One Goal

by Amy Bass

  McGraw made it clear that getting good grades was part of being an athlete, part of being on a team. To be fully devoted to a team, a player had to take care of everything else, from school to family, before stepping on the field.

  “BE. ON. TIME.”

  McGraw threw another stern look at the hopefuls.

  “Because if you can’t, that guy will,” he said, pointing.

  For summer games, transportation is not an excuse, he told them. Figure it out. Conditioning is key.

  “You guys who are fasting,” he said, thinking about the start of Ramadan in just a few weeks, “get your workout in early.”

  Last year’s record, 16–1–1, was in the history books. Done. This was a new team, new schedule. There was a burden coming back after losing a state championship, McGraw admitted. Everyone knew they were hungry. There was a target on their back and everyone, from Scarborough to Falmouth, Mt. Ararat to Brunswick, had gotten better.

  “You know what we’re up against,” he told them. “You are not last year’s team, but people are going to play you like you’re last year’s team. We need to finish when we’re supposed to finish and take advantage of our opportunities, because pain is never-ending until the next time you get there.”

  Thinking about the Cheverus game dampened his spirit for a moment. Thirty-three years without a title. But then his face softened and his eyes got their twinkle back. He hoped they were ready. He was.

  “Guys who don’t come to this meeting are going to have to prove it,” he said again. “You’re already one up on them.” He smiled, ever so slightly. “So thank you for being here.”

  McGraw was done. Dek stood up, thinking about what he’d said about school. Dek had done the work. He was determined that academic eligibility was not going to keep him out.

  Eligibility rules changed when Gus LeBlanc was principal. LeBlanc liked sports. The last thing he wanted to do was kill a sports program, but he was an educator first. When he won his second state football championship in 1985, nine of the eleven defensive players were in the National Honor Society.

  There’s a story LeBlanc likes to tell from his first year at Lewiston High School. A senior walked into his office in August. He wanted to play football but wasn’t eligible. LeBlanc looked at the kid’s transcript and was outraged at what he saw. Going into senior year, this student had never missed a football season, but he had only eight of the necessary twenty-four credits for graduation.

  “What the hell is going on here?” LeBlanc asked.

  Academic eligibility was a joke; a wink and nod. On paper the policy had teeth, but in reality, if a kid wanted to play sports, a kid played sports. Academics weren’t for everyone, LeBlanc was told. For those other kids, there were sports.

  “I found that mentality archaic,” LeBlanc remembers. “I believe if you raise expectations, as long as they are not unrealistic, kids will meet them and, in the end, they’ll benefit from them.”

  LeBlanc had to raise the standards, but he felt pressure from those—including the city’s school board—who worried about a higher dropout rate. It was time, he knew, to talk to the athletic director.

  Down the hallway and through the cafeteria from LeBlanc’s office sat Jason Fuller, who became AD the year before LeBlanc arrived at Lewiston High School. He, too, knew there was a problem. But he wasn’t entirely sure how to solve it.

  As athletic directors go, Fuller looks like he stepped right out of central casting, sitting in a windowless office just off the gymnasium, cases of trophies lining the wall opposite his door. A burly guy with biceps that appear as though they might pop out of his polo shirt, he speaks in a booming, rapid-fire voice, rarely able to keep still, his close-cropped hair giving him an almost military appearance. He is, he admits, a tense guy and a straight shooter; someone who not only plays by the book but also wants to make sure the book is written correctly.

  “Ohgodyeah,” he booms, all one word, when he agrees with something. He is doggedly loyal to the school and its students or, as he, too, calls them, “my kids.” There aren’t enough hours in the day for Fuller to do everything he wants to do for Blue Devils teams.

  Fuller did not expect to be back at his alma mater sitting at a desk. His parents came to Lewiston for teaching jobs—his mom from Ellsworth and his father from New Hampshire. Graduating from Lewiston High School in 1992, Fuller thought he’d left the city for good when he headed to Cornell University to play football. His career in the Ivy League was short-lived when he blew out his knee his first fall, something he’d done once before in high school. He returned to Maine and enrolled at the University of Maine in Orono.

  Fuller describes himself as “more hardworking than smart.” He hated college but managed to grab a degree in biology in just over two years, finding time to play a season of baseball before blowing out his knee yet again.

  Three times was enough. No more sports.

  His plan had been to be an orthopedic surgeon, but he didn’t get into medical school. At twenty-one, he was mowing lawns for cash when Skip Capone, Lewiston’s football coach, called him.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere,” Capone said. “Why don’t you coach football for us?”

  After Fuller had been on the job a week in the fall of 1995, the principal came down to the fields.

  “Mr. Fuller, can I talk to you?” the principal said.

  “Sure!” Fuller replied. He felt like a student all over again, the principal calling him out of practice. This can’t be good, he thought. What did I do to screw things up?

  “Have you ever thought about teaching?” the principal asked.

  “Yeah,” Fuller answered. Following in his parents’ footsteps was always in the back of his head.

  “Well, good, you’ve got an interview tomorrow at nine o’clock,” the principal said, walking away. “Science.”

  Fuller couldn’t believe it; he’d never taken a single education class. But the next day, just fifteen minutes into his first job interview, he wrote down information about new teacher orientation. He hadn’t just found a job, he realized. He’d discovered a career.

  Over the next several years, Fuller took classes in order to get certified to teach science. He continued to coach—football, basketball, baseball—and enjoyed the strong relationships he developed with student-athletes. When the AD position became available in 2005, he saw it as a chance to connect with even more kids.

  Fuller was just settling into his new position when LeBlanc arrived. LeBlanc wanted to talk about eligibility, and Fuller was prepared to listen. He knew well the story of the senior football player with few credits to his name. He, too, asked why the kid was still playing football. Creating new standards had nothing to do with the rising immigrant population in the school. It was about creating expectations for students and building structures to help achieve them.

  “Me and him had knock-down, drag-out debates about it,” remembers Fuller of LeBlanc. “We fell on a system we both could support, but Gus was the driving force. And we got a better eligibility policy out of it.”

  The new policy required athletes to be initially eligible based on the marking period before a season started, as well as continuingly eligible based on grades at a designated point in the term. Most important, they had to be on track to graduate. LeBlanc put safety nets into place to support students. He didn’t want to lose anyone, although he knew there’d be a few.

  The numbers improved, from classes passed to grade point averages. The number of student-athletes rose despite stricter standards, and by the time LeBlanc took a new job as headmaster of Lee Academy in 2012, graduation rates climbed from 58 to 73 percent. While one of every four students in Lewiston took ELL classes, more than half of them graduated in four years, with most others finishing in five. Graduating became a family affair, with Somali families requesting as many as thirty tickets for the ceremony held at the Colisée. The emphasis the Somali community put on education, LeBlanc knew, helped make t
he tougher standards work. Lewiston High School was going in a new direction.

  Chapter 7

  I Live My Thank-You

  Lewiston High School sits off East Street, a sprawling complex set among expansive playing fields with sweeping views of the city. Walkable via a few worn paths, it feels like a different world from downtown’s stacked apartment buildings and brick mills, Maine’s giant sky stretching overhead as students approach the glass entrance.

  McGraw starts his day standing outside his classroom before the first bell, taking in the scene, eyes gleaming as sleepy students shuffle by. He’s been awake for hours, usually beating the sun. He’s in his element, and students feed off his enthusiasm.

  “Hey, McGraw,” rings out repeatedly. He usually responds with a personal note—“You got your hair cut!” or “You getting more sleep these days?”—displaying an ease and familiarity that comes with four decades of teaching.

  Inside McGraw’s classroom, sports and academics come to meet. Bright blue tables with reddish-orange chairs fill the floor. The walls are covered by lively posters explaining DNA, while soccer team photos and plaques for his service to the community fill the shelves.

  As McGraw preps for his first class, players routinely drop in to chat, engaging in light, respectful banter. Maslah Hassan strolls by, hall pass in hand. Wherever he is supposed to be, it is more important for him to check in with McGraw. He stands, tall and silent, occasionally pulling on his goatee, waiting for McGraw to speak first.

  “Where’d you get that shirt? I like your shirt,” McGraw finally says, looking at the black hoodie the senior is wearing.

  “I got it from Maulid,” Maslah answers, looking down at his feet to hide the smile spreading across his face, his usual swagger somewhat checked in front of his coach.

  “Ha!” McGraw laughs. “Maulid has the goods, right?”

  Just after nine o’clock, students come through the door, chatting, mocking, and bantering, backpacks thrown over a mix of hoodies, jeans, and traditional African dress. Some of the girls wear brightly patterned hijabs—magenta with a band of fake flowers or turquoise adorned with jeweled leaves, metallic threads catching the fluorescent lights above. A girl in a sweatshirt and jeans, tattered Converse on her feet and her long hair tipped with hot-pink dye, walks in with a can of soda in one hand and a phone in the other.

  “Do you know where that goes?” McGraw asks, pointing to the can.

  “Down my throat,” she answers.

  He points to the phone, undeterred. “And do you know where that goes?”

  She nods.

  “Not in my class,” he pronounces.

  “HAT!” he calls to a boy walking in. The kid sheepishly throws the Red Sox cap to the floor before taking a seat.

  “How you guys doing?” McGraw begins. Picking up a piece of chalk with his left hand, he writes the due date for an impending lab report on homeostasis on the board, his slight Maine accent highlighting words like “cah-bon” dioxide. This is the first of three times today he will go through a diffusion-and-osmosis song-and-dance.

  Standing in the middle of the tables while he lectures, he picks up two beakers of liquid. He patiently waits until everyone’s eyes are on his hands.

  “What’s the one thing changed?” he asks. “What’s the independent variable?

  The class settles into lab groups. McGraw moves throughout the room, checking in with each of them, asking questions, and telling them to “staht making ob-suh-VAY-shuns.”

  “You’ve got more skills than you’re letting on,” he chides a group who is fooling around. “Is iodine a solid or a liquid?”

  “Liquid,” one whispers. McGraw waits. “Solid,” she says more forcefully. He nods and moves on.

  At the next group, he leans over the working students, his blue tie grazing the desk.

  “I love that shirt,” McGraw tells a boy wearing a Chelsea FC shirt.

  “Who’s Chelsea?” another student asks.

  “Are you kidding me?” McGraw asks in mock horror, shaking his head. He looks back at the kid in the soccer jersey. “Love it.”

  McGraw continues to work the room, his reading glasses flying on and off his face as needed, patiently explaining the assignment over and over, encouraging one to come see him at the end of the day for extra help, condemning another for texting under the table.

  “What are your observations?” he keeps asking. “What does iodine do to starch? What do you see?”

  He stops to talk to a girl with a striking black-and-white scarf covering her head, spilling down her back.

  “Yes, yes,” he says, looking at her lab report, most of which he recognizes from his lecture. “But I want to hear it from you—I want to know what you think.”

  He stays with her, helping her rethink the consequence of iodine as a starch indicator, before moving to the next table, where he asks a girl about a bracelet—blue stones strung together—on her wrist. Her boyfriend made it, she tells him. McGraw looks impressed. He tells her about a boyfriend his daughter once had who made her custom CDs. She looks confused; what’s a CD?

  “Which is larger,” he asks her, moving on, “starch or glucose?”

  At the end of the day, McGraw makes sure his classroom is in order, putting everything away in the storage closet at the front of the room. “MCGRAW IS RAD” reads the sign on the closet door. Inside, microscopes and hefty textbooks with titles like Basic Human Physiology are neatly stored next to soccer balls. A faded handmade poster—“LET’S GO BIG BLUE”—sits above photos of McGraw’s family. Framed butterfly specimens hang next to photos of soccer stars past and present. He has a story for just about every face.

  “He’s a doctor, he’s a baseball coach, and this one,” he says, pointing to Eric Wagner in an old black-and-white photo, “is head soccer coach at Swarthmore.”

  Wagner still returns to Lewiston every summer to work at McGraw’s youth soccer camp. An easygoing guy, he has a surfer look to him, with sandy hair that crawls across his face in modern-day muttonchops. Soft-spoken, he takes long pauses when he speaks, patient with his thoughts.

  Wagner is passionate about both Lewiston and McGraw. He was a senior in 1982, when McGraw became head coach, taking over for Nadeau.

  “Paul was much more of a disciplinarian, a yeller—he was a scary figure to us,” Wagner recalls. “He freaked us out.”

  Wagner thinks the team played well for Nadeau because they were scared not to. McGraw, on the other hand, was someone Wagner wanted to play for: inspirational, able to pull devotion from his players and make a strong team. When the two find time each summer to head to Gipper’s, a popular sports bar in Auburn, Wagner is always amazed at how McGraw makes everyone feel like the most important person in the room. It can take an hour for McGraw to get to a table, stopping to talk to everyone who’d had him as a coach or a teacher.

  “And so you’re sitting down at a table with him, and everybody in the place is coming up and stopping and saying hello, and you never once feel jealous that he’s not paying attention to you,” says Wagner. “You just know he’s popular and people like him. As soon as he’s done saying hi to that person, he’ll be right back, engrossed in the conversation. It’s incredible.”

  Wagner, whose father is a retired Bates psychology professor who still lives in Lewiston, knows well the changes the high school has undergone since he graduated.

  “I can tell you who the two black kids in school were,” he says of his high school days. “Because there were only two.”

  He thinks the changes are exciting, particularly in terms of soccer. Everywhere he looks when he visits, he sees kids of all ages kicking around a ball. But it’s more than how many are playing the game. It’s how they are playing it, and the traditions they are creating.

  A few Somali students found their way to McGraw in the earliest days of the refugee influx. Midfielders like Hamdi Naji and Mohamed “Momo” Mohamed, who was described as having the “fastest foot in town” in the 2003 yea
rbook, paved the way for others to follow. Within a few years, immigrants dominated the team. The Somalis no longer heard, “What’re you doing here?” when they showed up for tryouts. Perhaps no one’s story better represents the turning point than Shobow Saban.

  Slight of build, Shobow is a potpourri of personality, demonstrating an air of worldly and philosophical wisdom one moment; a bad joke and raucous laughter the next. A graduate of Assumption College, he is a caseworker with Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services, the former SBYA, determined to give back to the community. He helps parents better communicate with their increasingly Americanized children and works with city officials and social workers to better understand Somali culture. It’s his way, he says, of saying thank-you, wad mahadsantahay, which he would rather do through actions than words.

  “I came here as an immigrant, so the taxpayers who don’t even know me and I never met them, who actually spend money on me to get textbooks, to make sure the teachers get paid, to make sure that I sit in a chair, that I have a lunch—for all that, I say thank-you,” he says. “I mean, I’ve never met them, I’ve never seen them. So that’s the reason I say thank-you to the community. I live my thank-you.”

  Born in 1993, Shobow left Somalia with his family when he was less than a year old after a trespasser killed his grandfather. His memories start in Dadaab, where he learned basic math and English, and played soccer whenever he could. Life was hard, but Kenya felt safer, more peaceful, than Somalia. But when he was six, his father became ill. Disease spread rapidly in the camps, with so many people coming and going. Lacking adequate medical facilities, and with few doctors to be found, Shobow’s father died. Shobow’s mother, Bilow Farah, was left alone with her six sons. As the eldest, Shobow assumed much responsibility for the family.

  Shobow’s story is one that William “Kim” Wettlaufer, former director of the Trinity Jubilee Center, knew would get a strong reaction when he gave talks about Lewiston’s Somalis. He told his audiences about this woman, a single mother, who has six sons.