'I looked into it and wrote several hundred words about it for CNN and it kinda went viral,' says Bass. Many of her pieces for CNN are about soccer and, when an old friend from Bates posted about the Lewiston soccer championship on Facebook, Bass was intrigued. She is the sister of Elissa Bass, a former reporter and editor at The Day.Īmy has a Lewiston connection - she went to Bates College there, graduating in 1992. In 2015, the Blue Devils won their first-ever state championship.īass, a Massachusetts native, has authored three previous books, teaches history at the College of New Rochelle and has written about sports and politics for Slate, and CNN Opinion. Though there was jostling over who made the team at the expense of other players, the team - and skill level - ultimately started to nurture integrative relationships and trust across the entire town. When a few of the young athletes asked to try out, McGraw was happy to have them.

He'd noticed that, unsettled and lost in their new home, beset by poverty and isolation, the Somali kids were filling the community's parks, playing an endless succession of impromptu soccer games. Improbably and slowly, in ebb and flow fashion, a sense of coexistence and respect evolved, not least because a number of Somali youth joined the Lewiston High Blue Devils soccer team under coach Mike McGraw. history - and, not surprisingly, an electric atmosphere of racial tension developed. The per capita demographics were unprecedented in U.S. Starting in 2001 and over several years, almost 7,000 refugees, mostly Somalis, relocated to Lewiston.

'One Goal' is about the high school soccer program in Lewiston, Maine - a predominately white mill town of about 36,000 with a crumbling economy. That's the context in 'One Goal,' the passionate, wonderfully reported and riveting new book by Amy Bass, who appears Sunday at the Savoy Bookshop & Cafe in Westerly. On the other hand, what if 'Soccer is life!,' as expressed by a high school athlete at a transcendent moment extending far beyond the green-grass parameters of an athletic field, is instead a metaphor for gratitude, acceptance, affirmation and joy in a fashion that unified an entire conflicted community? A Maine high school soccer team united a whole townĪs a bumper sticker or the sort of exultation trotted out by a sports broadcaster trying to manufacture drama, 'Soccer is life!' isn't particularly clever or even memorable.

One goal by amy bass