lose to MacDonald in the subsequent December runoff, 4,398 to 3,826.
Throughout the fall of 2015, the mayoral campaigns yet again emboldened racist chatter in Lewiston. MacDonald’s anti-immigrant, anti-welfare stances overlapped with those of Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, a Lewiston native whose notorious rants about everything from the Holocaust to President Obama found favor with the rising tide of support for the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.
“Any native Mainers on the team?” a sports fan commented on an article about Lewiston winning the regional title.
Looking ahead at Scarborough, McGraw felt confident that his players were prepared for whatever Red Storm fans might throw at them. A focus on winning, McGraw told his players, made the other stuff matter less.
“Do not retaliate,” he repeated. “Just beat ’em by scoring goals. That’s all you gotta do. Don’t hurt ’em. Hurt the net. Hurt the ball.”
While Gish had a harder time than McGraw keeping tight reins on his emotions when he saw what the players stomached, he held his tongue during
playoffs because so much was on the line. But he still hated what he heard, both on and off the field. His mother was from Canada and didn’t get her citizenship for years. It gave him a perspective he wished more of his friends had, especially those from Lewiston’s outskirts, in the more rural parts of Androscoggin County.
“You know, I’m from Lewiston, and I know what Lewiston pride is all about,” a friend said to Gish a few days before the state championship game, “and that’s not it.”
Gish walked away, no good-bye, not trusting himself to respond. These kids bleed blue, he thought. Good soccer players. Good people. That was all that mattered.
Abdi H. didn’t want to waste any energy on what Scarborough fans might do or say. The team needed to focus on what he considered to be “unfinished business”: their journey that had started the year before. But he knew Scarborough was going to be tough. The Blue Devils hadn’t played scared since the final minute of the Cheverus game, evidenced by the number of goals they scored across the season. And if McGraw had left his starters in longer, the goal tally would be double. Confidence wasn’t going to be a problem.
But McGraw still feared complacency. The Red Storm outscored its own opponents 50–8 during the regular season, and logged eight shutouts. They were not a team to take lightly, especially with that 2–1 victory over Lewiston in the preseason. It didn’t count, but it hung in the air.
McGraw did his homework, studying Scarborough’s games and results. They were a good team with a strong defense, coached by men he liked and respected. His own players knew that, having played with Scarborough kids on elite club teams like Seacoast. Moe, Maulid, Q, and Abdi H. considered both Matt Caron and Josh Morrissey friends, never bothered about the stories of Scarborough’s fans and their notorious cheering. It wasn’t these guys, they reassured themselves. Indeed, Morrissey often made the trip to Lewiston to give them rides, and sometimes they slept at his house the night before a tournament. On the road, his family often took them to dinner.
