Belief in grassroots program is sprouting out of Delco
DARBY >> When you’re about 50 feet away, you spot the first rock. Once the first one makes its presence known, a dozen others materialize against the infield dirt.
These aren’t pebbles — they look more like buried bounders, only a small, jagged portion peeking through the hard earth at McCreesh Playground in Southwest Philly. Beyond the former softball infield lies unkempt grass that hides its own ankle-busting horrors. Ringing the playground are light stanchions whose state of operation is an unknown on most days.
“It’s the crucible,” first-team coach Neewillie Saie says with pride over the buzzing of the trollies on Kingsessing Avenue a block away.
Around those obstacles, Junior Lone Star has forged a team like few others in the nation. In the decade-plus since it sprouted from the earth faster than even those unruly grasses its players romp through for practice, the club has become a unique standard-bearer of the culture that fostered its growth.
Wednesday, the club takes a new step, playing in the U.S. Open Cup for the first time when it visits Ocean City Nor’easters in the first round of the 104th edition of the competition.
Junior Lone Star has come close before, two years ago losing by one goal in its final qualification match. Founded in 2001, the club has succeeded in many competitions — this spring, it reached the final of the U.S. Amateur Soccer Association Cup Region I, to be played in June with a national finals berth on the line. The club fields teams in the National Premier Soccer League’s Keystone Conference and the Philadelphia Premier Soccer League, the latter of which hosts a senior team and the Under-23s, plus an Under-19 developing players with college aspirations.
Junior Lone Star drew wide acclaim last summer with the Philadelphia Union’s signing of Derrick Jones, a Ghanaian-born midfielder plucked from the youth ranks to join the Union’s youth academy on the way to a Homegrown deal.
Those accomplishments on the local level, for a self-supported club that relies overwhelmingly on volunteers, have Junior Lone Star hungry to expose its reputation to the national spotlight.
“Soccer like any other business, when it gets big, we tend to forget the grassroots,” Saie said at a U-19 practice session at Penn Wood Middle School. “Right now, the MLS is flourishing a little more, so the grassroots efforts have gone away because it’s a big-business model. But we’re hoping that a team like ours that is coming literally from the slums and going on the big stage, we get a couple of victories there, we can be that Cinderella story and say that soccer started from the grassroots.”
Wednesday’s game solidifies Junior Lone Star’s position in a long lineage of cultural influence in soccer. For decades, as efforts at professionalizing American soccer floundered, the game’s spirit was nurtured by successive waves of immigrants who carried their own soccer dialects to the States. From the Brooklyn Italians to Greek American AA to Maccabi Los Angeles — and Philadelphia’s entries, the Ukrainian Nationals and German Hungarians — soccer survived as the purview of passionate new arrivals.
Junior Lone Star’s backbone is comprised of players from Liberia. The club crest derives from the Liberian flag, and the Liberian national team is known as the Lone Stars. In recent years, the reach has extended, though most players hail from East African nations like Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea that have been touched by national strife and civil unrest. (“We call it the United Nations,” jokes Bobby Ali, a co-founder of the club who has transitioned from leading the first team to the Under-23s.)
The more salient representation is of the refugee community in Southwest Philly and southeastern Delco, where vibrant pockets of new arrivals live. Many have been with Lone Star for years, progressing from the youth team to become wellrounded adults who play after work and bring their young families.
“It’s just an opportunity to represent the refugee community and give them something to smile about,” Saie said. “Most news we get from Southwest Philly and West Philly is bad news usually. But to have a team that represents the entire community to go as far as being recognized nationally in the U.S. Open Cup, it means a lot. …
“The boys know they’re playing something more than soccer. They’re representing the immigrant community.”
Some Lone Stars have played at higher levels. Striker Anthony Allison, an Overbrook High and Wilmington University grad, played professionally in Sweden. Zoncher Dennis, a Strath Haven All-Delco who attended Mount St. Mary’s, is a former Nor’easter. Many played collegiately, and having an avenue to continue in the game is a privilege of which they are acutely aware.
“Coach Bobby looks at it as some kind of therapy,” said defender Mitchell Torh, a co-captain and Immaculata grad. “You go to work, you come back and after college, it’s just something else to do, something to look up to. When you’re stressed out, this is the place to go. It’s more than a game to us older guys and it’s more than a game to these new kids coming up.”
None of the Lone Stars are running from the underdog label Wednesday. They embrace it every session at McCreesh — if you can extract beautiful soccer there, you can do amazing things on a proper pitch.
“When you’re going to a game and you’re the underdog, everybody knows that, it makes you want to work more,” said forward Bill Walleekendeh, a Chester native who compiled a record-setting career at PSU-Brandywine. “It makes you want to prove everybody wrong that you can do better. Going into a game as the underdog, it makes us play even better.”
Junior Lone Star is more than just the teams it fields. The spirited McCreesh sessions draw neighbors for impromptu community gatherings, akin to home games at Bonner & Prendergast. Ali hosts team functions at his home, offering youth players an alternative to the ubiquitous trouble surrounding them.
The players carry that responsibility into Wednesday’s momentous tie. Ocean City is an amateur side in the fourth-tier Premier Developmental League, comprised of college players sharpening skills during the summer and boasting a reputation for upsetting pro teams.
With pro outfits entering the Open Cup’s second round and MLS sides in the third, Junior Lone Star knows what could lie ahead. And they aren’t shy about embracing the challenge.
“It’s going to mean something amazing,” Torh said. “We believe. Yes, we are underdogs, but as pound-for-pound players, we strongly believe we have some serious talent around here. … We do have something to spark an upset. We believe that.”
“We’re going to tell the boys: This is what soccer is supposed to be,” Saie said. “You do it because you love the sport, but this is a reward. If you come out there and beat these guys on their own pitch, it’s going to be glorious.”