Alioune Diakhate: A Banner Season with ALBION San Diego
By Sam Weller Photo by David Frerker 6229 miles is a long way to travel to pursue a dream. But the distance from the west coast of Africa to sunny San Diego, Calif., is all part of the journey that began for Alioune Diakhate when he was a little boy. Sometime between the ages of five and seven years of age, Diakhate, who was born and raised in Dakar, the capital of the Republic of Senegal, discovered soccer, and from that point ...
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Alexander Satrustegui: A Long Way From Home
By Sebastian Johnson When Alexander Satrustegui was three years old, his family uprooted their lives in his birthplace of San Sebastian, Spain, and moved to his father’s hometown of Pamplona - a city 80 kilometers inland from the port town. It was an important moment in Satrustegui’s life, for Pamplona was the place where he truly fell in love with the sport of soccer. “I started playing soccer [in Pamplona] at a really young age,” he explains. “First for my school, then, ...
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Mayele Malango: Fluent in the International Language
By Sebastian Johnson Photo by Jon DeBoer Duke history professor Laurent Dubois stated, in his book The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer, that soccer is “...a language, probably the most universal on the planet.” This is a fact well known to New Amsterdam FC starting wing Mayele Malango. His journey has taken him thousands of miles - from the rainforests of equatorial Africa, all the way to the east coast of America. However, he’s never felt isolated thanks to ...
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