Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America

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Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America (eBook) Pub. Date: 10/13/2009 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
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Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America (Reprint) Pub. Date: 10/16/2007 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
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Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America Pub. Date: 9/5/2006 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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Overview

A Home on the Field is about faith, loyalty, and trust. It is a parable in the tradition of Stand and Deliver and Hoosiers—a story of one team and their accidental coach who became certain heroes to the whole community.

For the past ten years, Siler City, North Carolina, has been at the front lines of immigration in the interior portion of the United States. Like a number of small Southern towns, workers come from traditional Latino enclaves across the United States, as well as from Latin American countries, to work in what is considered the home of industrial-scale poultry processing. At enormous risk, these people have come with the hope of a better life and a chance to realize their portion of the American Dream.

But it isn't always easy. Assimilation into the South is fraught with struggles, and in no place is this more poignant than in the schools. When Paul Cuadros packed his bags and moved south to study the impact of the burgeoning Latino community, he encountered a culture clash between the long-time residents and the newcomers that eventually boiled over into an anti-immigrant rally featuring former Klansman David Duke.

It became Paul's goal to show the growing numbers of Latino youth that their lives could be more than the cutting line at the poultry plants, that finishing high school and heading to college could be a reality. He needed to find something that the boys could commit to passionately, knowing that devotion to something bigger than them would be the key to helping the boys find where they fit in the world. The answer was soccer.

But Siler City, like so many other small rural communities, was a football town, and long-time residents saw soccer as a foreign sport and yet another accommodation to the newcomers. After an uphill battle, the Jets soccer team at Jordan-Matthews High School was born. Suffering setbacks and heartbreak, the majority Latino team, in only three seasons and against all odds, emerged poised to win the state championship.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061120282
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 10/16/2007
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 265,616
Lexile: 940L (what's this?)
Product dimensions: 5.46 (w) x 10.86 (h) x 0.78 (d)

Meet the Author

Paul Cuadros's family moved to the United States from Peru in 1960. An award-winning investigative reporter, he has written for Time magazine and Salon.com, among others. In 1999 Cuadros won an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to write about the impact of the large numbers of Latino poultry workers in rural towns in the South. He moved to Pittsboro, North Carolina, to conduct his research and stayed on to document the growing Latino community in the Southeast.

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Anonymous

Posted December 17, 2006

A great soccer book, not necessarily about soccer

I recently had a chance to interview author Paul Cuadros for my soccer blog and if you're interested, you can listen to the podcast at the Triangle Soccer Fanatics website. A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America, is the new book from investigative reporter Paul Cuadros. Cuadros set out to write a book about how immigration to the interior states of the midwest and southest United States was changing the face of America. His investigation took him to Siler City, North Carolina to look into how the food processing industry in central North Carolina was causing a mass of immigration to the small towns of the Piedmont and what impact it was having on the area. Cuadros found, in Siler City, a town struggling to deal with the immigration whose frustration peaked in a now infamous Ku Klux Klan rally headed by David Duke. Among the backdrop of this tumultous situation, Cuadros found himself championing the creation of a soccer team at Jordan Matthews High School to serve as a focal point for the young hispanic boys of the region to have something to look forward to and entice them to stay in school, rather than dropping out and working in the local chicken plant. After years of struggle, Cuadros suceeded and within three short years, against tremendous odds, Cuadros coached JMHS to the State Championships, where they won the title against Lejeune HS at SAS Soccer Park here in Cary. Cuadros' book recounts the backstory, the creation of the team, and inspiring story of the young men involved in the JMHS soccer program. The story raises some very interesting points related to immigration in the United States and puts a human face on lots of the problems that are facing the US today. On several occasions, I could not decide whether I should be shocked and appalled that some of the things Cuadros was describing were happening right here, a short drive from Triangle. At other times, I was struck by how the behavior reminded me of some of the things I saw growing up in a small town in South Carolina. I really enjoyed learning the story of Los Jets but one thing really bothered me about this book. It is written in first person and I often felt that Cuadros' description of his role in championing the cause of soccer at JMHS was self-aggrandizing. While I'm sure the reporter never meant to become part of his story, the fact is he played an integral role in the events as they unfolded and then when he was called upon to tell the story from his own point of view, I found the situation awkward. I picked up this book looking to read a story about some dynamic young latino kids...and that story is definitely here...but I also found myself distracted by the fact that much of the story is about how Paul Cuadros helped change the little community of Siler City. I might have enjoyed this book even more had it been told in third person and I had come in to the book expecting to learn as much about the coach's endeavor as I was expecting to learn about the soccer players'. But that minor point aside, A Home on the Field is an interesting exploration of race relations and immigration right here in our local area set within the framework of a soccer tale.
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Anonymous

Posted October 31, 2006

Excellent soccer story

Cuadros has written an interesting account of the rise of a high school soccer team, consisting primarily of hispanic players trying to assimilate in a Southern town in the United States. Interspersed throughout this sports story is Cuadros' view of the immigration issue. The immigration side is informative but also 'preachy' at times. The story of the soccer team is the best part of the book.
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