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I will have good behavior on and off the field. Hands - black, brown, white - reach for the paper. “If you can’t live with this,” she says, “I don’t want you on this team.” She holds up a stack of paper, contracts she expects her players to sign. The final roster will be posted on the bulletin board at the public library by 10 Friday morning, she says. “If you miss two games, you’re off the team.” “If you miss a practice, you miss the next game,” she tells the boys. The second half will be for soccer, and for running. Every Monday and Wednesday, I’m going to have you from 5 to 8.” The first half will be for homework and tutoring. “Listen up,” she tells the panting and dusty boys. On the barren lot, every footfall and pivot produces a puff of chalky dust that hangs in the air like fog.Īcross town, the lush field in Milam Park sits empty. One plays in ankle-high hiking boots, some in baggy jeans, another in his socks. The boys at the tryouts wear none of the shiny apparel or expensive cleats common in American youth soccer. Mufleh - or Coach Luma, as she is known in the refugee community - is holding tryouts for her under-13 team on a rutted, sand-scarred field behind an elementary school. The mayor’s soccer ban has everything to do with why, on a scorching August afternoon, Ms.
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They speak with accents and don’t seem American. “They trigger people’s reactions on class, on race. “There are no gray areas with the Fugees,” said the coach, Luma Mufleh. In a region where passions run high on the subject of illegal immigration, many are unaware or unconcerned that, as refugees, the Fugees are here legally. A woman volunteering in a league where all the other coaches are men, some of them paid former professionals from Europe, she spends as much time helping her players’ families make new lives here as coaching soccer.Īt the other extreme are some town residents, opposing players and even the parents of those players, at their worst hurling racial epithets and making it clear they resent the mostly African team. More than 900,000 have been admitted to the United States since 1993, and their presence seems to bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. But as a season with the youngest of the three teams revealed, it is also a story about the challenges facing resettled refugees in this country. Their story is about children with miserable pasts trying to make good with strangers in a very different and sometimes hostile place. The Fugees, 9 to 17 years old, play on three teams divided by age. Some have endured unimaginable hardship to get here: squalor in refugee camps, separation from siblings and parents. The Fugees are indeed all refugees, from the most troubled corners - Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Caught in the middle is a boys soccer program called the Fugees - short for refugees, though most opponents guess the name refers to the hip-hop band.