Every year, thousands of hopeful West African soccer players try to make it to the international stage. Players from Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and many other West African countries travel as far away as Tunisia and France to try out for teams, hoping to get noticed by recruiters. Real success and a spot on a team are hard to come by, however, and many players never make it.
Elhajji says that when he was growing up in Dakar, Senegal, becoming a professional soccer player was every boy’s dream. Soccer was king, and even as teenagers, players he knew traveled to other cities in Senegal to try out for regional leagues. Some even flew as far away as Tunisia and Morocco to play in front of recruiters for European teams. So many hopeful soccer players from West African countries were (and still are) trying to make it on the international stage that Elhajji says he knew that real success would be hard to come by.
But his parents believed he was talented enough to play. When Elhajji turned 16, they bought him a plane ticket to the U.S., where his uncle lived. He remembers thinking that he would walk off the plane and start looking for a soccer field. ”I knew I was going to play soccer. At the time I was that good,” he says.
Things turned out not to be so simple. Elhajji made his high school’s soccer team, but his sparse knowledge of English meant he had to work extra hard to keep his grades up. He struggled to adjust to his new home with his uncle in Indianapolis, Indiana. And then there was the homesickness, for his family and friends, for his favorites foods, and for his close-knit community. “It was weird, I’m not gonna lie,” he says. “Everything was twice as big…I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t know if I really want to live here.’”
Luckily, he loved his high school, where he found a supportive community of friends, and even more he loved playing soccer for the high school team. When his uncle got a job in a nearby city and had to move, the family of Elhajji’s friend and teammate Anthony Long agreed to let him stay at their house. His host family and a busy soccer schedule kept him going.
Now pursuing a degree in sports management and playing soccer for Xavier University’s team, Eljhajji says he’s glad he’s gotten to live his dream in the U.S., even if it’s a slightly different one than he had imagined. He says he’s having a different kind of success and that it has come in the form of an education he never expected to have. After graduation, he hopes to start an organization that collects extra soccer cleats from professional teams and donates them to young players in West Africa. It’s a kind of payback, Elhajji says, he never expected to be able to give.
