After immigrating from Poland as a teenager, Dominik Stecuła spent a few years too afraid and embarrassed to speak up in class—until a gym class soccer goal changed everything. Sports became his medicine, his community, his voice. Then a hip replacement took it all away. Now a political communication scholar studying polarization, Dominik thinks the thing that healed him might just help heal the rest of us too.
Dominik Stecuła is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Political Science at The Ohio State University, where he studies political polarization and how media shapes public opinion. His research has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Communication, American Journal of Political Science, and Political Communication, and he is the co-author of We Need to Talk: How Cross-Party Dialogue Reduces Affective Polarization. He has written over 50 public-facing pieces for outlets like the Washington Post, USA Today, and Scientific American, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. He serves on the Scholars Council for Braver Angels. Originally from Poland, Dominik immigrated to the United States at fifteen and found his footing — and his voice — through sports. He is currently working on a new project exploring whether sports fandom can help bridge America's partisan divides.
Story Transcript
It's early afternoon in the fall of 2003. Dearborn Heights, Michigan. It smells absolutely awful. That unmistakable cocktail of sweat covered by way too much body spray.
I get the ball. I do a sweet little 360‑degree turnaround, a defender, and I score. I let out a visceral scream.
People run to me. They high‑fived me. The gym teacher, Mr. Price, was surprised. He approached me after and told me that I should try out for the soccer team. It's gym class in high school. Nobody cares.
But this moment ended up really mattering to me. It was my unlock. It reassured me that people could actually talk to me. It led me to start speaking in class. It connected me with others in ways that I hadn't imagined.
The few years before that were very different, my years in Poland. My parents got divorced, and my mom decided that a change of scenery was necessary. I'm grateful now that we have come to the U.S., but at the time, I was really afraid to go. I felt like I had everything I needed back in Poland.
So in August of 2000, it's me, my brother, and my mom. We fly into Chicago, and my uncle from Metro Detroit picks us up. I'm exhausted from the flights and I ask him how far it is. He says something like, “It's not bad, only about four‑and‑a‑half hours.” He sounded absolutely insane to me. You can get from one end of Poland to another in that kind of time.
Everything was disorienting. The cars were enormous, the bread tasted awful, and I was blown away by how diverse it was. I came from a small town in Poland, a country where the majority of people look like me and speak my language. Then I went to Crestwood High School in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, where the plurality of students were Arabic: kids from Lebanon, Yemen. Syria. I heard languages in the hallways that I couldn't even begin to identify. I had never met a Mohammed in my life before. Now, there were several in my English class alone.
I barely spoke English, and it fell on me to speak to the immigration officer on behalf of my family. That's a lot of pressure for a kid who's about to turn 15.
That experience shook me. The kid in Poland who dyed his hair green and hosted school assemblies, that kid was gone. In Michigan, I was paralyzed by embarrassment. I didn't say anything out loud in class for probably the first two years. I felt like I was trapped in another person's body, a person who can't talk.
Then came the gym class soccer game. My confidence started to build. By senior year, I was speaking up in class, being more myself, cracking a joke here and there. I didn't feel trapped anymore.
That was the moment sports became more than just a hobby for me. It had always been something that I cared about and followed. Growing up in Poland, all the kids do. They glorify soccer players. I was always watching games with my grandpa and talking about it with my friends at school.
In college, it was how I made friends. I always stayed happy and active. You could have a bad day in graduate seminar, and then you would go to the field and have some fun, clear your head. These moments let you bond with people. It was my out. It was my medicine.
In Philadelphia, while doing my postdoc, I started working on a project about bringing people together. I studied political polarization, especially how mass media and social media contribute to it. I studied the degree to which we actually have things in common and the degree to which we don't see those commonalities because the media chooses to amplify the things we dislike and even hate about each other.
Somewhere around January 6, 2021, when the polarization seemingly reached a boiling point and a topless guy wearing horns was standing at a podium in the Senate chambers, I began to think very seriously that maybe something that helped heal my personal injury could help heal the broader societal one.
My mentor, co‑author, and friend, Matt Levendusky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and I organized structured conversation at community centers and libraries all over Philadelphia. We would get people in a room and have them talk to each other. We eventually wrote a book about it. It was called We Need to Talk. The kid who couldn't even talk wrote a book about how talking to each other is what saves us.
And something kept happening at these events. Even before the structured discussions began, while people were just waiting around, small talk would break out. And so often, it started with sports. Someone would be wearing an Eagles hat. Someone else would be wearing a Sixers sweatshirt. And just like that, strangers were talking. They were already sitting at the same table, so might as well, right?
Then the real conversations would start and we'd watch something shift. People began to realize that who they think the other side is, who they expect to see because of what they watch on cable news and what they see on social media, is frequently not what they encounter in real life at all.
One moment I keep coming back to is two women who stayed after one of our sessions to keep talking. They just wouldn't stop. It got to the point where the library staff eventually had to kick us out because other patrons had reserved the space.
The implications kept nagging at me. How do we leverage this? How do we make it so we can tap into the shared identities we all carry? We don't have a lot in common left in our polarized world. We watch different TV shows. We drive different cars. We listen to different music. But sports, and nearly 7 in 10 Americans are sports fans and that cuts across party lines, that's what we have left in common. It's one of the last vestiges of what we still all share together.
I can't play soccer anymore with my replaced hip, but I still watch it a lot. But I think I've found a way to make this stuff matter, not just to me, but to a whole lot of other people. I'm calling it the “Stadium solution.” That's the working title of the next book. We'll see if it works.