He took his chance like a cool-headed vet. He might have been marginally offside, but few in Cascadia are going to quibble. Where he looked tentative and unsure of himself over the past month, on Wednesday night he was more decisive, and grew into the game. Bwana proved his coach right, and not just by scoring the winner. Maybe Bwana is the type of player who raises his game for the grandest occasions-such as the nationally televised contest between the last two MLS champs in a game Seattle was expected to lose badly. That was the rookie’s best game of the year to date, “and it wasn’t too big for him,” Schmetzer said in a phone interview on Wednesday morning. Asked about Bwana’s waning confidence, and his place in the depth chart, Schmetzer harkened back to his performance against Chivas in the first leg of their Champions League quarterfinal. His coach, though, had a good feeling about Wednesday night. Even in an attack in desperate need of a player with Bwana’s specific skill set, he appeared to be getting edged out of the rotation.Īgain, his situation looked tenuous. The last few weeks, though, he had fallen out of favor. The 18-year-old scored in each of Seattle’s first two preseason matches, and started three of the first four regular season games. Nor has Bwana’s first season with the Sounders been entirely on a smooth, upward trajectory. “There were a couple of times when I had him,” one of his club coaches once told me, “where if he makes the wrong decision, goes down the wrong path, hangs out with the wrong crowd and decides not to show up, everything he aspires for could have been lost.” So many people in his situation fail to make it. His talent was always obvious, but even up until recently, he walked a fine line, without much of a safety net if ever he were to fall. He would show up late to out-of-town club soccer tournaments, and only barely met academic requirements to play at the University of Washington-he was declared NCAA eligible mere weeks before the Huskies opened training camp his freshman year. Overwhelmed, and sometimes daydreaming about the freedom of Kakuma, where life was at least simple even if it was hard, Bwana bucked against authority. At school, it took him two whole months just to figure how to open his locker. As the eldest son of an immigrant mother scrambling just to get by, Handwalla was the one in charge of setting up rent and utility payments. The bus schedule was a confounding blur of numbers and names. Everything in the United States was new and bewildering. Though his family was grateful to be resettled in the United States in 2010 after six years at Kakuma, in Kenya, departing the refugee camp meant leaving friends and family behind. Game ball goes to for his first MLS goal and the game-winner! ? /xa8twVpFJM His is a story of struggle and sacrifice, a story of setbacks punctured by the occasional cathartic breakthrough. To edit Bwana’s journey down only to the highlights, however, would miss part of what made Wednesday night so special. Juxtapose a few images of a six-year-old Handwalla playing soccer barefoot on the red dirt of the Kakuma refugee camp with the clip of coach Brian Schmetzer awarding him the game ball in the visiting locker room at BMO Field, and the script writes itself.
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