WARREN ST. JOHN
OUTCASTS UNITED
A Refugee Soccer Team,an American Town
For Nicole
Contents
Chapter Two: Beatrice and Her Boys
Chapter Three: “Small Town … Big Heart”
Chapter Four: Alone Down South
Chapter Five: The Fugees Are Born
Chapter Seven: “Coach Says It’s Not Good”
Chapter Eight: “They’re in America Now—Not Africa”
Chapter Ten: “I Want to Be Part of the Fugees!”
Chapter Eleven: Figure It Out so You Can Fix It
Chapter Thirteen: “How Am I Going to Start All Over?”
Chapter Fourteen: Alex, Bien, and Ive
Chapter Sixteen: The Fifteens Fight
Chapter Nineteen: Getting Over it
Chapter Twenty: The “Football People”
Chapter Twenty-one: Playing on Grass
Chapter Twenty-two: Who Are the Kings?
Chapter Twenty-three: Showdown at Blue Springs
Chapter Twenty-four: Coming Apart
Chapter Twenty-five: Hanging On at Home
Chapter Twenty-six: The Dikoris
Chapter Twenty-seven: “What Are You Doing Here?”
Chapter Twenty-eight: Halloween
Chapter Twenty-nine: The Fifteens’ Final Game
Chapter Thirty: My Rules, My Way
Chapter Thirty-one: Tornado Cup
On a cool spring afternoon on a football pitch in northern Georgia, two teams of teenage boys were going through their pregame warm-up when the heavens began to shake. The pitch had been quiet save the sounds of footballs thumping against forefeet and the rustling of the balls against the nylon nets that hung from the goalposts. But as the rumble grew louder, all motion stopped as boys from both teams looked quizzically skyward. Soon a cluster of darts appeared in the gap of sky between the pine trees on the horizon and the cottony clumps of cloud vapor overhead. It was a precision flying squadron of fighter jets, performing at an air show miles away in Atlanta. The aircraft banked in close formation in the direction of the pitch and came closer, so that the boys could now make out the markings on the wings and the white helmets of the pilots in the cockpits. Then with an earthshaking roar deep enough to rattle the change in your pocket, the jets split in different directions like an exploding firework, their contrails carving the sky into giant wedges.
On the pitch below, the two groups of boys watched the spectacle with craned necks, and from different perspectives. The players of the home team—a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old