Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  “If you plan to continue with this team,” Luma added, “it’s my rules, my drills, my way.”

  Kanue and Natnael sat quietly before her, their heads bowed. They had worked hard to keep their team together, and the season had fallen apart anyway. They’d have to find a way to win next year.

  Chapter Thirty

  My Rules, My Way

  Things were much different for the Under 13 Fugees. Though she was reluctant to admit it, Luma’s bond with the 13s was deeper than that with the older boys. She had been coaching some of them since her first season, when they were younger than ten years old. The 13s had more faithfully adhered to her system—my rules, my drills, my way—and their record, Luma felt, showed the results. After the Athens game, the 13s had tied two games and lost one, but they had never folded, and in each of the contests, they had fought until the very end. The 13s had clearly improved. They had learned their own strengths—how to attack quickly using Josiah on the left wing, and how to attack more methodically, with quick passes from Qendrim, Bien, Jeremiah, and Shahir. The defense had improved perhaps the most. With the Dikori brothers—bottle rockets in cleats—they were able to chase down attacking forwards, and Mohammed Mohammed, a newcomer who hardly spoke a word of English at the beginning of the season, was now calling out instructions to his teammates from the back line. Despite his diminutive size, he had also proved improbably tough and hardheaded as a defender, willing to take on much bigger boys without flinching. A better defense took the heat off Mafoday and Eldin in goal, but even they had stepped up in the clinch, especially Mafoday after his penalty shot stop against Athens. They kept their cool; the Under 13s had received no red cards during the season. The boys had chemistry, and perhaps most important, they looked out for one another. When Josiah heard that Santino, the quiet Sudanese boy who had arrived in the United States just before the season, had no winter clothes, he dug around in a closet and found his old winter coat, which he gave to his teammate. No member of the Fugees, Josiah reasoned, should go cold.

  Something else occurred toward the end of the season that lifted the 13s’ spirits, a miracle of sorts, in the form of the arrival of two long, heavy cardboard boxes: a set of portable but regulation-size goals from the YMCA. With help from the boys, Luma and Tracy unloaded the boxes from Tracy’s small pickup truck, carried them down to Armistead Field, and dumped their contents in the grass. The goals, in their unassembled form, were a collection of long metal tubes with fluorescent orange nylon nets. When put together, they were not the sturdiest contraptions—a line drive to the top crossbar caused the goals to shudder violently as though they might collapse. But in the last weeks of the season, the goals allowed Luma’s team to practice set plays like corner and free kicks, and to get a feel for the game’s third dimension, between the ground and the top of the goal, where points were scored.

  THE UNDER 13S played their final regular-season game beneath the lights on a dark, misty November afternoon in Lawrenceville, Georgia, against the Georgia Futbol Club. Both teams had a lot riding on the game. The undefeated Athens United Valiants, who had beaten the Fugees following Luma’s arrest, were a shoo-in to win the division, but the Fugees and Lawrenceville were both among a cluster of teams with similar records and point totals that were vying for the remaining slots at the top of the rankings. If they hoped to finish well, the Fugees needed to win, and as important, to avoid getting any red cards, which brought mandatory point deductions. They had to keep their cool. It wouldn’t be easy. The team from Lawrenceville had managed some big wins earlier in the fall, defeating one club 10–0 and another 6–0, and to a player, they were bigger and taller than the Fugees. They would win a physical game, and perhaps, if they managed to goad the Fugees into retaliating, they could provoke a red card as well.

  Luma had a plan. The Fugees were to keep the ball on the ground to negate the competition’s height advantage, and whenever possible, to send the ball away from the middle and toward the wings, where Josiah and Idwar could use their speed and where the Fugees were less apt to get knocked around. If they got bumped or manhandled, she told them, they were not to retaliate. Take the fouls, she told them, and above all, keep your cool.

  “Let them push you down,” Luma said. “I don’t want anyone out there who’s scared.”

  BEFORE THE GAME, the Fugees found themselves with some time to kill. A game between two older girls’ teams was winding up on an adjacent field. The boys splayed on the sideline to watch and were quickly drawn into the action—cheering together at each shot and steal, laughing and trading high-fives when one of the girls dribbled artfully around a defender, leaving her competitor in the dust.

  A few minutes later, the Fugees took the field and ran through their warm-ups. They performed a familiar ritual with the referee during the pregame lineup; after mangling a few of the boys’ names, the referee shook his head and gave up, handing the roster over to Luma and asking her to call the boys’ names out herself. The boys laughed, first at the referee, and then when Luma became tongue-tied herself. Soon it was time to take their positions on the field. But first Grace had an idea. He thought the Fugees should pray together. The idea presented a quandary; there were both Christians and Muslims on the team. How could they accommodate everyone? With no help from Luma

  or any other adult, the boys quickly worked out a solution. Grace would offer a Christian prayer, Eldin, a Muslim one. There was no lengthy discussion of the matter, no self-congratulatory commentary on togetherness or the need to respect each other’s views—just a simple, practical ordering of business so that everyone felt included. The boys formed a circle at midfield, draped their arms around each other, and bowed their heads. Both Grace and Eldin felt more comfortable praying the way they’d been taught—in their native languages. No one objected as Grace prayed aloud in Swahili and Eldin in Bosnian, first for the health and safety of their teammates, and if God saw fit, a victory. The sentiment was understood even if the words were not.

  “Amen,” Grace said.

  “Amen,” the boys responded.

  “Amin,” said Eldin.

  “Amin,” said the boys.

  MOMENTS LATER THE game was under way. The Fugees attacked. Midway through the first half, Bien snuck through the Lawrenceville defense and dished a pass to Jeremiah, who quickly sent the ball across the field to Josiah. Without hesitating, Josiah took a shot from twenty yards out: goal. The Fugees went ahead 1–0 and carried that lead into the half.

  “One to nothing is not enough,” Luma told the boys. “Keep calm. Keep your game. Start smiling. Let’s start having a good time and let’s kick some butt.”

  The Fugees started the half by attacking down the touchlines, as Luma had instructed them. Eventually, Jeremiah controlled a pass at the top right corner of the box, rolled around into the open space near the corner, and fired a shot clear across the middle that slipped between the goalie’s fingers and the inside of the far post. The Fugees were up 2–0. A late foul in the box gave Lawrenceville a penalty shot to pull within a goal, but the Fugees held off the opposition’s final, desperate charges to win the game 2–1.

  The victory gave the Fugees enough points to overtake a handful of teams to finish third in their division, behind Athens and the Dacula Danger, a team the Fugees had tied 2–2 earlier in the season. As a reward for their hard work and their successful season, Luma had registered the Fugees for the Tornado Cup, a tournament that would feature some of the best teams from around the state. The Under 13s had a week to prepare. In the meantime, Luma didn’t want a 2–1 win over Lawrenceville to go to their heads.

  “You got really lucky,” she told them after the game. “You play like this next weekend, you’re going home in last place. It’s going to be some tough practices this week.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Tornado Cup

  Luma knew that if the Under 13 Fugees hoped to compete against the teams in the Tornado Cup, they needed to make some quick improvements, and for that, the
y had to have an intense and focused week of practice. The Fugees were still shooting poorly, which Luma blamed in part on the lack of goals for much of the season. Luma planned to put the Under 13s through three days of intense drills on crosses, corners, and free kicks, followed by a scrimmage on Thursday with the 15s. But even this schedule—four practices instead of the usual two—wouldn’t leave the Fugees much time to improve. Daylight saving time had ended—the clocks had been set back an hour—and darkness fell on Armistead Field not long after six o’clock each afternoon. Practices started at five o’clock. There were some old lights mounted on telephone poles around the field, but they didn’t work—or at least, the city refused to turn them on. There was no point in moving practice earlier either. Most of the Fugees depended on school buses to get them back to Clarkston from the various schools in the county where they were enrolled, and some players had to take two separate buses on journeys that could take as long as an hour and a half each way. Luma told the boys to come straight to practice when they got home and to arrive ready to play.

  In the end, it was the weather—not darkness or bus schedules—that interfered with Luma’s plan. Heavy thunderstorms rolled into Atlanta early in the week and hovered overhead, soaking the field into a tepid mush, like a cotton mop dunked in a bucket. The rain trailed off on Wednesday night. The scrimmage was on. So on Thursday afternoon, the 13s and 15s gathered at Milam Park beneath a canopy of steel-colored clouds. The air was cool and damp, and long puddles of runoff from the field’s crown collected around its perimeter, rippled by breeze. On the field itself, the wet grass clung to the ball like glue.

  “You play this game like it’s a real game,” Luma told the 13s. “No clowning around. No joking around. No switching up your positions when you feel like it.”

  Luma left the Under 15s to coach themselves. Kanue, Natnael, and Muamer took charge. They understood that their pride was on the line. They hadn’t had a successful season, but they had no intention of losing to—or even getting challenged by—the younger team. The 13s had something to prove themselves. Some of the boys, such as Bien and Eldin, had older brothers on the 15s. But even the younger boys who didn’t have blood relatives on the older team had come to see players such as Kanue and Natnael as brothers of sorts. They wanted to earn the older boys’ respect.

  Luma blew the whistle, and the game began. From the outset, the 13s showed they had come to play. They fought the older boys for loose balls, made crisp passes, and managed one run after another against the 15s’ goal. And yet, they kept missing their shots. Josiah missed an open shot high, and another wide. Jeremiah missed with a wild shot that soared twenty feet over the crossbar. By the end of the first half, the 13s had taken eight shots on goal and missed all of them. The 15s, badly outplayed by the younger boys, held the lead, 1–0.

  Luma summoned the Under 13s over to a corner of the field. She had diagnosed the problem: the younger boys were trying to show off. She told the boys to forget the dramatic blasts from outside. She wanted them to calm down and to aim their shots. She wanted her defense to move up the field and to stay even with each other, in order to draw the offsides calls on the faster competition. And she wanted the 13s to keep the pressure on.

  The 15s, meanwhile, were angry. Even though they led by a goal, they knew they were being embarrassed by a younger team that included a ten-year-old on defense. They’d lost their last game of the season, and the idea of losing to the 13s was more than they could bear. So when Luma blew the whistle to start the second half, the U15s came out attacking. Muamer, Kanue, and Natnael worked the ball down the center of the field, away from the standing water near the sidelines that threatened to slow them down. But the 13s held fast. Robin cut off one attack and Prince Tarlue, a speedy Liberian, clogged up another run by the 15s. Eventually, the 15s began to wear down the younger boys and to find the seams in the 13s’ defense. Muamer scored on a touch shot from just in front of the goal. And though the 13s managed to move the ball down the pitch, they continued to miss—a disturbing sign on the eve of their year-end tournament. In the end, the 15s won the scrimmage 3–1, but not before the 13s managed a final blow to the older boys’ pride. It came near the end of the game, as Muamer was chasing down a ball near the touchline, alongside a trough of gray-green water that ran the length of the field just beyond the boundary. Muamer controlled the ball and attempted to make a move down the sideline, as the 13s’ defenders converged. Prince went in for the tackle. The ball froze, but Muamer tumbled out of bounds, face-first in the murky puddle. Muamer looked helplessly at Luma, hoping she’d call a foul. But she waved it off; the tackle was clean, and to the delight of the 13s, now bent over in hysterics, Muamer decidedly wasn’t.

  “If the Under 13s win this weekend, they have you to thank,” Luma told the 15s after the game. “You taught them to be a bit more aggressive, and that was something they hadn’t been doing all season.”

  She turned now to the 13s.

  “The way you guys fought for the ball today, the way when one of them gets the ball four of you charged him, that’s what you need to do on Saturday,” she said. “And none of you quit the entire game. I didn’t see any of you walking.

  “It was an okay scrimmage,” she told the boys before sending them home. The Fugees understood it as high praise.

  IF A CASUAL youth soccer game in the American suburbs has the feel of an outdoor concert, tournaments are the Woodstocks. The events draw crowds of players, coaches, parents, siblings, friends, and onlookers, and take place over acres of green space so vast that tournament organizers, like music promoters, often need golf carts to get around. If there is one thing that every youth soccer tournament has in common it is that there is never enough parking. Parents are forced to park their minivans, station wagons, and SUVs on grass byways, on inclines, alongside ditches, or in the woods, precarious terrain for which family vehicles are not designed. (In the course of a weekend, typically at least one family’s car requires extraction by tow truck.) American families don’t stop by soccer tournaments so much as temporarily move to them. In terms of outfitting, the quantity of gear and provisions required for a single soccer game versus a weekend-long tournament is akin to that difference needed for a day hike and an attempt on K2. Consequently, there is an iconic image familiar to anyone who has ever attended such events: mothers and fathers, loaded like pack mules with folding chairs, blankets, coolers or picnic baskets, trekking from wherever they’ve managed to park to the far-off fields where their children’s games will take place. Expert tournament-goers will conduct this exercise while also carrying a cup of coffee, which sloshes onto their wrists and forearms, while other hapless souls will do so while also chasing toddlers. As these beleaguered adults approach, the uniformed sons and daughters whose pursuit of soccer has inspired their expeditions are nowhere to be seen. They’ve usually run ahead on the pretense of making warm-ups or an important pregame meeting. There are few things more embarrassing to an American teenager, after all, than a parent loaded down with stuff.

  Such was the scene at the Gwinnett YMCA on Saturday morning when the Fugees arrived in their usual configuration: a white bus trailing a beat-up yellow Volkswagen Beetle. The Fugees arrived early, so after a few laps around the parking area, Tracy, at the helm of the bus, and Luma, driving her Beetle, managed to find parking nearby. The boys unloaded and made their way toward the playing fields. They were confident to the point of cockiness, and on their way to their assigned field made fun of the competition—decked out with matching gear bags, embroidered with their jersey numbers, and all those silly-looking parents bivouacked on the sidelines. Today, they were sure, would be their day.

  In their first of two games on Saturday, the Fugees would face a familiar opponent: Blue Springs Liberty Fire, the team the Fugees had beaten in a 3–2 comeback earlier in the season. Luma viewed that victory as the turning point of the Under 13s’ season, the game in which they found confidence and a sense of team identity. The game had also helped
nudge the Fugees into third place in the league’s final rankings, one point ahead of none other than the Blue Springs Liberty Fire themselves. The Fire wanted revenge.

  Luma was confident, if anxious. Her team was playing better now than at any point in the season, but she was worried about their inaccurate shooting and their inability to finish runs with goals. Before the game, Luma had the Fugees line up and take simple shots from directly in front of the net. She wanted them to get a feel for scoring, to absorb a sense of place on the field relative to the crossbar and a feeling for the angles. And yet even this simple task proved difficult, as balls sailed high over the bar and clunked against the posts. The referee blew his whistle. Practice was over. It was time to play.

  “I want to have a hard time picking out MVPs today,” Luma told the boys. “I want to see your best game, and I know what your best game looks like, each and every single one of you. I want to kick some major butt today. I want to have some fun. I’ve been excited about this all week.”

  “Me too,” the boys responded, nearly in unison.

  “Let’s go,” said Luma.

  The Fugees controlled the game from the outset and played the first ten minutes on the Fire’s side of the field. Early on, Josiah fired a shot from the top left of the box, which sailed high. Moments later Jeremiah booted a corner kick across the face of the goal, but there was no one in the middle to finish. The early minutes of the game felt eerily similar to the scrimmage days before against the Under 15s; the Fugees were outplaying the competition but unable to score.

  “Time to get physical!” one of the Blue Springs dads shouted from the sideline.