Student Advisory Board Spotlight: Cassidy Hettesheimer

Spread from Accipiter yearbook, Mill Creek High School. GSPA Student Advisory Board member Cassidy Hettesheimer serves as editor-in-chief of Accipiter.

Each month, GSPA will feature work from Student Advisory Board members working at high school newspapers, news websites, newsmagazines, literary magazines, broadcast channels and yearbooks.

WORLD CUP WONDERINGS by Cassidy Hettesheimer, Mill Creek High School

Most of the time, when you’re watching the World Cup Final, you’re either thinking about how you wish the United States was good enough to hoist the coveted tournament trophy or you’re too nervous to think about much else besides whether your favorite team will make a penalty kick, block a shot, or produce a bicycle kick that will grace “Sports Center’s Top 10” the next morning.

Unless you’re Yasmeen Ahmed, 11, who found not only entertainment from the 2018 Russian World Cup, but also inspiration-- inspiration for a 5,000 word, year-long research report for Dr. Hancock’s, FA, AP Research class.

Ahmed, who grew up playing soccer at Dacula Soccer Club and refereeing local games, traveled to Bosnia and Croatia last summer to visit her mother’s hometown and the beach. This trip was in the midst of Croatia’s improbable run to the World Cup Finals in which they beat England and host country Russia before losing to France, 4-2, in the final round. So, wherever Ahmed traveled, locals were in a full-fledged soccer frenzy.

“We watched one of the games at like a cafe kind of thing, a family-owned one where my grandpa knew the owner,” Ahmed said. 

“And you see all these people coming to watch, and then when you drive back into the city after, you see all these people honking cars and yelling. It was just crazy--like the day we played Russia, they played the game on like a mega-tron projector outside, and when Croatia scored, you heard gunshots, people celebrating. Then, when it went into PKs, you see people on the ground praying. It’s just an experience hard to compare to anything else.”

However, not everyone in the southeastern region of Europe that Ahmed visited was rooting for the Croatian underdogs. In the 1980s and 1990s, religious and ethnic conflicts between Croatians and Bosnians after the dissolution of the Yugoslavian government and the rise of Serbian nationalists displaced many Bosnians and left lingering political tensions-- and Ahmed began to wonder if these tensions transcended into soccer.

“Some [Bosnians] were mad that their own people were cheering Croatia on because of the Bosnian war that happened decades ago,” Ahmed said. “The city that my mom was in is like half-Croatian, half-Bosnian, so you can’t really tell who’s Croatian because they’re all living in the same area. But there’s a split-- like one road kind of splits it, but you wouldn’t know that unless you lived there... It’s kind of funny because if you went to the Bosnian side of the city, for some of the people [the game] was a regular night, but then some people you see literally across a road, honking their horns, sitting on top of their cars, and you see fireworks going. It’s just kind of interesting, but it was also weird.”

Weighing her own support of Croatia against the disinterest of some of her fellow Bosnians, Ahmed began to consider these differences as a potential research topic once school began in August. Her AP Research class was tasked with coming up with a research question about anything-- quite literally, any topic, studied through any method.

“You see that all the time--politics and sports, like the NFL and people kneeling. This war happened 20 years ago, but I wanted to see what’s going on today because of it, because we can say my mom’s city is split like this, people aren’t living together, but how is it like with stuff like soccer and the media or, you know, stuff that isn’t as cut-and-dry as, like, the government?”

So, after researching other social effects of the Bosnian War and the impact of other political conflicts on sports, Ahmed began interviewing ten local Bosnians whom she reached out to through her mother. She and her interviewees met at their homes, at coffee shops, or at her mom’s office, and Ahmed asked each subject a series of open-ended questions about their experiences in the Bosnian War and their opinions on Croatia’s World Cup success.

“Around six of them said that they cheered for [Croatia] and the majority said the same thing: either politics and soccer do not go hand-in-hand or, like one guy I interviewed said, I’m proud of the style of soccer they play because that’s the same style [Bosnia] plays,” Ahmed said, “Or, they were saying ‘I cheered for the sport and not for my ethnicity because that’s not my ethnicity. I cheered because it’s like, my sport.’ But one lady I interviewed did not care at all because she does not care about sports. Then two or three of them that I interviewed-- one of them, he was kind of mad that his people were cheering for Croatia because he was like, ‘How can you guys forget what they did to us?’ And then one lady was like, ‘Oh, I have no connection to them. I don’t care. Like it’s like any other country that I know but is not my home country.’”

As Ahmed compiled and analyzed her data, she also began to learn more about the extent of the Bosnian War--both from her subjects and from her own mother, who attended each interview with Ahmed.

“We can’t really picture it all because we live in this world where everything’s like fine and the worst thing that happens to us pales in comparison,” Ahmed said. “I remember that one time, during [Hurricane] Irma, the power went out and I was like, ‘What the heck? and my mom was like, ‘We didn’t have power for three years.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ It’s stuff like that you learn about from these people’s interviews. A lot of them didn’t want to talk about the war, but some of these people you learn about what happened to them and it’s like-- how is that possible? Why did no one stop this? And once I started interviewing these people, my mom was more open to talk about it, whereas before I never really asked her about it. 

“Afterwards, I would start asking her like similar questions, and it’s crazy- like there was one point where she in a car with this Croatian guy that was bringing her back from a city and they were driving across this line and there were just shots going back and forth and she was just in the car lying on the floor... It’s hard for me to imagine my mom being a teenager and being that scared.”

Yet, for all the terror that occurred during the war, the magic of players like Luka Modric and the story of Croatia’s team may be a way to bridge the gap across two historically-opposed groups, Ahmed’s research seems to say.

“The Croatian national team actually has a lot of Bosnian people on it. They chose to play on the Croatian team because the Croatian funding’s a lot more than the Bosnian funding for soccer, so they knew they could have a better chance of doing anything on a Croatian team,” Ahmed said. “When the wars put them up, they had the choice because all of them didn’t really claim an ethnicity. It was kind of interesting to see that because there are some people I even interviewed that, ethnically, they were Croatian but they can consider themselves Bosnian because that’s their home and they just kind of hard to put a label on it if you’re not really religious because in this case ethnicity is tied to religion. Another reason I and some Bosnians were cheering for Croatia is because they started bringing out stories about refugees-- which to me that is important. They started highlighting this war, and this war a lot of times gets swept under the rug because of what happened, where it was, and who is was against.”

Ahmed, alongside many of her Research classmates, struggled to fit all her findings into the seemingly-miniscule 5,000-word count: the complex history of the region, the significance of Croatia’s success, the intricate details of the Bosnians’ reactions, all of which she was able to witness firsthand--a unique ability for a research topic as far-from-home as hers.

“My world, basically, part of it is soccer. And if I if I didn’t go to Bosnia this the summer I never even would have thought of the problem, this topic...It’s a different experience to be somewhere where that country is going to the World Cup.”