Coach Gets It's Not Good Character Analysis

In the chapters “Beatrice and Her Boys,” “Paula,” and “‘Coach Says It’s Not Good,’” from Warren St. John’s novel Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make A Difference, St. John shares the stories of three families from different countries and their immigration from their violent homelands to America. St. John’s title clearly expresses the novel’s focus points; however, one of the main ties that connects the three families together is soccer. The Ziatys, Balegamires, and Ntwaris share their violent pasts and struggles with adapting to a society’s divided response to refugee immigration and connect through Luma Mufleh’s local soccer teams. Although on paper the three immigrant families may seem different because of where they are from, the families’ violent pasts are relatively the same when looking at their reasons for leaving and the sacrifices that they made in order to leave. The Ziatys are from Monrovia, Liberia, and they fled their country due to a modern day civil war. When Beatrice (and her children) witnessed her husband’s murder, she decided to try and escape the awful conditions which she and her family had grown accustomed to. Similar to the Ziatys, Paula Balegamire’s family also left their home, The Democratic Republic of Congo, due to a civil war which
Without soccer the Clarkston refugees’ lives would have played out much differently. In Warren St. John’s novel Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make A Difference, families are introduced and explained frequently; however in the chapters “Beatrice and Her Boys,” “Paula,” and “‘Coach Says It’s Not Good,’” these three families stories are connected, as St. John walks us through each of their similarities to each