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Emerge Film Festival to Screen Film About State Champion Lewiston Soccer Team

Susan Sharon
/
MPBN
Abdi Shahariff (from left), Mohamed Abdisalan, Maulid Abdow and Ian Clough.

When the Lewiston High School Blue Devils won the state championship in soccer last fall, it was a victory not only for a team made up of Somali, Kenyan and Congolese players, but for their community.

The players and their coach will be recognized Friday night at the Emerge Film Festival with the screening of a documentary and after-party at the Franco Center in Lewiston.

Titled “One Team,” it could be considered a metaphor of the benefits of integration.

Most Mainers are probably familiar with the story of the Somali refugees who relocated to Lewiston from Atlanta beginning in 2001. With its abandoned factories, lack of diversity and long winters, Lewiston seemed an unlikely choice. But for Somalis there was affordable housing, good schools and a low crime rate.

The resettlement, however, was not without some tension. At one point a pig’s head was tossed into the local mosque, and early on, a white supremacist group threatened to descend on the city after the Lewiston mayor wrote a letter expressing concern that Somalis would exhaust social services.

Instead, a counterprotest and unity rally attended by hundreds of people stole the day. Social services have remained intact and the city has became home to about 6,000 Somalis who have opened shops that now dominate one part of downtown.

A similar transition has also been taking place in the high school.

“And I said, ‘You have to come in and mix in.’ So they came in and mixed in,” says Mike McGraw, who has taught biology and coached soccer in Lewiston for more than 30 years.

As the racial makeup of his team changed, McGraw noticed that Somali and white players on his team would put on their cleats and warm up on separate parts of the field during practice.

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“So, I said, ‘You go over here and you go over here and you up here,’ I think I described it as ‘speckling’ them around,” McGraw says. “I said, ‘See where you are?’ And then I said, ‘This is how it — this is how a team is.’ Kind of chokes me up a bit when I think about it. I said, ‘You have to be like this.’ I said, ‘You have to be like this when you play. You have to be like this in practice. You have to be like this in the hallways. You have to recognize each other.’ And they, they smiled. Because that is exactly what they wanted, but somebody had to tell them to do it. They were not going to do it on their own.”

That was more than six years ago. In the film, McGraw says it was a defining moment for his team, which is now made up primarily of players from African countries. When you go to a Blue Devils soccer match, expect to hear the pregame chants sung in Arabic.

Filmmaker Ian Clough is a former Blue Devil himself who played soccer for McGraw in the early 2000s. He says he originally thought he’d just make a little film about McGraw’s quest for a state championship. The Blue Devils have been runners up multiple times.

“And then it just built from there,” Clough says. “The kids were awesome. They were pretty special and I knew there was kind of a bigger story there then Mike McGraw. Nothing against McGraw.”

Several of the kids on the team came from the same refugee camp in Kenya. Playing soccer, watching professional matches on TV, it’s a big part of their culture. And when Clough first saw them in action, he realized they could be a winning team.

“We played all together and everything. No player was selfish. And we had a lot of good connections in between us so it was going really good,” says Mohammed Abdisalan, one of the 12 players who is graduating this year, on his team’s success.

But the biggest connection for the players? They all say it was the coach.

“Because, he believes in us,” Abdisalan says. “He likes the way we do things and he wants us to do better.”

“My thought was, if whatever they can do on the field together, then they can translate that and take it into their lives, spread that type of camaraderie and get along with each other.”

Friday’s showing of “One Team: The Story of the Lewiston High School Blue Devils” and the after party have been sold out. But a second screening will take place on Sunday at the Community Little Theatre in Auburn.