by Amy Bass
Abdi H.’s family came to Maine via Kentucky. Like so many of his teammates’ families, his parents fled Somalia during the civil war. They landed in Ifo, another of Dadaab’s camps, where he was born.
Like Moe, Abdi H. remembers many details of refugee camp life. He recalls his mother “farming” a small garden, helping her when he was just three years old. He remembers the tiny clothing shop his father worked in, where the child helped his father fold items after customers came through. He also remembers the violence of the camps, the assaults, the fear, and the danger. But most of all, he remembers playing soccer.
To his parents, nothing was more important than school. They saved money to hire a private teacher, but the lure of soccer often won out. He remembers going with his older brother to find games, matches staged between buildings to stay out of sight from the police. When the police would finally come to send them all to school, they simply moved their game to another alley.
In 2005, Abdi H.’s family made it to the United States. They were lucky, managing to stay intact and move together. Others spend years waiting for resettlement authorization. Many, like Moe’s sisters, are separated.
Louisville was, he recalls, a “rough” time for them, an overwhelming experience. “I was little,” he says. “And it was the first time I saw white people, too, so I was just scared.”
Thrown into second grade at age eight, he didn’t understand anything anyone said to him. He remembers looking out the window at kids playing, asking his mother, Adey Amin, why they left Kenya. “It will get better,” she patiently told him each time, thinking about the violence of the camp, the beatings, the stuff Abdi H. didn’t yet know about. When she and his father escaped Somalia with his three older siblings during the war, she said, it took them a long time to get used to Kenya. But they did. And now he would get used to America.
However, life in the refugee camp was all Abdi H. had ever known. Every morning, he had walked five miles to a well with his mother to get water—it was so heavy, he remembers—for the family. His father walked with them before heading to the market, where he would try to sell things. One morning, the routine changed.
“Soo baax, Abdirahman,” his mother said to him. “Let’s go.” He was sad to leave behind his things and his friends, yet he was excited. But once in Kentucky, his new life just didn’t feel right.
“We didn’t speak English and our parents didn’t speak English, and it was just so hard to get around and communicate with other people,” he recollects. “And the Somali population in Kentucky is not as large as Lewiston—we didn’t have the community, and my parents said we had to move to Maine so we can have people help us out.”
They had family in Portland who’d been in the United States for a while. These relatives knew the language—their English was very good. They understood American culture. Abdi H.’s parents uprooted the family again in hope of finding a better quality of life.
When Abdi H. was in fourth grade, the family arrived in Lewiston, where they found the Somali community they’d been looking for. It wasn’t about geography; it was about people. The scars of Somalia’s civil war went deep, but could not diminish the importance of keeping their culture, language, and customs alive. Finally, it seemed, they’d found a place that felt as close to home as could ever be in the United States. His father found a job at a local pizza company; his mother started babysitting. Abdi H. learned English, becoming his parents’ translator and his younger siblings’ homework helper.
Even with the added responsibilities, Lewiston felt better than Louisville to the new student at Montello Elementary School because of the community that welcomed them. He had peers who spoke Somali, who understood the ways of Islam, and who liked the same foods that he did. And, most important, they loved soccer.
“The game,” he says, “just comes with the culture.”
To say that Abdi H. is obsessed with soccer is an understatement. He fills his Twitter feed with games he watches; not just as a fan but rather, according to McGraw, as a student of the game. A snapshot of Amel Majri training. A match between Liverpool and Dortmund. Barça. Ronaldo.
“I do not want any C. Ronaldo haters to speak today,” he tweeted after a hat trick by the Real Madrid star.
Abdi H. would watch the English Premier League (EPL) all day, every day, seven days a week. While many immigrants in the United States follow their homeland’s national team, he is a Manchester United fan because he’s never had a home team to cheer.
But his eyes light up at the prospect of Somalia playing soccer internationally. Because of civil war, FIFA prohibited sanctioned matches from taking place in Somalia. However, the country continued to harbor a passion for the game, whether it could be played in Mogadishu Stadium or not. While the national team, the Ocean Stars, has never qualified for the World Cup, soccer remains Somalia’s most popular sport. Somali teams first emerged in the 1940s, created by the Somali Youth League, the country’s first political party and a key player in its campaign for independence from colonial chains. The SYL put together a team—the Bondhere—to play against Italian expats, giving soccer a strong anti-colonial thread. The Somali Football Federation followed a decade later.
Soccer stadiums are among the few structures in Somalia relatively untouched by years of war and more recent violence by Al-Shabaab. While Al-Shabaab banned sport in 2008, today the 35,000-seat Mogadishu Stadium plays a central role in the country’s tentative recovery plan.
But for kids like Abdi H., who spent the first years of their lives playing in Kenyan refugee camps, soccer doesn’t need a stadium or uniforms or cleats. Soccer happens, he says, when there’s a ball and a passion.
“The second you’re done watching, you just want to go out there and start playing,” he says of his obsession with the EPL.
When Abdi H. talks about soccer, he gets louder as he describes games and teams, especially his beloved Manchester United. He is animated, happy, loose. But on the field facing Cheverus that day in 2014, he was all business, feeling the pressure with every minute that passed on the clock.
In his final preparations for his penalty kick, Abdi H. bent over and touched the ball one last time, looking at it resting before his neon green-and-black cleats. He was cold. He wore leggings underneath his shorts and gloves on his hands, but for the first time during the game, he felt cold. He turned his head, his spray-painted blue hair in stark contrast to his white uniform, and waited for the ref to blow the whistle. As the ref raised his left hand, Tomkinson began to jump in the goal, opening his arms as Abdi H. took a small step back. Hearing the whistle, he moved back to make room for a short run while Tomkinson crouched, arms still outstretched. Abdi H. fired his shot as Tomkinson threw his body to the left, diving sideways.
The team believed the ball was going in. The fans believed the ball was going in. They had no question as to what would happen because Abdi H. hadn’t missed a penalty kick all year. That’s right: not one. All year. Until now.
Tomkinson embraced the ball, hugging it to his chest, and quickly leaped up as his team roared, a swarm of celebration. Abdi H. stood, dumbfounded, his hands gripping his head in disbelief. He turned and slowly started to walk back to midfield as Tomkinson booted the ball. It felt impossible to get back into the game, but he knew he had to.
“When you take a penalty, you just try to pick one side and place it, and hopefully you can beat the keeper,” Abdi H. says of what had been his fail-safe move. “And I think from the get-go, from the beginning, the keeper picked his side and he just happened to go to the same side as me.”
After the game, Abdi H. told McGraw his timing had been off because Tomkinson had moved into the middle just before the whistle. His kick went exactly where he wanted it to go, but without the kind of pace it should have had. Tomkinson devoured the low, left-leaning shot as if Abdi H. had told him where it was going to go.
“He played an awesome game,” McGraw says of the Cheverus goalie. “A hot goalkeeper can mean the dif
ference in a game.”
Abdi H. tried to regroup, digging deep, but it was hard with the clock ticking.
“All right, what now?” he yelled, doubt creeping in, gnawing at him. “We can score one more! SCORE. ONE. MORE.”
But as darkness descended on the field, Cheverus took its one-goal lead and did exactly what McGraw expected, putting in a defensive shell that didn’t let anyone or anything through. The Stags were happy to just wait out the clock.
Within the local sports scene, Cheverus’s 2–1 victory was an upset of enormous proportions. It was like Aston Villa’s 1–0 victory over Bayern Munich in 1982 for the European Cup, or Denmark winning Euro ’92, a tournament they qualified for only after Yugoslavia bowed out because of geopolitical instability.
It took only a moment for Mike Wong to realize he’d just played his last game. He fell to the ground, his face twisted in agony. He couldn’t get up because when he did, it would really be over. Karim stood over him, his hand on his teammate’s head as he waited for him to stand up.
“It’s a cruel game,” McGraw told reporters afterward. He praised his team, how they worked hard, kept their heads on straight. He acknowledged the chances they hadn’t capitalized on. It was the same old story: It wasn’t the right time. Maybe next year, maybe never.
His public face good-natured as ever, inside McGraw was angry.
“We played right into Cheverus’s hands,” he remembers, his face reddening at the thought of it. “We should’ve won it, and we did everything right.”
But when he thinks about it, McGraw admits that isn’t true.
“Not only were my players impatient, I was, too,” he says. “I didn’t settle them down and tell them to move the ball back, stretch them out, play the game, because we were…” He pauses, frustrated. “We were so used to dominating!”
And they did, at least on paper. The Blue Devils outshot the newly crowned state champion 21–7. But they didn’t finish their shots, so they didn’t finish what they set out to do. The 2015 season started, knew McGraw, right then and there.
“There was no way we were not going back.”
Chapter 2
We Have to Go Back
The bus ride to Lewiston from the Cheverus game was far different from the one that got them there. On their way to the game, the team proudly carried its winning season on the sleeves of their blue warm-up jackets. They were soaring; hair sprayed blue, wearing game-day Mohawks with mixed results. But now they sat in sweaty, suffocating, smothering silence, rehashing all that had happened.
“It was,” remembers McGraw, “a pretty quiet ride.”
The walk to the bus from the field felt interminable. Parents dotted the route, gently offering consoling remarks. The team kept its collective head down, barely acknowledging them.
Where was the bus, anyway? Why was it taking so long to find it?
On the bus, their misery only grew. They were hungry and wondered if they’d stop at Subway. In the old days, it was McDonald’s, where both coach and bus driver ate for free. Now they couldn’t do that because most of the players had no money for such things. But Kim Wettlaufer, a Lewiston businessman with deep connections to the Somali community, owned a bunch of Subway franchises and kept the team fed.
Maulid was hungry—he was always hungry—but he hated ordering. It made him nervous. He usually asked his dad to do it, even though his English wasn’t all there either. Maulid never remembered what he liked. Besides, it was just food. It wasn’t going to make anything better.
While the players stewed, McGraw had trouble sitting still at the front of the bus next to assistant coach Dan Gish. Gish felt terrible. He kept replaying the game in his head, growing more frustrated by the minute. If we’d just put that first one in, he thought, the game would’ve been over because the offensive floodgates would’ve opened. Cheverus wouldn’t have known what…
Gish stopped. Would’ve. Should’ve. None of that had happened. Instead, they hit the crossbar. The post. Then Cheverus scored, not once but twice. Hustle goals; nothing they couldn’t handle. But the pressure, the second-guessing, the hesitation—it just killed them. He could actually feel the kids thinking, Uh-oh, here we go again. Gish shook his head. He had to stop doing this. He needed to figure out something to say, anything to break the silence, fill the bus with its usual energy. But he had no words. He could only think they’d blown their chance. They finally got to a state championship game, and now it was over. Would they ever get back?
Gish turned to the man sitting next to him, a man he respected and loved. A man who’d waited so long for this chance, worked so hard, only to see it disappear.
“Coach, I’m so sorry,” Gish whispered. “I don’t know what to say.”
The two briefly embraced, a tentative side-hug. After looking at Gish a moment, McGraw hoisted himself up and walked back to the middle of the bus, gripping each seat as he moved, his white hair making his cobalt blue eyes pop vividly. Hip and knee surgeries had taken a toll on this man who once played on a championship high school football team. He started to pace the aisle, talking, something he’d never in four decades of teaching and coaching had trouble doing. “We’re coming back,” he announced to the rows of defeated faces, his end-of-season hoarseness more strained than usual.
He surveyed the tops of their heads, waiting for them to look up, which they did when they heard his voice. He was Coach. When he spoke, they listened, staring at him directly. Eye contact was something many of them had had to learn. The Somali Bantu Youth Association gave workshops on such things. Their parents had raised them to look down as a sign of respect, to avoid looking directly into someone’s eyes. But in the United States, whether it was a teacher, a cop, or a coach, eye contact was important.
“When we get off this bus, we train from day one, because we are gonna get there.”
McGraw realized he’d just violated one of his own rules. He’d committed to the next season without his usual two-week waiting period. He’d tried to quit once. It was early in his career after a devastating loss. He went home and told Rita, his wife, that he didn’t want to do it anymore.
“Look, you lost, you feel awful,” Rita said. “Why don’t you give it two weeks, and if you still feel the same way, resign.”
So he waited, and then everything was fine. It was like coaching had become a bad habit, something that just kept coming back. Usually by December, he started thinking about what he had to do next, which teams he wanted to play over the summer, getting things ready. It was routine.
This time, he didn’t need two weeks.
McGraw kept talking to the players, barely thinking about the words coming out of his mouth, knowing he was talking more for himself than for them. He wanted them to look ahead because what lay in the rearview mirror had crushed their souls. They were just kids. They were his kids.
“There is no denying we are gonna get back into this game,” he repeated, “and we are going to win the game.”
“Yep, naäam, yuh Coach, haa, yes, ndiyo, we are,” the players muttered in their usual mix of Somali and Arabic, English and Swahili, nodding in agreement. They just wanted to sit. But they dutifully listened, earbuds and Beats hanging loosely around their necks, waiting to fill their heads with African music, rap, and pop.
McGraw continued his impromptu speech, feeling his blood pressure going up. Losing was not good for his health. His team’s string of postseason tragedies, year after year, took a toll. The veins in his neck pulsed. He could hear his heartbeat in his head. His face got hot, and there was a slight ringing in his ears. He felt like what he wasn’t saying was going to kill him: they should have won that game.
Instead, they played right into Cheverus’s hands. Cheverus, for God’s sake. The seventh seed. The word kept echoing in his head. The more he thought about it, the hotter he got. He thought it would be Scarborough. He was ready for Scarborough. How in God’s name did Cheverus beat Scarborough to get into the final?
“In no unce
rtain terms,” he said, his voice breaking, “we are going to be back. You’ll go to school and hold your heads up, because your friends are still your friends and the people who love you still love you. It can be a cruel game that has been pretty beautiful for us, so go to bed and don’t think too much. Tomorrow will be tough, and then it will get a little easier.”
He felt bad for the seniors who couldn’t go back, he said, players like Ibrahim and Mike and Speedy.
“We have to go back,” McGraw said one last time. This was not the right ending to their season.
A few rows back, Austin Wing sat dejected and quiet. The quiet part wasn’t unusual—he’d never been a loud kid. But the team bus was where he left that part of himself behind, joining his teammates’ raucous chants and songs. He usually had no idea what language he was singing in, never mind what anything meant, but he didn’t care. He loved joining in, getting loud, and clapping until his hands hurt.
Austin was glad that Coach was talking. The first ten minutes of the ride were silent, which he found unbearable, heartbreaking. But his heart wasn’t the only thing that hurt. He’d been dealing with a pilonidal cyst that made even walking difficult on some days. In another week’s time, he had basketball tryouts. How was he supposed to run? His doctor didn’t even want him to try out for basketball, never mind play.
How had they lost to Cheverus? Austin asked himself. He knew it hurt them to play with two key defenders on the bench because of that party. Their suspension was scheduled to end on Monday, but the administration wouldn’t budge. Rules were rules. Moe had moved from midfield to defense, and had the strength and attitude to make it work. But today…
Austin shook his head. Today was about more than missing players. They’d been too confident against a number-seven seed. Thought it would be a blowout. Some blowout. Cheverus played hard. Physical. And that goalie! Austin had heard the goalie had been hot throughout the playoffs, but what a game that kid had. After Cheverus beat Scarborough, Austin knew Scarborough’s coach, Mark Diaz, had told McGraw about the kid’s amazing saves. They’d done some role-playing in practice to prepare, working on ways to attack, break through. They had reviewed strategy for two days in McGraw’s classroom, going over each player, figuring out who to mark and how to get to goal. But still, Austin hadn’t realized the goalie was that good.