You can immerse yourself in all the data produced by the Census Bureau. But if you want a handy snapshot of America, there’s also the Alexandria Avalanche.
The Avalanche are a fit-for-Disney bunch of mostly 10-year-olds who play in the Alexandria Youth Soccer League. In a shotgun marriage arranged by the wife of a former colleague whose son is on the team, I wound up as the coach.
“Great,” said the wife when her mild guilt-tripping succeeded after the actual coach had split town. “The season starts Saturday, and you have a practice this afternoon at 4:30 at Barrett Elementary.”
Improbably, the team went from abject losers, winless the previous season, to the Bad News Bears in shorts and crimson shirts. Having somehow embraced the notion of passing the ball, they won the league championship the past two seasons, capping the latest with a made-for-Nickelodeon overtime win over a team of mostly 12-year-olds.
All along, I’ve felt like Kofi Annan overseeing a mini-United Nations. Nine of the players are from Central and South America, two come by way of Africa and one from Russia. Then there’s our top defensive player, a pint-size half-Pakistani with a tendency to oversleep on weekend game mornings.
We have a Salvadoran fullback, Oscar Lazo, who is one of several 12-year-olds added this season because of a mandated sprinkling of kids born in 1989 among various rosters. His mom is severely disabled, scraping by in part by selling tacos on the street. He lives in a tiny apartment with his mom and an older brother and had never played organized sports. He struggles in school because of spotty English skills, but as the weeks progressed, he was a portrait of increasing self-esteem as his play improved markedly.
Our whirling-dervish halfback, Mario Bonilla, a wonderfully skilled, fearless tyke with a Julia Roberts smile, was born here after his mom, Maria, arrived from El Salvador with virtually nothing in the 1980s during her country’s civil war. She doesn’t know what happened to Mario’s father and works as a day-care center teacher.
“I am very happy I came here because our country is so hard,” she said.
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Cael Ekpata, a fleet-footed halfback and forward with a wild streak that can test referees, came from Benin in West Africa 18 months ago. He spoke French, no English. He’s living with his father and his father’s wife, who was raised on a farm 70 miles east of Columbus, Ohio. The biracial couple, Eloi and Heather, met when Eloi, a civil engineer, was in college here, and Heather, a schoolteacher, was working at a bookshop. They got married, and Eloi only later told her he had a child back home. His own father arranged Cael’s move from Benin, and Heather has taken care of the child as if he were hers.
Heather says that Cael, whose English is pretty good now, had a tough time adjusting to “not having a lot of people around. In Africa, you live with lots of others. And while I don’t really like his being sucked into so much TV and commercialism, he loves America and sees himself as an American.”
Jamal Stone, the team’s shortest member and defensive star, is the half-Pakistani. His mom, Yasmin, is a conservator at the Library of Congress and the child of a retired diplomat who spent years in Spain, Nepal and Sweden. She met his dad, Bob, a San Antonio native and a Spanish teacher, at the U.S. Naval Academy, when they attended college in New York City.
Jamal spent his first 18 months in Pakistan and loves going back on vacation, even if, said Bob, “his image of the place is of somewhere he can get interesting food and bootlegged video games for a buck.”
John Weyrich, our all-purpose and indomitable halfback-forward, has a mop of blond hair and resembles a stand-in for Timmy on the old “Lassie” series. He was living with a younger brother in a Siberian orphanage when Linda and John Weyrich, who had met in a Falls Church, Va., church and then married, decided to adopt. Linda has a 22-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.
They arrived at Dulles Airport here on Dec. 31, 1997, with John, who at home still goes by his Russian nickname, Ilya, and brother Thomas, or Chenya. The boys had been in the orphanage for more than two years but assimilated quickly after initial shocks, like going to a food warehouse.
“They had never even been to a grocery,” Linda said. “They just squealed with delight. It made you want to cry.”
Learning English was hard, but John, an American Airlines pilot, and Linda picked up enough Russian to help, phrases like, “don’t pick on your brother” and “it’s time for bed.” In a few years, they plan to take the boys back to Russia to see what they left behind.
“When Ilya gets mad, he says he wants to go back to Russia and that things were better there,” Linda said. “I tell him that I don’t really think so and, when he’s an adult, he can do what he wants. As Christians, we believe these boys have been placed in our family for a reason.”
Jean Paul Vergra is a tank of a fullback with an improbable self-image of lithe, speedy forward. But every time a game gets out of hand, and I put him up front, he becomes a hulking magnet for the ball and scores.
Patricia and Rafael, his parents, are from Colombia. They were musicians who lived well but left everything behind in 1985 and came here to join relatives, beating a key immigration deadline by one day. They spent their first months in an efficiency apartment without furniture. “Zero,” Patricia said. “We never told our parents how we were living.”
Rafael had to start anew, singing in small restaurants after having played tourist hotels in Colombia. Patricia taught acoustic guitar. “It was a very difficult transition,” she said. “In Colombia, family comes first, and people work 9 to 5, period. No overtime, working on weekends or in the evenings. But everybody here was working. People have hamburgers in their car.”
Spanish is spoken at home, but Jean Paul responds in English. “He’s a completely American kid,” his mother said. “The clothes he likes, how he acts with friends is all American. But I am happy to say he is also a gentleman. He knows how to sit at the table and eat with people.”
Patricia runs a day-care center in her home and is music director at her parish. Rafael worked two jobs, as transportation director at one hotel and engineer at another, and now he helps run a valet parking service.
“It has been very hard for us,” Patricia said. “But we are happy with what we have and the education the kids [ages 21, 14 and 11] have.”
Our center forward, Tayo Lawal, has never been to Nigeria, home of his parents, Stephanie and Wale. The two came from different social classes, and she’s Christian and he’s Muslim, but they fell in love while studying in England. Wale, my coaching aide-de-camp, is a network engineer. She worked for a bank and is now a full-time mom, eternally grateful to be in America, “where you can be what you want to be.”
Our stellar right wing, Antony Rivera, is the son of Edgar, who came from El Salvador with nothing and first worked as a busboy, then waiter. A moving company he ran went bust, and Edgar turned to community organizing work, where he met Melanie, who was born and raised in America.
Antony, whose biological mom left the scene when he was quite young, was born here, but Spanish is his first language, and his self-image is Latino. Because Edgar and Melanie are active in immigrants’ rights matters, he has a distinct political consciousness and discerns a greater sense of community when he visits El Salvador. “Kids are out after dark, playing, having fun,” his mom said. “There is a richness there that is not material.”
Close to the immigrant community, Melanie sees frictions and divisions, notably between blacks and Hispanics. She also sees the upsides of immigration, noting that even many undocumented workers have Social Security numbers and pay taxes.
The Avalanche parents strike me as fiercely devoted to their children’s betterment. Sandra Hidalgo, who came from El Salvador, once yanked son Ronald, the team’s heart and soul of a left wing with a cannon for a left foot, at halftime for extra tutoring. The kid is sweet, talented, disciplined and grounded.
He was there when we had our championship barbecue a few Sundays ago. Hot dogs and burgers on a grill, the kids playing a raucous pickup game of soccer, parents from very different worlds chatting at nearby picnic tables–and nobody giving a damn where anybody was from.
All in all, quite a snapshot.