When Jeremiah arrived, he joined twenty-two other boys on the small field out back of the community center. On the touchline, he unzipped his backpack carefully, as though it contained a fragile and precious artifact, which in a way it did: a single black oversized sneaker. Jeremiah took off his flip-flops and slipped the shoe on his right foot, leaving his left foot bare, and took the field.
Before trials began, a sense of puzzlement seemed to settle on the boys: Where, they wondered, was the coach? Luma was right in front of them, but a woman football coach was a strange sight to young Africans, and especially to the young Muslim boys from Afghanistan and Iraq. During shooting practice at an early training session, Luma was instructing the boys on how to strike the ball with the tops of their feet when she overheard a lanky Sudanese boy talking to the others.
“She’s a girl,” he said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Luma ordered him to stand in goal. She took off her shoes as the boy waited beneath the crossbar, rocking back and forth and growing more anxious by the moment. She asked for a ball, which she placed on the grass. Then, barefoot, as the team looked on, she blasted a shot directly at the boy, who dove out of the way as the ball rocketed into the net.
Luma turned toward her team.
“Anybody else?” she asked.
ON THAT FIRST day of trials, Jeremiah, in particular, played with all of the joyful abandon you might expect of an eight-year-old who had been stuck inside for months in a dark two-bedroom apartment. Soon the other boys had given him a nickname—One Shoe—which Jeremiah didn’t seem to mind in the least. At the end of the practice, he took his shoe off, carefully wiped it down, and placed it in his backpack before slipping on his flip-flops and starting the two-mile walk back home.
“See you later, Coach,” he said to Luma as he left the field.
“See you later, One Shoe,” she said.
WHEN BEATRICE ZIATY found out her son was sneaking off to play football with strangers after school, all hell broke loose.
“You’re too small,” Beatrice scolded him. “Don’t go out of the house!”
Jeremiah started to cry. And he cried. He begged his mother to let him play, but Beatrice held her ground. She wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her son. And she certainly wasn’t going to be defied—after all she’d done to get the family here. Inside, though, Beatrice was torn. She knew an eight-year-old boy needed to run, to get outside. She knew it wasn’t fair to keep him confined to a small apartment all the time.
“You say you have a coach,” she finally said to Jeremiah. “Why you can’t bring the coach to me to see?”
“Momma,” he said, “I will bring her.”
The conversation took place outside, in front of the Ziatys’ apartment. Luma came in her Beetle and parked out front. Beatrice walked outside with Jeremiah and explained her concerns to Coach Luma: She wanted to know that her son would be safe and with an adult. She wanted to know how to get in touch with Luma if something went wrong. And she wanted to make sure that Jeremiah wasn’t walking alone through Clarkston.
“She did the bulk of the talking,” Luma recalled. “She said that Jeremiah was her baby and she wanted to know where he was going.”
Luma promised to pick Jeremiah up before practice and to drop him off afterward. He wouldn’t have to walk alone. She gave Beatrice her cell number and promised to be reachable.
“I’ll treat him like he’s my own kid,” Luma told her. “He’s going to be my responsibility.”
Beatrice agreed to give the situation a try. Jeremiah climbed into Luma’s Volkswagen and sat among the footballs and bright orange plastic cones strewn about—she used the car as a mobile equipment locker—and together they were off to practice. One Shoe had no intention of letting his mother down.
IN THOSE EARLY practices, Luma made a point not to ask her players about their pasts. The football pitch, she felt, should be a place where they could leave all that behind. But occasionally, as the kids became more comfortable with her, they would reveal specifics about their experiences in ways that underscored the lingering effects of those traumas. Luma learned that Jeremiah, for example, had been at home the night that his father was killed. Once, in an early practice, Luma expressed frustration that a young Liberian player seemed to suddenly zone out during play. Another Liberian who knew the boy told her she didn’t understand: the boy had been forced by soldiers to shoot a close friend. Luma wasn’t a social worker, and she had no background in dealing with profound psychological trauma. In such moments, she felt perilously in over her head.
“How do you react when someone tells you he saw his father get killed?” she said. “I didn’t know.”
Luma picked up on another problem facing her young players. Many had come from societies that had been fractured by war, and as a consequence they never had access to any kind of formal education. It wasn’t uncommon for some refugee children to be both illiterate in their native languages and innumerate—they had never learned the simplest math skills. Without this basic education in their own languages, they were playing catch-up in schools where classes were taught in a new language many of the boys could barely understand, if at all. While the public school system around Clarkston offered English-as-a-second-language programs, the schools were overwhelmed with newcomers. To move students through the system, many refugees were placed in standard classes that, while appropriate for their ages, did not take into account their lack of schooling or their deficiencies in English. The clock was ticking on these young students; if they didn’t get help and find a way to succeed in school, they would fail out or simply get too old for high school, at which point they would be on their own. Given the enthusiasm for football in the refugee community, Luma wondered if perhaps the game and her team could be an enticement for after-school tutoring that might give young refugees a better chance to succeed. She resolved to get help from volunteers and educators for tutoring before practices, and to require her players to attend or else lose their spots on her team.
Somewhere along the way, the team got a name: the Fugees. Luma was unsure of who exactly came up with the name, which many opposing teams assumed was a reference to the hip-hop band. But in fact it was simply short for “refugees.” The name stuck, and over time began to take on its own meaning among the kids in Clarkston, one separate from its etymology. In Clarkston, the Fugees meant football.
That first season, the Fugees played in a recreational, or “rec,” league, an informal division teams were required to play in before they could be admitted to more formal competition in the “select” grouping. There wasn’t much of an equipment budget, so Luma relied on donations, which didn’t always work out. A batch of jerseys given to the Fugees turned out to be absurdly large, like nightshirts. Someone donated a box of old boots, which Luma distributed to her players. When one of those players went to kick the ball, the sole of his boot went flying into the air to hysterical laughter from his teammates; the boots were so old that the glue holding them together had rotted. Luma stoically refused to acknowledge the equipment problems, at least to her players. She didn’t want them to get discouraged by what they didn’t have. She even made a point of wearing the same clothes to practices and games—football shorts, a ratty green T-shirt, and her dingy Smith baseball cap—because she noticed her players almost always wore the same clothes themselves.
Luma began the work of trying to make a competitive team out of her young recruits. She had to teach them the basics of organized play—how to take throw-ins, how to stay onside. But soon enough, a far bigger challenge began to reveal itself. Luma noticed that when she would tell the boys to divide into groups for drills, they would instinctively divide themselves according to their ethnic backgrounds or common languages. In practice games, boys would overlook open teammates to pass to their own kind. And each group, she learned, had its own prejudices toward others.
“The Afghan and Iraqi kids would look down at the African kids,” Luma said. “And kids from northern Africa would look down