Goals: Southridge Soccer
A growing Latino population in a small town in Indiana celebrates its long-awaited high school soccer team. Photo by Sarah Ann Jump.
Written and reported for The Herald (Jasper, Indiana), October 2016
Huntingburg is still dark and sleepy when cousins Jeovanny Dubon and Jonatan Navarro emerge, pedaling bicycles from behind a row of houses.
Fifteen minutes before sunrise and the two Southridge High School students are up and moving, exiting an alley and starting west on 12th Street. It’s the end of June, but Jeovanny is dressed warm in the chilly morning air, wearing jeans and a gray hoodie. Jonatan dons shorts and a striped soccer jersey with the name Neymar Jr. emblazoned in gold across the back.
They bike about 3 miles, climbing rolling hills until they arrive at the house of Rhonda Schum. They park their bikes, retrieve two empty plastic ice cream buckets from the garage and head to a patch of blueberries at the rear of the property. They pick until about noon, peeling away the ripe berries and filling their buckets to the brim. The Schums offer $11 per gallon of berries, and on a good day, the cousins stay late into the afternoon, sometimes working seven, eight hours. On those days, they’ll pass the time by listening to motivational movie speeches on their phone. Jeovanny has found an entire channel on Youtube that lasts more than an hour.