An unfamiliar thing: A new Faribault Somali travel soccer team tries to find its way

By BRENDAN BURNETT-KURIE
bburnett-kurie@faribault.com Southernminn

 

From where Khadar Siyad is standing, the grass, bright as a painting, stretches across three fields before it is interrupted ever so briefly by a concession stand, restrooms and a small parking lot.

Then it picks up again, flat like a green sheet laid across the countryside, radio towers as a backdrop and a small retaining pond demarcating the end of openness. Beyond green is a small collection of trees, then farmland as far as the eye can see.

This is the first unfamiliar thing.

In the whole of this green viewscape mixed only by the perpendicular white lines of goalposts, Siyad is the only person. On a muggy, overcast day with the gentle sound of birds chirping in the distance, he is but one man on acres of pitch, slowing setting up a dozen small, orange cones in the shape of a long rectangle. By the post of one goal he has poured the contents of his small backpack — orange, red, yellow pinnies tumbling out.

It’s nearing 6 p.m., and soon he won’t be alone. Before long cars are lining up along 17th Street and from them emerge dozens of young men, in small groups or alone, some wearing jeans and some wearing shorts, some wearing shirts of the team they support (Man U or Arsenal or Real Madrid) and some wearing thrift store T-shirts from some indiscriminate road race halfway across the state.

They all wear shoes.

This is the second unfamiliar thing.

They laugh and yell in a sharp, fast language, then flock to the man with the camera, excitedly jabbering in a mix of English and Somali. They want their picture taken. They want to know if it will be in the newspaper. They want the man to know about the game against the local Mexican team the next day. They wonder if the lines will be painted on the field in time.

Then another man arrives, an average 50-something white guy with a moustache and puffy, unkempt gray-white hair. He’s the Paperwork Man. The organizer, the money man, the one with the answers.

They ask him about the lines.

This is the third unfamiliar thing.

The Familiar

It all started from the most familiar of places with the most familiar of things. A schoolyard and a soccer ball.

Terry Gersemehl, the Paperwork Man, has been substitute teaching at Faribault Middle school for less than a year and everywhere he looks, the local Somali children are playing soccer. In the courtyard. In the snow. In the lunch room.

Gersemehl, who still remembers that “Just for Kicks” was the theme of his 1966 Faribault High School senior prom, has been around the game for 30 years. It started in North Oklahoma City where he maintained 15 pitches and assigned referees for the in-house program that ran 80 games every Saturday. After a stop running Forest Lake’s in-house program, he came to Northfield where he took over field maintenance duties from Jeff Amerman.

He works full-time in IT support for Corelink, a company that provides services for Blue Cross Blue Shield. On the side, he subs. That’s where he met Abdirahin Abdullahi, an eighth grader.

That’s where the road from familiar to unfamiliar began.

The Creation

Abdullahi was one of those boys who couldn’t stop playing soccer. It’s the game he grew up playing in Somalia and it’s where he finds comfort.

Gersemehl stopped Abdullahi one day, “Do you have a team?”

“No,” Abdullahi said.

“Do you want one?” Gersemehl asked.

He did. So Abdullahi started asking his friends. He asked his friends to ask their friends. They started meeting in a room above the library. Soon there were eight players. Then 14. Now 22.

“These kids don’t play organized soccer,” Gersemehl says. “They’d never played in an organized game.”

Now they had players, but it takes more than that to be a team. Gersemehl found a coach, Khadair Mohamed, who has lived in the United States for nine years and had helped coach an older Somali team made up of 17- to 24-year-olds called the Faribault Eagles.

“Everywhere I saw a lot of players on the fields,” Mohamed says. “But we didn’t have a team. They were too young to play with the older team, but we said, ‘You guys can be a team.’”

Thus this summer a second incarnation of the Faribault Eagles was born, a 13-17-year-old group that plays under the Faribault Soccer Association umbrella and so far has competed in U19 tournaments in Apple Valley, Lakeville and Rochester.

“They really have fun,” Mohamed says. “They really enjoy it. They have good energy and they hope to be a better team.”

The Love

Somalia and soccer are inextricable. In 2010, the Washington Post sent a reporter to Mogadishu, the capitol city, for a story on the country’s Under-17 team.

“The players practice in mismatched attire for a match against Egypt,” Sudarsan Raghavan wrote.

“Their field is a forlorn, uneven patch of earth covered in mud, rocks and rusty cans. There are no goal posts.”

Three years later, Mohamed is standing on the edge of Warren Field at the Faribault Soccer Complex trying to answer a question about the difference between soccer in America and Somalia. He keeps looking at the ground, but can’t come up with the word. Exasperated, he asks Abdullahi in Somali.

“Grass,” Abdullahi translates.

With word in hand, Mohamed continues, “The field is not grass there because people steal the grass and animals walk all over the fields.”

“So the field is dirt?”

“Yes, but some people steal the sand to build their houses. But here, no one can take the grass out.” Mohamed beams.

Abdullahi pipes in, “Over there we don’t play with shoes. Here we have cleats.”

As practice starts, Mohamed — dressed in a white khameez with a koofiyad on his head, sandals and dark sunglasses, looking like a movie version of an Abu Dhabi banker — talks about the pasts of the 22 young men he’s coaching. He says many of them were in the same refugee camps, but never met until they arrived in Faribault. Most had never watched a professional game before; the closest they had come was huddling outside a theater that charged between 10 and 20 schillings to watch EPL or World Cup games and swarming people as they came out, begging for any information they could get.

Now, they gather at local Somali grocery stores to watch games together. Each supports his own team, since the Somalia National Team has never qualified for the World Cup (it has only attempted to qualify five times) and has never been ranked higher than 158th in the FIFA standings (it’s currently ranked 202nd).

Despite experiencing the game only in its most basic, natural state, as a pick-up game played among friends, family and neighbors, they love the sport.

“Everybody plays,” Abdullahi says. “It’s like America with football.”

Now, in a strange land where most of the Somali boys have lived for less than four years, they come back to it, not only as a way to remember, but a way to stay out of the pitfalls of their peers.

“It keeps me out of trouble,” Abdullahi says. “I’m not wasting my time, I’m not going downtown or doing other stuff or getting in trouble.”

The Team

After forming less than two months ago, the Faribault Eagles have had a rough entrance into the competitive world. It started with an 0-3 record at the Apple Valley Tournament and continued with losses in their first two games of the Lakeville Tournament.

But then on June 16 it started to turn around. The Somalis beat Alexandria 2-0 and dedicated it as a Father’s Day gift to Gersemehl.

“It was a hard-fought game,” he says. “It’s taken us a while to work as a team. After enough practice and talking about what we need to do they put it together on Sunday afternoon. That was a great to see.”

“We were so happy we got the win,” says Siyad. “We worked hard and we played well and we made a lot of improvement.”

No one can doubt their natural ability. They have the speed, endurance and, for the most part, the on-the-ball skills to excel. What they lack are teamwork and a solid grasp of the rules.

“We have some great skills and we’ve been told that by all the other coaches,” Gersemehl says.

“Even though soccer in an individual sport in some ways because you’re 1-on-1 with the ball, it’s a team sport and you have to work as a team. It’s learning how to play with their teammates and not just trying to dribble up the middle and hoping to get a shot on goal.”

Early on, Gersemehl gave Mohamed a book on coaching soccer, which he hungrily ate up and has been trying to pass along to his players.

“Every day we do different exercises,” he says. “We practice every day.”

As teamwork grows, so does their understanding of the rules. To them, off-sides was an esoteric idea. In their first scrimmage against an FSA team (they eventually won two and tied two) the Eagles were called off-sides at least a dozen times.

“You probably could have called more than that,” Gersemehl admits. “Off-sides is a big deal.

Nobody had ever called them off-sides.”

Several things Americans are taught by the age of 10 and take for granted are still a struggle. In their first game the Somalis were whistled several times for illegal throw-ins. They simply didn’t know they had to keep both feet on the ground.

“Now we rarely get called for throw-in errors,” Gersemehl says. “Occasionally, but not very often. But we still get called for off-sides.”

The Future

With three tournaments now in the rear-view mirror, the team has turned to raising money to compete in a tournament in Duluth. Originally, the team had hoped to compete in the Schwan’s USA Cup in Blaine, even holding a car wash earlier this month, but ended up merely breaking even after struggling to even attract their own parents as customers.

It’s a thread that has wound its way through the brief history of the team. From the beginning, parents didn’t show up at the initial meetings in Buckham Center. When it came time to provide birth certificates and sign medical releases signed, Gersemehl called it “like pulling teeth.”

Eventually they managed to get releases for all 22 kids. But entering tournaments and coming up with uniforms cost money. An $1,800 diversity grant from the Minnesota Youth Soccer Association and reduced fees from the FSA went a long way, allowing them to purchase shirts, shorts and green socks for each player. Many of them are so proud of the uniforms they wear them to practice.

“That brought the team together,” Abdullahi says. “That was awesome. We were so excited when we got jerseys.”

But Gersemehl also wanted each family to “have a little skin in the game” so he asked each player to pay $25 as a participation fee. He’s still trying to collect from many of them.

He says he’s trying to teach more than soccer; he wants to imbue responsibility. At their last game players were swapping shirts as they subbed in and out because half the kids didn’t have their uniform.

“These are the things you don’t think you have to deal with but you do,” he says. “I think having fun is No. 1, but they’re also learning responsibility. Being responsible for themselves and to show up on time and have their equipment ready. Those are all issues we’ve had to deal with.”

He pauses, trying to find a balance between his frustration and his optimism.

“But they’re a good bunch of kids,” he finishes.

Reach Sports Editor Brendan Burnett-Kurie at 333-3129, or follow him on Twitter @faribaultsports

Source: Southernminn.com