Ibrahim Cisse didn’t know the difference between an extra point and a field goal when he started his career as a placekicker. He would just wait for his coaches at Weequahic High to yell his name and point at the bright yellow poles in the end zone — the uprights, they had called them — and he would boot the ball through.
“I didn’t know what a first down was. I didn’t know any of the rules,” Cisse said. He had wandered onto the practice field as a freshman to flirt with the cheerleaders, and when the Ivory Coast native couldn’t figure out how to throw the oblong-shaped ball that bounced at his feet, the former soccer player just kicked it instead.
An assistant coach saw Cisse’s powerful leg, had him try a few kicks while wearing his Vans sneakers, and made the next decision for him. “I need you to come back here at 4 o’clock sharp for practice,” Cisse was told, and just like that, the Weequahic High varsity football team had a new kicker.
He was about to put that leg to good use — a lot.
One of the best stories in New Jersey football is unfolding in Newark this fall, where a high school that was earmarked for closure a few years ago is dominating opponents in a way a city team hasn’t in a long, long time.
How dominating? Try this: Weequahic has outscored its rivals 415-2 this season, the kind of lopsided margin that first draws your eyes to the column on the right. The two came in the first quarter of a game last week against Newark West Side, when cornerback Shahib Abdul intercepted a pass near the Weequahic goal line and then slid to the turf in the end zone. The referees ruled that it was a safety.
So, technically speaking, a Weequahic player has scored all 417 points in its games this season. Abdul also had two pick-six interceptions in the 58-2 victory over West Side, so longtime head coach Brian Logan wasn’t going to hold the mistake against him. The donut is gone, but not the dominance.
Weequahic leads New Jersey in points scored and fewest points allowed, and Logan knows the doubters will point to a weak schedule and shrug. He gets it. Early in his coaching career, he was on the other side of lopsided games as the head coach who inherited a West Side program that was in the midst of a 56-game losing streak.
He remembers losing to Caldwell, 54-0, in his first season in 1998, after which he said legendary Caldwell coach Ken Trimmer offered the losing team to join in a postgame barbecue. Logan was so embarrassed he wondered if he should go back to coaching at the Pop Warner level.
“You just beat me like that and now you’re going to try to invite me to the cookout?! No, no thanks, that’s okay,” Logan said with a laugh. “Thank you for helping me to grow up. I’m going to learn how to get better, that’s what I’m going to do.”
West Side got a lot better under Logan, winning a North 2, Group 3 title in 2007. He left for Weequahic, his alma mater, in 2011, and watched as the school district debated turning it into a charter school a couple years later. Weequahic found a way to survive, as it always does, and Logan won his 150th game as a head coach last month — the most of any Newark public schools football coach.
The bigger victories come off the field. When he first took over at Weequahic, the former Newark police detective had to meet with the neighborhood gang leaders to ask them to stop beating up his players when they walked home from practice. Now, he said, some of those same gang leaders are among the fans rooting on the team from the bleachers.
Logan walked under a bright orange scoreboard that was just installed a few days earlier, one part of a facelift at Untermann Field that includes a new running track and artificial turf playing surface. This place used to be all mud and gravel when Logan was a player in the early ‘80s, and the assistant coaches would call plays from the third-floor windows at Chancellor Avenue Elementary School because the facility didn’t have a press box.
Still, this was — and is — his sanctuary.
“This is where I find my solace,” Logan said. “This is where I find my peace. Anything going on out there, for a little while, it don’t matter.”
Brian Logan celebrated his 150th victory as a Newark public schools football coach this season. (NJ Advance Media file photo)John Jones | For NJ Advance Media
Logan’s lifelong mission to get as many kids as possible to join him on this field, and over the years, hundreds have done just that. He expected his team to be good this year. This good? That was hard to predict. The Indians are so dominant, most of their stars only play in the first half. Rashawn “Shady” Marshall is eighth in the state with 1,215 rushing yards on just 76 carries — a 15.9 average — with a state-best 144 points and 24 touchdowns.
Marshall is just 210 yards behind Hackensack Ayden Jones, the statewide leader, despite having less than half the carries. He shrugs it off. “We don’t care about stats,” he said. “As long as we’re winning and blowing teams out, stats are extra.”
Weequahic, with its 25 seniors, will face its biggest test of the season when it hosts 6-1 Immaculata on Friday night. In the weeks that follow, the team will find out if it deserves a place in Newark history in the state playoffs, where strong opponents like Cedar Grove, Mountain Lakes and Park Ridge loom. The annual “Soul Bowl” against rival Shabazz also awaits on Thanksgiving.
If the team does play a close game, it knows it can count on Cisse to convert under pressure. The placekicker has converted 56 of his 57 point-after attempts this season (the one miss was blocked), but nothing he has accomplished on the field compares with what he did off it. Cisse took care of his 6-year-old sister, Mariam, so his mother could stay at a New York hospital for two weeks after his 2-year-old brother, Vakaba, suffered a medical emergency.
Many afternoons, Mariam would hang out on the sideline while Cisse and his teammates practiced. “My coaches and teammates are like another family,” Cisse said, and before the kicker took his sister home, Logan would make sure he’d have something to bring with him for dinner. Those are the sort of challenges Weequahic overcomes on a daily basis.
“People don’t know, man. Inner-city football? It’s hard!” Logan said, even as his current team is making it look so damn easy.
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Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com.