Overcoming adversity and surgery

He has played in only one game, completed only one tackle. But mild-mannered Moez Abouelnaga, beloved by his teammates and coaches, is viewed by those at Long Island City High School as a special player. Part of the reason is that just three years ago, it didn’t look like he would be playing at all.
The problems began the summer before he started at Bayside High School. Abouelnaga’s hip was hurting. He was walking crooked. And when he went to the doctor, he found that he had slipped capital femoral epiphysis - a hip problem in which the thigh bone slips from the ball of the hip joint. It is known for being particularly painful, and it requires surgery.
As a result, Abouelnaga, a defensive tackle, missed most of his freshman season. His experience at Bayside was stunted even further when his family, which includes five brothers, moved to Long Island City before Abouelnaga’s sophomore year. That year, his father died of lymphoma.
“It was really bad,” Abouelnaga remembers. “During that time, my family was struggling with money.” He credits his mom Mahassen for “telling me to keep my head up high.”
Abouelnaga did not join the varsity team at Long Island City until his fourth year of high school. All the while, he watched his brother Karim practice with the team.
“I looked at my brother on the field, and I couldn’t step onto the field. I was scared,” he says.
Even by senior year, Abouelnaga wasn’t ready to participate in tryouts. But head coach Steve Agresti, who Abouelnaga says “has helped me out a lot,” gave him pads and told him to put them on. Abouelnaga says that a misunderstanding, in which he left his equipment in the locker room and was thought to have quit the team, nixed his chances of playing that season.
Athletic director Penny Bellas, always a supporter of Abouelnaga’s and the real facilitator of this interview, lobbied the PSAL for Abouelnaga to play a fifth year. The league obliged, and Abouelnaga was overcome with relief.
“ ‘There’s always a chance I can’t play football,’ was in the back of my mind,” he says. “I had to play fifth-year football.”
Today, amid a season of other distractions - the repeatedly-pending debut of Irene Gjoka and the brawl against Jamaica that cost Long Island City two victories - Abouelnaga is one of the Bulldogs’ unsung heroes. After his four-hour practices are over, he works for two hours each night at the Flushing Meadows Aquatic Center, where he is a swim teacher, a lifeguard, and a certified CPR practitioner. His brother Karim and his brother Monzer, who plays for the junior varsity football team at LIC, work too.
His goal is to study business and to play football or basketball next year - he’s currently looking at Baruch College, and quietly dreaming about Ohio State. “I don’t think I have enough [appearances] over here,” he admits, to make a case for himself as a potential college star. But he does have an impressive story and an awful lot of pluck. In football and in life, what else does one really need?
“Surgery didn’t put me down,” he says, when asked about the moral of his story. “I’m one of the quickest linemen on the team.”