A Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America
A Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America
Click for a closer view

Paul Cuadros
List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $6.70
You Save: $7.25 (52%)

Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days


Product Details

  • Author: Paul Cuadros
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Dewey Decimal Number: 796
  • EAN: 9780061120282
  • ISBN: 0061120286
  • Label: Harper Paperbacks
  • Language: English
  • Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks
  • Number of Items: 1
  • Number of Pages: 320
  • Product Group: Book
  • Publication Date: 2007-10-01
  • Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
  • Release Date: 2007-10-16
  • Studio: Harper Paperbacks
  • Title: A Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America
Avg Customer Rating: 3 stars

Product Description:

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.



Customer Reviews


5 stars Excellent and inspirational
Remarkable and well-written story of Latino high school students who win the North Carolina state soccer championship. Let me underscore that it's good sports writing, as well as reasonable social analysis. The author is both the coach of the team and a magazine reporter. White supremacists are sure not to like this book, as klansman David Duke himself denounced these kids. The story of "Los Jets" will win the hearts of all real Americans, just as they won the struggle against racism and poverty.


1 stars a lot of political bombast
Portions of the story, the lives of the students, their family's struggles, the choices they make in life, are meaningful and entertaining. A soccer enthusiast would probably enjoy the descriptions of the games, which are well written. The author starts out looking for discrimination and racism and finds it. He has an exaggerated chip on his shoulder, and his gratuitous bashing of business interests, political opponents with differing views on immigration matters, school administrators, opposing teams, turns a potentially great story of demographic change in rural North Carolina into a cheap and dull political tract.


If the page does not return any products or product details please click here or refresh the page.
If only page numbers are returned on the page please choose a sub category (left side of this message).
 
Return to Web-Helper.net
Copyright 1998-2004 Web-Helper.net, All Rights Reserved