Polynesian Pipeline Feeds a Football Titan

[Ohio Pete]

At a Texas Prep Football Power, a Polynesian Influence

 

EULESS, Tex. — Public-address announcers at games for Trinity High, the nation’s top-ranked prep football team, sometimes inadvertently twist players’ names into what Pacific Islanders consider swear words. Anywhere else in this state, the land of “Friday Night Lights” where high school games can draw tens of thousands of fans, such mispronunciations would not be an issue. But the Trinity Trojans hardly fit the familiar image of the Texas gridiron.

 

A pipeline from the Pacific Island kingdom of Tonga has delivered a Polynesian influence to this town’s churches, markets and championship football team, which won state titles in 2005 and 2007 among Texas’ largest schools. Players of Tongan descent have brought imposing size, strength and toughness to the Trojans — and the need for a roster with phonetic spellings for the announcers.

 

“That would stop the cursing,” said Ofa Faiva-Siale, projects manager for the Euless Parks and Community Services Department.

 

Students at Trinity speak 53 languages, and the flags of 31 nations hang in the school’s entrance. The proximity of Euless to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, which is located partly within the city limits, has brought a remarkable diversity to this town of 54,000.

 

Thirteen of the 24 Trinity players who have made all-state since the 1980s, and 16 members of the current roster, are of Tongan descent.

 

“When you think of Texas high school football, you think of country kids, farm kids; you don’t expect to see players from the South Pacific,” said Sioeli Pauni, who has two sons on the Trinity team.

 

The parents of many players work at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport as baggage handlers and food-service employees, facilitating affordable travel on special family occasions. Others are self-employed as landscapers, carpenters and masons. Meanwhile, their sons are resolute linemen and linebackers, who weigh from 200 to 333 pounds and find in football a brisk physical exertion similar to the Tongan national sport of rugby.

 

Each time he knocks a defensive lineman on his back, Uatakini Cocker, a 6-foot-2, 297-pound offensive tackle, screams: “Mate ma’a Tonga,” meaning, “I will die for Tonga.” Later, the playful Cocker said, he often has to explain his heritage to opposing players and fans in this typical postgame conversation:

 

“Are you Mexican?”

 

“Polynesian.”

 

“Samoan?”

 

“Tongan.”

 

“O.K., because you would be a very big Mexican.”

 

The presence of 3,000 to 4,000 Tongans here has lent an unmistakable touch of Polynesia to Euless and Trinity High. The Hawaiian Market advertises kava root used for a traditional drink. A nonprofit organization called Voice of Tonga addresses concerns about immigration, culture, language and health, and broadcasts a program, including Trinity football highlights, on local cable television.

 

The Free Church of Tonga, the Tongan First United Methodist Church and the First Tongan Assembly of God Church — three of nine Tongan-affiliated churches in the area — sit on or near South Main Street. A Catholic chaplain, who is Tongan, visits several times a year from San Francisco, but must work his schedule around football season, said Faiva-Siale.

 

“I’ll call and say: ‘Don’t come this weekend; we’re in playoffs. Only two or three people will show up,’ ” Faiva-Siale said.

 

Half of Trinity’s 2,189 students in grades 10 through 12 are white, with a roughly equal mix of black and Hispanics and about 275 Asians and Pacific Islanders. This year’s football team is represented by at least eight nations, from Laos to Rwanda. Nine of the 22 starters are Tongans.

 

“It makes you a better person, learning to accept different people,” said Dontrayevous Robinson, Trinity’s star running back, who is African-American.

 

Trinity has a Polynesian Club, and Polynesian students frequently join the choir and participate in the arts. Often, they are chosen homecoming king and queen, coaches said. Ukulele music wafts through the school courtyard at lunchtime and between classes. Occasionally, someone wears a traditional lava-lava sarong. Before and after each football game, Tongan players lead a ceremonial team war dance called a haka.

 

About 10 Polynesian players from Trinity (5-0) are now playing college football.

 

“I think they set the tone for the whole school,” said Susan Kaufman, who coaches women’s volleyball. “They are self-confident. Their culture is taught to respect authority. They are very big on family and see the team as an extension of the family. They are nonmaterialistic, which means at Trinity, you can be who you are, no matter what your background is. You can have pink hair or a mullet or be a Goth. Whoever you want.”

 

Euless is also viewed as a haven from gang violence that some Tongans encounter in places like California and Utah, said Fotu Katoa, who was the first Tongan football player at Trinity High and is now Utah’s director of Pacific Islander Affairs. Sione Moeakiola, a Trinity linebacker who was born in Long Beach, Calif., spoke of simple freedoms here, like being able to place a television near a window without risking gunshots fired into the living room.

 

Katoa said: “Euless is thought of as a safe place where you play football and go to school and work and people have an opportunity to make something of themselves. They fit in and are accepted.”

 

When the 6-2, 210-pound Katoa first arrived in Euless, early in 1982, a coach spotted him near the trophy case at Trinity and asked if he needed help. “I’m looking for someplace to play football,” Katoa said. The football coach asked where he was from. When he said Tonga, it drew a blank.

 

“It’s four hours past Hawaii,” Katoa said. A fierce linebacker, he would soon become known as the Hawaiian Punch.

 

“The first time he hit somebody in spring practice, I knew we had something,” said Steve Lineweaver, then an assistant and now the head coach at Trinity. “He would yell, ‘I love this Texas football.’ ”

 

Katoa’s younger brother, Sammy, became an all-state linebacker. If the Katoas’ heritage was unfamiliar, their football skill was not. Undoubtedly, their athletic success helped engender the general acceptance of Tongans, said Faiva-Siale of the city parks department, who attended Trinity with the Katoa brothers.

 

City officials have patiently assisted Tongan residents acclimate to a new culture, Faiva-Siale said. Compromises have been reached to accommodate large family gatherings at funeral rituals that last for days. And the city has promoted alternatives to the slaughtering of pigs at home for open-pit cooking. A mobile health unit helps to provide free flu shots and medical checkups.

 

“They have been very understanding of the huge adjustment it takes for many people,” Faiva-Siale said, adding that the city has also provided police escorts for Trinity’s football team and signs for fans to wave at games.

 

Before each game, L. T. Tuipulotu or Cocker, the offensive tackle, leads the Trojans in a haka dance, performing a version of a ritual associated with the Maori people of New Zealand and popularized by New Zealand’s national rugby team. As the team trainer blows a conch shell, the Trinity players crouch and pound their chests and thighs and stomp and shout the preamble to a long-ago battle: “Ka Mate! Ka Mate! (I may die! I may die!)

 

“Ka ora! Ka ora! (I may live! I may live!)

 

“He Tehine te tangata puhuru huru (Behold the hairy man)

 

“Kane ti mai faka la titi te ra! (Who will lead us to victory and make the sun shine!)

 

“A hupane, A hupane (Up the ladder, up the ladder)

 

“A hupane, Kapa, Riti te ra! (To the top, the sun will shine in victory!)”

 

Elikena Fieilo, a 200-pound linebacker and perhaps Trinity’s best player, said the haka was meant to “ignite the breath” of competition. Opponents are not always welcoming. Earlier this season, a rival school band started playing the national anthem during the haka. Others have mocked the dance, but at their peril.

 

In 2007, Permian High of Odessa, Tex., defeated Trinity, 30-3, during the regular season. When they met again in the playoffs, Permian fans carried signs suggesting the haka was no more threatening than the hula.

 

“That got us fired up,” Cocker said.

 

Trinity won the rematch, 38-14, on the way to a state championship.

[Ohio Pete]

Also DT Siosaia Tuipulotu's school.

[BIGREDFAN_in_OMAHA]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing Pete!

[Ohio Pete]

More of same from NPR including nice pic of L.T./Siosaia Tuipulotu leading the Haka. (I have no idea where they got L.T. from but its the same guy as on Rivals pictures, #99.)

 

Trinity High School in Euless, Texas, has the nation's top-ranked football team, according to Sports Illustrated. The idea that the state of Texas could field some of the best players in high school football is not exactly breaking news.

 

But the Trinity Trojans are different because the backbone of this team, its offensive and defensive heart and soul, is Tongan — many of the players' families are from Tonga, the island nation southeast of Fiji.

 

The reasons so many Tongans are in Euless may seem rather random. But the reasons for the team's rise to the No. 1 national ranking are anything but random: Many credit the squad's success to the Tongan players' size.

 

Friday Night Warriors

 

On autumn Friday nights in Texas, high school football stadiums are packed with hundreds of thousands of people, celebrating one of their most important and historic tribal customs.

 

The rituals are precisely defined: There must be music and dancing, chanting and marching. Sticks are twirled and thrown spinning into the night sky.

 

The tribe's future — its strong, beautiful young men and women — paint their faces, don costumes and perform amazing feats of physical prowess for the pleasure and admiration of their people.

 

But when it is Trinity's warriors who are preparing for a Friday night battle, there is an added ritual.

 

A massive Tongan offensive lineman, Isikeli Cocker leads his fellow Tongans and the rest of his Trinity teammates in a haka, just before kickoff. Cocker moves around the field, gesturing in a primal, ancient way. His men affirm their readiness with chants and slaps to their legs and chests.

 

Watching this spectacle unfold in a North Texas suburban football stadium seems both surreal and somehow just fine, totally appropriate. The visiting football team stands there and watches, some try to ignore the spectacle. But it's hard not to stare.

 

And when it's time for the team captains to meet at the 50-yard line for the coin toss, the Trinity players seem to have a slight edge in the swagger department. It doesn't hurt that one captain is a Tongan the size of a small skyscraper.

 

Strength In Diversity

 

Mike Harris, the young principal of Trinity High, says a lot of people are unfamiliar with the Pacific island nation. He says people often ask, "What is the Tonga population, and where are they from, where is Tonga, where are those islands?"

 

As for Euless, it's a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, next to the big international airport.

 

"Whenever we travel to other schools and other events, or people come here, they're surprised to see our population," Harris says.

 

Trinity is a big school with a sprawling campus. Its 2,200 students are in three grades, from 10th to 12th.

 

When you walk in the front entrance, the first thing you see are dozens of national flags hanging from the ceiling. Each flag represents the home country of one of the students, and it looks a little like the Olympic Games in there.

 

Harris says the entryway serves two purposes: First, to impress first-time visitors, and second, to make the students feel like the high school honors their heritage.

 

He says one of the unique things about Trinity that he's always loved is its diverse population.

 

"We have cliques, just like every school has cliques," he says. "But the majority of our cliques are all interest-based — not racial-based."

 

Of course, let's not get carried away. This is suburban North Texas, and Trinity is half white.

 

But another 15 percent are Hispanic; 15 percent are black; and 13 percent are Pacific Islander. To be Pacific-specific, Tongan. So how did a community of more than 3,000 Tongans come to be in Euless, of all places?

 

In the early 1970s, a Tongan man who worked for American Airlines moved to Euless with his wife.

 

"The first Tongan couple that moved here to Euless is Halatono and Siupeli Netane," says Ofa Faiva-Seile, a Tongan whose family moved to Euless when she was a teenager in the mid-1980s. Faiva-Seile has been recording an oral history of the Tongan community in North Texas.

 

"When they arrived here, they realized that the cost of living was inexpensive, [with] plenty of jobs over at DFW airport," she says. Then they told their friends and family, and the area drew an influx of people from the island.

 

Faiva-Seile was in the first wave of Tongans to arrive. At first, the big brown girl was an outcast, whom nobody knew was from Tonga.

 

"I remember coming here and going to high school at North Richland Hills, where it was nothing but cowboys. So I felt very out of place," she says.

 

"I didn't have a lot of friends, you know, I wasn't approached a lot. But I moved to Trinity, and I'll tell you what, there was just a whole different atmosphere to Trinity High School."

 

A Community's Bonds

 

The word got out in the Tongan community that Trinity High School was a place where Tongans could be themselves.

 

And the conservative Texans discovered that, surprisingly, they had a lot in common with the Tongans. For example, Tongans are intensely family- and community-oriented, and they also don't believe in sparing the rod.

 

"The police here can pick up a kid, and run him over to the house and say, 'Mom, dad, we caught him mouthing off' — or stealing, or whatever," Faiva-Seile says.

 

"Then, I hate to say it, but it's normal in our culture, you get a butt-whipping," she says. "Mom whips your butt, and then your daddy whips your butt, and then your uncle can come along and go whip your butt, too."

 

That sort of accountability goes over big here. And this sports-happy Texas culture also heartily approves of the Tongans' tendency toward the physical. Trinity High's head football coach, Steve Lineweaver, can describe it in a very political way.

 

"I think we've been blessed with a diverse group that brings their own strengths to the program, predominantly Tongans, that bring a passion for the game of football," he says.

 

Asked if that passion included a love for hitting their opponents on the field, the coach agrees.

 

"They're very physical," Lineweaver says, and "a lot of them are very large."

 

They are large — and when they're in high school, fast, too.

 

In the Trinity weight room, the team turns weight-training into a party. They face each other in rows and lift and jerk heavy free weights above their heads, then drop them to the rubber floor like they're big and bad — and don't they know it.

 

Senior wide receiver Alex Jones says he loves his Tongan teammates. "We've got a lot of freaks of nature, really, that come and kick people's butts," he says.

 

A New Tradition Is Born

 

As the Tongan community has grown in Euless, so has the success of Trinity football. In just the past three years, they've won their first two state championships. Last year, all five offensive linemen and their tight end were offered college scholarships.

 

While other top Texas high school football programs have gone to the spread offense, throwing the football all over the lot, Trinity plays smash-mouth, running it down the other team's throat.

 

Jones says he takes great pleasure watching the other teams' high-powered offense, with their speed and great hands and talent, standing forlornly on the sidelines, their defense being slowly ground into the dust, the game clock spinning like a merry-go-round.

 

"A couple of years ago, our entire offensive line outweighed the Washington Redskins' offensive line," Jones says.

 

The Tongan players at Trinity are, not surprisingly, proud of themselves, their team and their school.

 

They are a big success at something that counts for an awful lot around here. And lest any non-sports-fans sneer, they and their teammates earn every win with their sweat and blood in the cruel Texas heat.

 

"We're not pass-blocking," a coach yelled at a recent practice. "Stick your nose between his numbers. Here we go — hit!

 

"Good! That's what some of you guys have got to learn," he said. "You've got to bring the hat!"

 

Motivation, And Success

 

Defensive end Vai Sapoi, a senior, says his parents told him when he was in the fourth grade that if he wanted to play football, he had to get his grades up.

 

Sapoi says he wasn't always the smartest guy in the classroom, but he worked his tail off so he could play for Trinity.

 

"Playing for Trinity, it's not just a sport to everybody, you know," he says. "Everyone takes it seriously. It's more like a career."

 

On a recent Friday night, the stadium stands were packed. Midway through the first quarter, a Trinity running back burst through the middle of his huge offensive line. He cut right, exploded into the opponent's backfield and streaked down the sideline, the defensive safeties giving desperate chase.

 

The opposing head coach smacked his clipboard against his leg in frustration as the defenders finally pushed the Trojan runner out of bounds inside the 10.

 

Everyone knew that play was coming. The problem is, how do you stop it?

[Ohio Pete]

The Haka

e8VUbjcj7pM

[TMul]

Great article pete, thank you.

 

Sounds like that team is a force to be reckoned with. With saying that, and with Robinson playing behind that kind of O-line in HS, makes you wonder a little??

 

I used to watch a lot of HS football here in Colorado and watched Lendale White while he was a Chatfield. Robinson highlight video reminds me a lot of L. White. One thing, L. White doesn't go on to have the type of career he has at USC without that superior O-line. But I will add that L. White had excellent vision. I guess my point is moot anyways, without the O-line you have what we have today.

 

I just second guess recruiting these types of rbs in todays college game where utmost speed is required at the RB position and or superior O-line play-which we don't have. Unless somehow B. Cotton can install a new pipe line in Lincoln, I don't see this kid being that effective.

[Vuren]

The Haka

e8VUbjcj7pM

psha at least show the all blacks doing the haka.

[arenateam]

Great article pete, thank you.

 

Sounds like that team is a force to be reckoned with. With saying that, and with Robinson playing behind that kind of O-line in HS, makes you wonder a little??

 

I used to watch a lot of HS football here in Colorado and watched Lendale White while he was a Chatfield. Robinson highlight video reminds me a lot of L. White. One thing, L. White doesn't go on to have the type of career he has at USC without that superior O-line. But I will add that L. White had excellent vision. I guess my point is moot anyways, without the O-line you have what we have today.

 

I just second guess recruiting these types of rbs in todays college game where utmost speed is required at the RB position and or superior O-line play-which we don't have. Unless somehow B. Cotton can install a new pipe line in Lincoln, I don't see this kid being that effective.

I've seen Robinson play and he doesn't have breakaway speed but he is a banger. His lack of speed is probably what keeps him from being a 4 star player but he's got good potential and definitely a downhill runner.