If that sounds like food — and not some of the international players from Southern Methodist University he’ll go up against in a historic Sweet 16 game at Baujan Field on Saturday night — you are right.
It’s some of the Lebanese food he hopes his mom, Samir, is making and bringing him today when she and Ethan’s dad, Raymond, come from Georgia to watch him and his soccer teammates who are making the furthest advancement into the NCAA Tournament in UD program history.
Samir and Raymond were both born in Lebanon and later resettled in North America.
Her family moved to Montreal and his to Chicago. Ethan said his dad got a PhD in engineering and his mom got her law degree.
The couple moved to Georgia in 1999 and raised three sons: Maroun, Connor and Ethan.
As the youngest, Ethan followed his older brothers’ lead and that quickly led him to the soccer pitch.
He said his parents first enrolled him in a soccer program at age 2:
“I couldn’t sit still so my parents would say, ‘Here, take this ball and go play.’
“From the time I was very little, I had an eye for scoring and after that, that’s what I always wanted to do.”
And it’s what he did do, first at Northview High School in suburban Atlanta and then at Georgia State, where he led the team in scoring last season.
He transferred to UD in the spring and now he’s tied for the team lead in goals — he has eight — even though he’s been coming off the bench.
The biggest moment of his soccer career came last Sunday night when he was sent onto the Michigan game with a little over 27 minutes gone and, soon after, his first scoring opportunity was yanked away from him on a questionable no-call.
“I was on a little breakaway and got tugged down,” he said. “I was hoping for a card (on Michigan) but there was nothing. After that I was like, ‘I’ve got to score! I’ve got to prove to them…’”
And he did in the 39th minute when he headed in a corner kick that Geni Kanyane assisted. The goal gave Dayton a 1-0 lead and ignited the record Baujan Field crowd of 2,513.
“For a striker, once one goes in, your confidence grows and it feels like it will easier for a following one to go in, too” he said.
And on this night, he was right again. In the second half — at the 60:20 mark — he scored his second goal on assists by Hjalti Sigurdsson and Felix Buabeng.
The 2-0 margin held as UD goalkeeper Dario Caetano and the defense recorded their fourth straight shutout.
The No. 5 seed Flyers now have ascended to those rarefied reaches only a few UD athletic teams ever have; one of the last and most memorable being the Obi Toppin led, 29-2 basketball team which was ranked No. 3 in the nation and was looking at a No 1 seed in the 2020 NCAA Tournament when the plug was abruptly pulled on the college hoops season because of the COVID pandemic.
This UD team has the same heady promise as those basketball brethren had five years past.
It began in the fifth game of the season when they shut down Indiana 2-0 in Bloomington and then eight games later routed top-ranked West Virginia 5-1 at Baujan Field.
“Going into Indiana — against a big program, a team with such a big history and shutting them down at their own home, something not many teams do there — it was a game where we proved ourselves. And it became something to build on.
“And when we beat West Virginia, 5-1, our mentality changed and it was like, ‘Why can’t WE be the No. 1 team in the country?’”
After the Flyers shut down Saint Louis 3-0 to win the A-10 Tournament and then blanked Michigan, Sassine believes the team mentality morphed even more:
“Instead of just thinking, ‘Why not us?’ it becomes ‘It is us!’
“You need to have a little bit of that mindset this late in the tournament. If you want to win it, you have to believe you can win it and we can if we stay true to what got us here.
“It goes back to the grit of this team and the three structural things our team is built on: energy, communication and intensity.
“We’re such a talented team that if those three things happen, I believe good things will follow.”
Transferring to UD was a ‘no-brainer’
Being recruited during the COVID shutdowns of 2020 altered his college choices, Sassine said.
Campus visits he’d planned to make couldn’t happen and for a while colleges weren’t even reaching out.
He ended up staying close to home and going to Georgia State in Atlanta. He played in all 20 of the Panthers’ games as a freshman, had two game-winning goals and won all-conference honors while also making the Dean’s List.
The following season he was medically redshirted with a sports hernia, but made the Dean’s List again.
Last year he returned and led the team with seven goals.
He then entered the transfer portal and looked for a good academic school where he could be part of an accomplished soccer program that played an attacking style of offense that would showcase his skills and one day help him move on to the professional ranks.
“When I looked at the stats Dayton was a no-brainer for me,” he said. “They always have a high-scoring offense. They’re always top five in shots per year, top five in goals and as a striker that was the attraction. Scoring goals is my job.
“Dayton had just won an A-10 championship. They have guys get drafted every year and they draw good players from everywhere in the world really.”
This season the Flyers roster includes players from 11 different nations and 12 different U.S. states, as well as Puerto Rico.
“All these guys coming from so many different places, it shouldn’t work so well but it does because of what the coaches foster here,” he said. “Everyone gets so bought in when they get here.
“The coaches recruit guys who not only want to play in college, but want to play at the next level, too. They do all the right things to be winners and, off the pitch, they’re good guys. That’s a credit to the coaches, too.”
A holiday full of soccer
Before the Michigan game became his very own highlight reel, the most glorious moment in his soccer career came when the Atlanta Fire U13 club team he was playing on made it to the championship game of the Disney Junior Soccer Showcase at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando.
The prestigious tournament takes place on the weekend after Thanksgiving — his brother played in it before he did ― and draws teams from around the world.
“It was 0-0 in the 90th minute of the title game and about to go into extra time when the ball came across and I came from the back post and managed a bicycle kick for the game winner,” he said.
While he called it “a pretty big deal back then,” it took some prompting on my part to get him to admit that Sunday’s two-goal performance — considering the setting and the history making circumstance — was the “biggest moment on my career…so far.”
Afterwards — whether it was on social media or messages to his phone or people stopping him on campus — he was flooded with congratulatory responses.
Today his parents are scheduled to come in and while they are here to relish what’s happening now, they also reinforce a past Sassine’s very proud of.
Samir and Raymond have made sure their sons know and appreciate their Lebanese roots. Ethan speaks Arabic — along with English, Spanish and he can understand French — and, of course, he loves the food.
“My mom cooks the best Lebanese food,” he said with a grin. “She’ll FaceTime me now and show me what they’re eating, and I get jealous.
“What I love most was on weekends we used to have the Lebanese grill and there’d be shish kabobs and skewers and there’d be a table spread with everything like hummus and baba ganoush and so many things. For my birthday dinner that’s what I’d have.
“This week my mom’s bringing a bunch of dishes for me. There’ll be things like kibbeh and tabbouleh, and more traditional things like kousa and grape leaves .
“I can reheat those dishes, so I’ll be eating good for a while.
“While they’re here, I’ll take them to dinner Friday, and then Saturday’s the game.
“We joked that our Thanksgiving weekends have changed. It’s still about soccer, but the celebration has moved from Disney to Dayton.
“And this is the best it’s ever been.”
This time he wasn’t talking about the Kibbeh…Tabbouleh…Fattoush.
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