From Queens to Kathmandu: a New Yorker's two-year stint as Nepal's coach
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Version 0 of 1. The Himalayas glowed in a late day sun as the plane whisking Jack Stefanowski from anonymity descended toward Kathmandu. It was January 2013 and until that moment he was just a 37-year-old guy from New York, a one-time goalkeeper who played at New York University and had been an assistant coach in Puerto Rico. To the passengers on the flight from Doha he must have seemed like another face gazing out the window. But he had applied to be head coach of Nepal’s national soccer team and they had offered him the job. In moments, the plane would land and he would be pulled into a room filled with reporters and camera crews and besieged with questions about players he had yet to meet. Almost 8,000 miles from home he was about to become somebody very important in a place he knew nothing about. That glimpse of the mountains shimmering below would be his last touch of peace for nearly two years. “He was a celebrity here,” says Sanjeeb Shilpakar, a television journalist and former Nepalese soccer federation official who befriended Stefanowski. Only two sports matter in Nepal: soccer and cricket. That means the national soccer coach is a big deal, especially when he comes from New York and nobody has heard of him. Everywhere Stefanowski went he was news. Cameras appeared. Photos were taken. For a man whose professional career was a season as a goalkeeper with the Long Island Rough Riders and had coached at places like Briarcliffe College and Stony Brook his sudden fame must have seemed overwhelming. Instead, he gives a small shrug. “I think by now I’ve gotten used to it, you know?” he says. Stefanowski is sitting in a square at Sixth Avenue and Carmine Street in Manhattan’s West Village wearing soccer shorts and a jacket. It has been almost six months since he came back from Nepal as his contract was expiring, ending an adventure a kid growing up in Queens with soccer posters on his wall could never have imagined. He is a friendly man with big hands and a nice smile who doesn’t say much. He spent nearly two years living in a world that was nothing like his own, coached games in places that had been exotic names on a globe to him and survived a catastrophic earthquake but when pressed on what it all was like he says: “Overall, it was a great experience.” For now he is teaching goalkeeping to children aged seven to 18 at the Downtown United Soccer Club in Manhattan while waiting for the next big coaching opportunity. He wonders when it will come and where it will be. Another national team? A pro club overseas? His wife Christel Halliburton is sure the call will come. “Jack attracts these kinds of things,” she says. “He’s always up for it. When we came back here a friend said: ‘Oh you guys are here? I don’t believe it. I give it six months.’ “I think people see this free-spirited guy who will go any place” He had one great moment as Nepal coach. It came early in his time there when Nepal beat India 2-1 in the preliminary rounds of the South Asian Football Federation championships. Nepal had never beaten India in regulation of a soccer match before. And when it was over, the packed crowed in Kathmandu’s Dashrath Rangasala Stadium where fans sit on concrete slabs, roared. “For Nepal, beating India is everything,” Shilpakar says. The victory meant Nepal were on top of that tournament’s ‘Group of Death’, finishing ahead of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and advanced to the semi-finals. But to most in Nepal, winning the Group of Death was secondary to beating India. The mysterious new coach from America had done something miraculous. Jack Stefanowski of Queens, New York had become just about the most famous man in the country. “After beating India, he was a superhero,” Shilpakar says. And yet being a superhero in a foreign land has its price. “We came from New York where you are anonymous,” Halliburton says. “There is a freedom in that.” Halliburton and their then-three-year-old daughter Lila, arrived in Nepal not long before the India match, not really knowing what to expect. They had lived in Puerto Rico, where Stefanowski had been an assistant coach with the NWSL’s Puerto Rico Islanders and enjoyed the mesh of cultures and the warm weather. But Nepal was a much different adventure, the kind of place you never think about until you are holding a plane ticket with your name and being told this is where you will live. In many ways it was a magical experience. She would go to the grocery store and see an elephant walking down the road or watch monkeys outside the coffee shop. They took family trips to Kathmandu’s many religious temples, rode out to the mountains and even visited the base of Mt Everest. But there were adjustments too. They never drove. Instead, a driver took them everywhere they needed to go, which was fine for Stefanowski given the way cars and motorbikes buzzed through the streets. Their apartment didn’t come with a washer or dryer and there were no laundromats or dry cleaners. A woman showed up every day to hand wash the family’s clothes and hang them on a line. In time this all became the normal flow of their life. It was different than New York but they got used to it. What Halliburton never accepted was the constant hum around her husband. Everywhere they went they were stopped for pictures. People wanted to meet the American man coaching their team. The fact Halliburton is black and Stefanowski is white only added to the intrigue. People were friendly but they insisted on taking photos. “Jack was very comfortable with it,” Halliburton says. “For Lila and I it was challenging.” After the India victory, Nepal lost its semi-final match in the South Asian Football Federation championships to Afghanistan. They haven’t scored a goal in the two years since. As Nepal struggled, fans and the media turned on the new American coach. The superhero who beat India became a mistake. Nepal needed to hire someone with more experience, maybe someone from their own country. Stefanowski brushed away the criticism. It was part of being the head coach of the national team, after all. But Halliburton never understood it. How could these people walk up and ask for a photograph, be so nice and then say they wished he’d be fired as soon as he walked away? “I think celebrity status is like having a frenemy,” Halliburton says. “They are friendly to your face but they criticize you behind your back. I wanted to rage but Jack just said: ‘Oh you just leave it alone.’ “He’s really good at taking the lumps and allowing himself to feel diplomatic and letting it all go.” What Stefanowski wanted was more chances for his team to play. Nepal did not have many international tournaments or friendlies. They would go months without a match and trainings only came before the biggest tournaments It was hard to build continuity. Players would show up a few days before a tournament and practice a handful of times before playing national teams that had been working together for months. Nepal had talent, he says, but it lacked the infrastructure to build a cohesive national team. When Nepal lost a World Cup qualifying match to India and drew another 0-0 earlier this year, Stefanowski began to suspect he would not get a new contract. Whenever he asked, the answers were not clear. Still, he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave Nepal. He started discussions with one of the teams in the country’s club league with the idea of running it while perhaps working for the national team as well. “Coaching is my passion,” he says. Then came the morning of Saturday 25 April. Stefanowski and Halliburton were home with Lila eating lunch when the floor began to shake. None of them had really experienced earthquakes before and weren’t sure how serious these tremors were. The shaking got stronger and stronger, the apartment rocked for what seemed like an eternity. They huddled in the doorway and waited for the shaking to end. They knew the earthquake had been serious. American seismologists later said it had a magnitude 7.8. Chinese measurements put the size at 8.1. Either way, it was a massive quake, one so large it triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest that killed 19. Around the country more than 9,000 people died. While Stefanowski and Halliburton’s apartment survived without damage they were told they couldn’t go back for many days. The government feared an aftershock even bigger than the initial quake. They were fortunate to have friends nearby with a courtyard where they could stay, huddling under blankets at night, hoping it wouldn’t rain and feeling fortunate to have a safe place to sleep. Many others slept on sidewalks and on the sides of streets as aftershocks rumbled every few hours. “That was the most terrifying thing,” Halliburton says. “No one knew if that was the earthquake or a pre-quake.” One day, right after the quake, Stefanowski went in a van with the Nepal team’s goalkeeper to visit some of the worst-hit areas outside Kathmandu. Entire buildings were flattened. Towers had toppled. People still walked around in shock. He handed out food and water, doing what little a soccer coach could do at a moment like this. Soon people began to smile. In the rubble of their lives they pulled out their phones and asked the coach to pose They said they wanted his picture. They wanted to shake his head. It might have been the most surreal scene in his entire time there. But nothing seemed certain anymore. The earthquake had destroyed any talk about a new contract, not that Stefanowski was expecting one. He and Halliburton started to wonder why they were still there, taking up precious food and water if they had a place to go back to in New York. The earthquake had unsettled them in a way Stefanowski’s celebrity had not. “I think it was the sense of being shaken – physically shaken and feeling helpless,” Halliburton says. “My greatest fear was that something would happen to my daughter and husband.” Five days after the quake, they boarded an airplane that climbed up past the Himalayas and headed back to New York where they moved in with Stefanowski’s parents in Queens. A nearly-two-year whirlwind that began with a late-night press conference in an airport room and included the riotous day when Nepal beat India, ended quietly with a flight out of disaster. He was still interested in coaching the Nepal team even after returning to New York. He considered a plan in which the family could live in New York and he would fly out to Nepal to coach. But communication with the national federation was limited. Weeks went by. Finally, in mid-summer he was told the federation had hired a Napalese coach. His adventure was over. Now as he sits in the park at Sixth and Carmine, he considers his time halfway around the world and sees an experience ne never thought he would have had. He lists the countries he visited – Iran, Qatar, Japan and Korea – and wonders if he would have otherwise gone to such places. He wishes he could have had more time to build a culture and instill a philosophy. But that’s soccer especially when coaching national teams. Nothing lasts very long. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says. “I think in coming back here we definitely needed to take some time to recover from the earthquake.” He smiles. He has enjoyed working with children and teenagers. Coaching is something he knew he wanted to do since he was in high school himself. For a time, after college, he worked as a physical therapist. It paid well but he longed to coach. He gave up the stability of his physical therapy job to chase a coaching career. Now that he has had a taste of it internationally he wants more. He yearns for another chance. And maybe he could be the most famous man in a faraway land once more. |