Body language: Gardner High boys soccer creates T-shirt promoting team's diversity

GARDNER — It started, like so many good ideas, as an impromptu conversation during the Gardner High boys soccer team’s end-of-the-season awards banquet last year.

Surrounded by ethnic dishes from around the world, Gardner High athletic director and boys head soccer coach Dan Forte and then-junior defenseman Dhruv Patel wondered aloud how the Wildcats could best promote the soccer program’s multicultural identity.

“I have the best attendance at my banquets because the food is the best,” Forte said. “(The idea) was almost born from banquet time. That’s where we started thinking about that stuff.”

Perhaps dipping into the multiple potluck-style dinner entrees prompted thoughts about the United States as a melting pot where cultural differences of arriving immigrants meld to create a stronger American society.

How could the Wildcats visibly depict that their team — featuring players from Gardner but also Brazil, El Salvador, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Mexico, and Uruguay — was stronger because of its diverse backgrounds and experiences?

The creation of the Gardner boys soccer team's warm-up T-shirt

Though they both deflect credit for the idea to the other, Forte and Patel eventually came to the same conclusion: why not create a T-shirt which featured the name of the game they love written out in their native languages?

“Everyone thought it was a great idea because we wanted to let people know that we have all the different types of people from different cultures and we support all of them and we need it on the team,” Patel said. “We’re proud because it’s nice to have someone come from a different culture or a different background and they’re on the team and they’re putting in the work. People should know that it’s not just Americans playing soccer or Hispanics or Spanish people, but we have all different types of people playing soccer.”

The gray T-shirt, which Gardner has worn during pregame warmups throughout the season, features the Wildcats mascot emblazoned on the front, while on the back the word soccer is written, in descending order, in Spanish, Gujarati, Portuguese, Arabic and English.

“It shows that soccer can involve everyone from every country. It doesn’t have barriers,” senior striker Elvis Camejo said.

Yet there was one obstacle which Patel, Camejo and their international teammates had to overcome individually and collectively.

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Breaking down the language barrier

Patel’s family moved to Gardner from Gujarat, India when the senior defensive back was 9 or 10 years old. Born in the United States, Camejo and his mother moved to Montevideo, Uruguay when he was an infant but they returned to the Chair City when the senior striker was in middle school.

Fabio Carvalho, the Wildcats’ starting right back, is Brazilian. Henry Aguilar, a junior who scored the game-winning goal in double overtime to advance the Wildcats into the Division 5 state semifinals, is Guatemalan. Kerolos Soliman, a sophomore who has split time with the Gardner junior varsity and varsity teams, emigrated with his family from Alexandria, Egypt when he was 8 years old.

At the time of their arrival in Gardner, many of them could not speak English.

“I couldn’t speak English at all. I didn’t even know the alphabet or anything, so I had to learn and I had no one in my school that spoke my language so it was really hard for me,” said Patel, who still speaks his native language, Gujarati, every day at home but is also fluent in Hindi and English. “It was really hard. I had my cousin (here), so I was just trying to learn from them. I was trying to learn common stuff like ‘how are you?’ I got my confidence up after I started going to school and making friends. It was hard in the beginning but they were nice to me. I didn’t get bullied or anything. They knew where I came from and so they were helping me out.”

As he had only ever spoken Arabic in his native Egypt, bullying was a concern of Soliman’s when he started school in Gardner.

“I was really afraid that I would get made fun of or something like that, but when I came here everybody was nice to me,” he said. “It took me like three years to learn English. All the teachers, all my teammates and all of my coaches helped me.”

It was a similar experience for Carvalho, who is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, but is quickly picking up the English language, too.

“It was kind of hard in the beginning but with the friends that I was knowing here, they helped me a lot,” he said. “We always talk about how it’s crazy that everybody speaks another language but we’re together and playing well as a team.”

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As they strove to find their place in a new country and a new culture, the sport of soccer enabled them to establish roots and network within their new community.

“When I came here and I didn’t know English. I made friends because of soccer just because we share the same passion,” Camejo said. “That’s all we tried to share with (the T-shirt). We’re a family. No matter what language you speak or where you come from, we’ll take you in.”

Communicating on the field

Trevor Boudreau, a midfielder and team captain who grew up in Gardner, said though English is most commonly spoken by the players during games, there are no language barriers on or off the field.

“When coach brought it up (the idea for the shirt) I thought it was a good idea because it shows that we’re all one and we’re all unified,” he said, “so it’s like even if there is a language barrier we’re still a team on the field. It really doesn’t matter what language we speak, we all speak soccer.”

Is there a universal soccer language? Boudreau said non-verbal communication helps the Wildcats overcome any lingering language barriers.

“Any time I’m explaining something I try to break it down. I’ll say, ‘to my feet,’ and point. Hand signals help,” he said. “If we put our hand down it means to pass to our feet, if we put our hand in the air we want a through ball so we can run on to it, so pretty much everyone knows what we’re talking about at that point. So, you just scream and put your hand up and they know.”

There are even one or two unique styles of communication employed by the Wildcats.

“We joke about that a lot. Fabio whistles. He whistles. It’s what he does. I’ve got a couple of kids that will give you a ‘yo, yo, yo,’ and it’s a lot of hand signals,”Forte said. “Everyone knows to feet, through ball, corner, and cross and we have varying levels of understanding of those languages, too.”

Asked if he has added any of his teammates’ vocabulary to his own, Boudreau said, “golazo.”

“That’s really about it. We scream it after we score,” said the senior, who admitted he assumed but wasn’t positive of the definition for the Spanish word for an impressive or spectacular goal in soccer. “I think so. I don’t know. They just all yell it, so I yell it, too.”

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With so many cultures represented on the roster, Forte said he hasn’t found it necessary to limit the influences which guide the Wildcats’ style of play.

“We don’t really conform to one system or another when we’re kind of developing what we’re going to do for the year or week to week,” he said. “When we game plan specifically we have people that have played in some very advanced systems and we have some that have played in some fairly standard systems.

“They all watch soccer at home and so that is a fun little addition for us where they all follow and see some pretty high-level stuff,” Forte continued. “This year we’re running a very advanced system because we have the kids to do it and it wasn’t news to any of them. A lot of them picked it up almost right away. On the varsity level, the adoption time was 30 minutes and we were off and running it and perfecting it right way.”

The Wildcats have a unique blend of players who grew up playing youth or travel league soccer locally in Gardner along with others who have played club soccer since they were as young as 6 years old.

The results of the melding of the Wildcats' diverse cultures, playing styles and abilities speak for themselves. A 16-3-2 record, including 10 wins at home, a share of the Mid-Wach D League title with Tahanto, the CMADA Class C championship and a Division 5 state semifinals appearance which capped of the longest tournament run in program history.

Though the Wildcats fell a whisker short of their ultimate goal of winning a state championship, Camejo said they will always be able to look back at the 2022 season as a unique time in their lives.

“Sometimes you stop and look at how many people you have around from different cultures, a different story of where they come from, but they share the same passion and share the same goal,” he said. “We all look forward to winning and to supporting each other.

“That makes you feel like you’re home.”

This article originally appeared on Gardner News: High school boys soccer: Gardner promotes team diversity with T-shirt