Bel Air's Joël Tristan Ouandji Nana, after immigrating from Cameroon, quickly adapting to football, wrestling
Jan. 12—By Sam Cohn — scohn@baltsun.com
January 12, 2024 at 5:00 a.m.
Eric Siegel had a hard time understanding over the phone. The woman on the other end — her pronounced Central African accent driving the conversation — was inquiring about signing her son up to play football at Bel Air High School.
"She said he was moving from Cameroon and weighed about 60," Siegel remembers. "I thought she meant pounds, [not kilograms]. I'm like, 'Oh man, this woman must be talking about soccer.'"
Even the metric-to-imperial system conversion weight gave the Bobcats football coach pause. This scrawny, 135-pound novice wanted to try a brutish contact sport? "That's a little light," Siegel told her.
But Sabine Laure Mye-Wandey was adamant that her son, who was moving halfway around the world, at least try what she considered to be the country's most popular sport. Not fútbol, a proven talent of his and Cameroon's national sport, but football. She's careful to now qualify it as "American football."
Behind that 2021 phone call were a stream of tears. Joël Tristan Ouandji Nana, just weeks after landing in the United States, felt like he was breaking up with his first love. "That day," he said, "I cried because I've been playing soccer since I was a kid. It was a part of me."
Three years and 50 pounds later, Ouandji Nana is built like a chiseled 5-foot-9 truck. He eclipsed 1,100 rushing yards this past fall with eight touchdowns in his debut varsity football season. He's also taken on wrestling and has matured into one of Bel Air's most strapping grapplers, becoming a standout in two sports he previously knew nothing about.
The prospect of sharing his little-known roots reinvigorated a post-practice Ouandji Nana, who leaned forward in his chair to hash over life experience.
Cameroon roots
Ouandji Nana was raised in Yaoundé, Cameroon's capital. "It wasn't really what people think it is," he said, dissuading misguided stereotypes of African countries. He never experienced strenuous financial scarcity but noted wealth doesn't segregate folks in Cameroon the way it does in the western world.
The school system operates differently as well. Ouandji Nana is convinced his Bel Air classmates couldn't handle the dissimilarities of his educational upbringing.
For one, schedules better resemble the European model where students remain in one classroom while teachers shuffle around.
More notably, Ouandji Nana said, it's much stricter in Cameroon. "If you mess up one time, you get beat up," he deadpanned. Students talking too much, skipping class or even a poorly timed wrong answer could lead to corporal punishment from whipping sticks or beefy ropes, a more sternly enforced illegality since early 2023.
Mye-Wandey missed out on much of her son's upbringing. Ouandji Nana was raised largely by his father and grandmother while his mother was determined to earn them a new life outside of Cameroon.
"I don't want my kids to go through the struggle that I went through growing up in Cameroon," she said, referring in part to sharing one bedroom with three sisters, walking a great distance to school because they didn't have a car, and the lack of educational advancement. "Everything I was doing was for him. ... It was my goal. 'I'm going to get a better life and I'm coming to get you.'"
Mye-Wandey emigrated from Cameroon in 2008, first hoping to secure a visa to France, then Canada as a backup. Both were denied. Then a conversation with a close friend, on a bit of a whim, spurred a visa application to the U.S. To her surprise, she got it. Mye-Wandey moved to Maryland in 2010, continued schooling, found a job in financial planning, and watched American football on Sundays.
Back in Cameroon, Ouandji Nana sharpened his soccer skills in a nearby park. He was discovered at 8 years old by a coach from Assec Sportive de Nkolmesseng, the sponsored club with which he'd gain exposure traveling the country up through middle school.
Mye-Wandey remembers the coach calling in admiration of her son's talents as team captain. "He's gifted," the coach told her.
In 2016, Mye-Wandey flew home to begin the process of Ouandji Nana's immigration; namely collecting baby photos and taking a DNA test. The pandemic wrenched the process until December 2020, when Ouandji Nana learned he'd be moving.
"I wanted to come here," he said. "I was excited; I was happy. I'm gonna get to see all the places that people from where I'm from wish to see. I'm telling all my friends I'm leaving. But at the same time I'm sad 'cause [I'm leaving] my family, my people that I used to see every day."
Ouandji Nana didn't have to entirely sever his connection with soccer. Mye-Wandey offered to pay for a club season if he gave football a fair shot for one year. But he assimilated into the new sport better than reengaging in his old sport in a new place.
"I had to pick one," Ouandji Nana said, "so I picked football."
'That's what built me'
It's 2 p.m. Thursday afternoon when the school bell rings. Ouandji Nana darts from his last class of the day down a long hospital-white hallway. Past the Bel Air gymnasium at his left and a row of athletic offices to the right, is a shiny, weight-lifting cornucopia.
Hanging outside the swinging double doors is a poster chart recognizing some of the school's most prolific athletes. "TOP 10 Lifters by Core Lift," it reads. And "TOP Lifters — Total Weight." Ouandji Nan's name tops every statistical category. Siegel and wrestling coach Craig Reddish agreed the posted figures may even be a bit outdated.
In that gym is where his reputation took shape: humble and to himself, never willing to be outworked. Ouandji Nana was blunt in his admittance of learning to be a competitive high school athlete in a new country.
"I had never touched a weight before in my life," he said. Without a community of friends when he first moved, Ouandji Nana immersed himself fully in the gym.
About football: "I couldn't understand the rules. Like how to play, how to score touchdowns. Just like, how you play football." Players covered in pads up to their ears was pretty taboo.
Ouandji Nana originally wanted to play receiver. He aimed to learn the position through YouTube highlights. He was adrift in his first JV practice, dropping every ball thrown his way — albeit stressed in a foreign space, barely able to communicate with his new teammates.
How about wrestling? "I would just try to take people down," he said. "I didn't know the rules until this year."
What he lacked in technical understanding, he made up for with brute strength. Reddish's favorite story was a recent match against a returning state finalist from Stephen Decatur.
"Those kids can give JT problems because they're so skilled," Reddish said. "JT blast doubles this guy. It wasn't illegal but it was so aggressive, just like no fear."
Mye-Wandey can't nail down precisely where her son's motivation comes from, nor does she remember the first glimpse of his unflappable determination. But when she was pregnant, spending considerable time watching sports on TV, anytime she saw an athlete celebrate she'd tell her pregnant belly, "My son is gonna be a champion one day." Maybe that's why she thinks he was born with it.
"I think it comes from me trying to make my people feel better," Ouandji Nana said. "I'm trying to make a better life for myself, my family, the people I grew up with, my friends. That motivation, when I go to the gym I just think about my childhood since I was a kid. That makes me go harder. ... The anger when you get hit in school by teachers, that's what built me for real."
Reddish likes to think of Ouandji Nana as a "jump in the fox hole kind of guy." Siegel's most impressed by his quick switch — a rarity at that age — quiet when needed, armed with a well-timed spark.
"When I moved here," Ouandji Nana said, "I felt more comfortable just being me."
Mye-Wandey doesn't give her son any heads up that she'll be at his games. She'll arrive at Bel Air's stadium after work, find a secluded place in the bleachers on a chilly fall evening and scour the field for the No. 1 blue and white jersey.
When Ouandji Nana emerges from the Bobcats backfield for a momentous gain, his mom gets goosebumps. Or when he slams into an opposing player on a fearless tackle, Mye-Wandey can't help but shed a tear. Through a proud laugh she said, "Sometimes I'll ask myself, 'Who is this guy? That's my kid?'"
Having been apart from her son for an aggregate of about a decade, Mye-Wandey's hope is Ouandji Nana's athletics and academics don't — geographically — take him too far. The University of Maryland is her dream for her son.
"He came in very raw and very light," Siegel said. "But by his sophomore year we realized, 'Oh OK, we got someone who could be very special on our hands."
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