All in for the Written Hero

May 26, 2016 (original date)

City College soccer player Mostafa Haridi. Twitter Images

If you walked around the City College of New York before the CUNY soccer season started last fall it is a guarantee that none of the 13,299 students would’ve expected City to win the CUNYAC soccer championship.

In fact, when Mostafa Haridi scored the game-winning goal for CCNY he didn’t even know he scored. “After the ball touched the goal, I didn’t believe it went in,” Haridi said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes until my teammates started yelling goal.”

The Beavers played College of Staten Island in the CUNYAC championship. The game was tied one apiece after the regular 90, sending the two finalists to overtime. Two minutes into a second period of overtime, Haridi headed Aaron Schoenfelder’s corner kick in the back of the net. And City won CUNY.

Now if you have no idea what you would do if you led your school to the promise land, you probably would do something like this: The 23-year-old goalscorer grabbed his chest and started galloping to the fans with his arms wide opened, screaming so loud that the people in the parking lot could hear him.

Haridi tried to put a few words together to express what it feels like to be City College’s hero. “After scoring the game-winning goal, I was ecstatic. It was an unbelievable feeling,” the senior said.

City College had the most parties they ever had that night. That goal will for sure remain the best thing that will happen to CCNY this schoolyear—yes, it’s even better than Michelle Obama coming to the graduation.

And it’s all because of one man. Who? Mostafa Haridi.

If you look at Haridi, he was the perfect candidate to score the header that gave City the trophy. The midfielder is 6’3” and weighs about 190 pounds—you wouldn’t want to mark him. Furthermore, he had already scored similar goals throughout the season. End of conversation, Haridi was the chosen one.

Indeed, the Egyptian admits being CCNY’s Neo. “It was like the ball had my name written on it,” the hero said.

Although, he acknowledges that the goal was a team effort, in other words the whole team—or school—worked together to feed the ball to the only student at City College who was able to crown the school CUNYAC soccer champions.

“[On] being the person who scored the goal, I have to admit it was a team effort. Aaron [Schoenfelder] crossed a great ball and the ball hovered over my head.”

It wasn’t just Schoenfelder who worked in feeding Haridi the ball, it was all City College—all in for the written hero.