VI soccer puts best foot forward

BY SPENCER CAMPBELL
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER

BRISTOL, Va. – They came from as far away as Washington, D.C., to practice on the shortened pitch. It begins stiff and awkward. But they’re just high schoolers, and they’re nervous. If they impress the man standing just off the field, they just could earn a spot, a scholarship, on the new team he’s building.

Robert Ssejjemba – arms crossed against his chest, a soccer ball at his feet – scrutinizes from the sideline. The tighter field dimensions he’s constructed at Sugar Hollow Park heightens the intensity. Rocket shots drive into unsuspecting stomachs, hard-charging digs lead to unsightly tumbles.

Ssejjemba tries to remain objective. He shouts for spacing when the players bunch, applauds when a keeper punches away a sure goal. But the former forward loves his offense.

When Curtis Clatworthy, a Virginia High senior, blasts the ball past a diving goalkeeper, Ssejjemba bellows: “Finish. Yes. Punish him!”

He just can’t help himself. Soccer is more than just a game to the Uganda native. When he first met war at the age of six, soccer silenced it. When he couldn’t afford shoes, well, he didn’t need shoes to kick a soccer ball. Later, it pulled him from his war-torn homeland and took him to America.

“All I ever knew was soccer,” Ssejjemba said. “It’s amazing, growing up in an environment that has all that hardship and poverty, God puts a seed in you that offers you hope. It was soccer that offered me hope.”

Now it’s Ssejjemba’s turn to offer hope, this time to the school that once delivered him.

In 2007, VI eliminated its men’s and women’s soccer programs. The college was in financial peril, on the verge of shuttering its doors. It quickly severed expensive programs, like soccer, which relied on costly international players on high-dollar scholarships.

Ssejjemba left Uganda for Bristol, Va., in 2000 as part of the Cobras’ first-ever recruiting class. In the program’s first season, Ssejjemba led VI to the NAIA national championship. Now he must start over all over again.

“I started the program as a player,” Ssejjemba said. “I guess I’m doing it again as a coach.”

Guns

Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1980, Ssejjemba missed the reign of Idi Amin, and his 300,000 political slayings, by a year. But he saw the others.

There was Milton Obote and his human-rights violations. In 1986, Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Army captured Kampala in a coup. And, boy, the guns they brought with them.

On street corners: guns. In passing trucks: guns. Everywhere: guns. The Ssejjembas refused to leave their home, lest one of their nine children meet the unforgiving end of a rifle.

Museveni’s reign installed peace in Kampala, if not Uganda. The guns? Well, they never left. And in the north, rebels continued to wage war against the government.

Ssejjemba, however, built his own vacuum. From morning into night, the boy ran barefoot across Ugandan soccer fields.

His country’s plight suddenly seemed a million miles away. A few tattered clothes: Play soccer. Not alot to eat: Soccer. No shoes for soccer: Who gives?

“I would play soccer all day,” Ssejjemba said. “Everything stopped. I stopped seeing the pain and the suffering around me.”

But the country’s rebellion never stopped.

In Kampala, Ssejjemba and his family crowded around newspapers to read the horrors leveled by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. From base camps in southern Sudan, the LRA terrorized northern Uganda, carving away the lips, breasts and ears of non-supporters.

Generations of children – 66,000, according to catholic.org – were kidnapped by LRA forces. Once seized, the children were given guns and forced to kill. Young girls were bartered to Sudanese arms dealers for weapons, some were serially raped.

For their own protection, Museveni herded northern Ugandans into concentration camps. In the cramped conditions, HIV swept the population like wildfire.
Ssejjemba kept to soccer, and it paid dividends.

First came the new soccer cleats at age 12. Kampala had no public high schools, so it was a soccer scholarship that paid his way.

At 17, the Uganda national team came calling. In stadiums filled with 150,000 people, just like the ones his father used to take him to, Ssejjemba scored two goals in six games.

In 2000, there came a plane ticket. To college. In America!

But after 20 years of purposely dodging the savagery of his country, he would never forget it.

“All those things helped shape my character,” Ssejjemba said. “It’s part of my story. It’s easy to say, ‘I wouldn’t want to be raised in such an environment.’ But I just look at that as part of my story.”

Pet lions

In his first year at VI, Ssejjemba took a seat next to an American woman in the college’s dining hall. She immediately noticed his African accent and asked: “Do you put clothes on back home? Clothes like this?”

“I didn’t get mad at all,” Ssejjemba said. “I felt sorry for her because she was ignorant of the outside world. … So many people I notice think that in Africa you have a big lion for a pet.”

The movies depicted the United States as a sprawl of metropolitan skyscrapers. He expected New York but got Bristol, Va.

“But it was America,” Ssejjemba says. “It was still America.”

Being one of nine siblings, Ssejjemba was alone for the first time. And the pressure. Not only to play well, but grades had to maintained to keep his scholarship.

But the school quickly opened it arms to the Uganda native. Professors met him after classes for extra tutorials and Reda Green, head of international students, became an adoptive mother.

He met Katie Quick on the first day of classes. Her family became his own and he married her in 2002.

Soccer never was much of a struggle at VI. Twice Ssejjemba led them to the NAIA National Tournament and twice more was named to the all-american team.

His success bred attention from other schools, like Carson-Newman. But Ssejjemba wouldn’t leave VI.

“I was home,” he said.

Payback

The United Soccer League championship game, 2007.

Playing for the Charlotte Eagles, Ssejjemba followed a wandering ball toward the end-line, running at full speed. He prepared to cross, but his cleat caught in the artificial turf.

The momentum pushed his knee to the right, his body left, but his cleat didn’t budge. Ssejjemba felt his ACL snap and crumpled to the turf.

“Ah, that’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” Ssejjemba said. “Mentally I was prepared. For a year, I was saying this is my last year. This is it. This is it.”

That same year, VI cut its soccer programs. A year later, after heavy fundraising, the school was ready to give soccer another go.

The new programs, however, would not be built in the image of their predecessor’s.

The school is still on thin ice, having had its Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accreditation placed on probation due to the school’s financial crisis. As a result, the new teams will be thrifty with the scholarships they hand out.

“We just want them to recruit locally,” VI athletic director Chris Holt said. “We want that to be where they begin and not that they can’t expand out from that regionally and nationally, and even internationally, but we want to begin at home with our recruiting.”

The team’s first recruit, however, was both international and homegrown.

After graduating from VI in 2004, Ssejjemba was the MVP of the USL in 2006 playing for the Richmond Kickers. He toiled briefly with D.C. United, sharing a room with Freddie Adu, but by 2007 he was already looking toward coaching.

“I knew what was going on with the school with the financial issues, which broke my heart,” Ssejjemba said. “I felt bringing back soccer here was that opportunity for me to be a part of this drive to bring back not only soccer, but the school to where it should be.”

But the team’s resurrection has met with its fair share of doubters, including former women’s coach, Aly Joslin.

“It’s strange how the financial issues – no way we can do it and then it’s there again,” Joslin said from Florida in a telephone interview. “I got text messages all day [that said] ‘What are they doing?’ All my friends down here were kind of laughing at it.”

The athletic department has already incurred its first stumbling block. Diana Niland, a former head coach at Troy University, was hired to bring the women’s team back in 2009.

Holt announced earlier this month that women’s soccer will not be returning as planned. Niland was unable to secure enough recruits to satisfy the department. VI will try again in 2010.

This setback, however, hardly concerns Gil Graham, president of the Bristol Soccer Association. He’s just glad to have the Cobras back.

“VI was always very active in the Bristol soccer program as referees, coaches and mentors,” Graham said. “Plus, it’s great to have an intercity rivalry [between King College and VI]. It used to really get the kids out.”

Ssejjemba concedes that putting a team together has been more exhausting than he imagined. When hired, he thought he’d have half of his 20-man team signed by now.
Midway through April, the Cobras had signed six players.

Ssejjemba, though, is unshakable. He says that 30 other players are interested, only a step or two from committing. Whatever pitfalls his new program encounters, he’s been through worse – much worse – and soccer was always there for him on the other side.

Now, for VI soccer, it’s time for Ssejjemba to return the favor.

scampbell@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2543