In the midst of the madness that is March, meaning so many eyes are on college basketball, including mine, I want to talk about soccer. But I don’t want to talk about the US mens’ national team’s historically dismal loss to Panama in the Nations League semi-final because seriously: how many times can we call something a so-called much needed wake up call? And I don’t want to talk about the new women’s soccer stadium that Denver is building, even though I am really, really excited about it. And I don’t want to talk about Trinity Rodman and Ben Shelton’s coming out as a couple, despite the fact that I spent more time than I’m willing to admit scrolling social media to see what they’re up to.
Instead, I want to talk about a soccer match that took place in Lewiston, Maine, last week at the high school’s Franklin Athletic Complex, a recently built state-of-the-art turf pitch that accommodates the Blue Devils teams. No, my beloved state championship winning Blue Devils boys’ soccer team -- the one at the center of my book One Goal, which situates the team as a lens to understand the migration of Somali refugees into the largely Catholic, Quebecois town -- was not playing. Instead, Lewiston hosted the inaugural match of Maine’s first professional soccer team, Hearts of Pine, whose 4-0 win in front of some 3,000 fans (some say even 4,000 fans!) perhaps solidified the city’s soccer identity even more deeply and sent the team into the second round of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup.
Enthusiasm for Maine’s professional soccer launch in Lewiston shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been following the growth of the sport in the state’s second most-populated city. Once a textile manufacturing center with factory jobs that brought an influx of French-speaking Canadian immigrants across the border, Lewiston now features a rather global landscape, created in large part by the thousands of Somalis who migrated there in the last two decades. Soccer has been instrumental in how the newcomers carved space for themselves in Lewiston, as the home of high school hockey dynasties began to make room for the beautiful game.
The weather for the Hearts’ debut was typical of so many soccer matches I’ve watched at Lewiston High School -- dank, foggy, wet, and chilly. But nothing could dampen the spirit of the folks filling the bleachers and the side lines, beating drums, waving flags, holding up their match-day scarves, hitting a fever pitch when winger Walter Varela, originally from Cape Verde, notched the first goal in club history, and on his birthday, no less. For Lewiston fans, the peak moment came in the 80th minute, when the city’s own Khalid Hersi, the 20-year-old son of Abdullahi Abdi, the man I call the “coach of everyone” in One Goal, subbed in, making his first appearance as a professional. Watching at home on a live stream, I marveled at this moment, watching this young man that I first met in his parents’ living room a handful of years ago, a soccer ball, of course, at his feet (at the Hersi’s, you do play ball in the house.) As Lewiston’s veritable soccer royalty, the Hersi family is part and parcel of the sport’s growth in the city, making it more than fitting that Khalid is the first-ever Mainer on the roster, something the fans made quite clear as they chanted "From Maine, first one, he's from Lewiston, Khalid Hersi."
Hearts won’t take up residency in their home stadium in Portland until May, but for now, they seem right at home in Lewiston. As the final seconds on the inaugural game ticked off, securing the 4-0 victory that would return them to Lewiston’s pitch on April 2 for the next round, the players did exactly what their high school counterparts did after they won their first state title in 2015: they headed to the sidelines to celebrate with the diverse array of soccer fans, their joy contagious, a celebration for everyone. Up the Hearts, indeed -- Maine is (and has been) officially soccer country.
Amy Bass is professor of sport studies and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville University. Bass is the author of ONE GOAL: A COACH, A TEAM, AND THE GAME THAT BROUGHT A DIVDED TOWN TOGETHER, among other titles. In 2012, she won an Emmy for her work with NBC Olympic Sports on the London Olympic Games.
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