Slam dunk for Salam Stars: Milwaukee’s all-Muslim girls basketball team appears in novel

In Wisconsin, there are 971 high school basketball teams with more than a half a million players in total. 

But there is only one Salam Stars. 

“I like saying that I’m playing from a Muslim school and it’s an all-girls team and we’ve gone pretty far. We’ve won games. We won conference championships. It kind of shows we’re at the same level as other people,” Aamina Farooq, senior and player on the Stars , told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” 

The basketball team is part of the Salam School district, a private prep school on Milwaukee’s southside. It is one of the largest Muslim schools in the U.S., with enrollment of more than 1,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade. 

The team’s season recently kicked off with an away game Nov. 22. 

When the school opened in 1992 with a student enrollment of 25, the Muslim community in Wisconsin was relatively small. Today, the population has grown to more than 70,000.  

The team became well known around the nation starting in 2019 after they went from a team that casually practiced and occasionally won to highly competitive conference champions. Players have been featured in The Washington Post, CNN and local coverage has been picked up by even more outlets, including USA TODAY. 

Now, the team is in paperback. 

This year, award-winning children’s book author Hena Khan wrote a fictional graphic novel about the team. The novel is called “We Are Big Time.” 

“I was so struck by their poise and their eloquence and the way they were able to really express themselves and what they felt in the moment,” Khan told “Wisconsin Today.” 

“But it was a lot of pressure,” she continued. “And that was one of the things I wanted to talk with them about, privately, was what was that like, getting all that unexpected media attention and having cameras follow you around and what did you feel about the questions you got? And that became part of the story.”

Story follows Wisconsin transplant who becomes co-captain

The fictionalized story is about a character named Aliya, who moves to Milwaukee from Florida. She is an incoming freshman at Peace Academy — a reference to Salam, which means “peace” in Arabic.  

At first resistant and lonely, Aliya eventually finds her place as co-captain of the basketball team.  Similar to the Salam Stars, the team makes headlines for its winning season. 

Khan interviewed teammates about their experiences. She said students were asked if their parents approved of their participation in sports and about things like foreign policy or immigration. 

“Stuff that is so far outside of the scope of high school athletics,” Khan said with a laugh. 

Khan added in some of those awkward experiences. Also included in the novel are positive interactions between players and their families to demonstrate the tremendous amount of support players felt.

According to the players, Khan got it right.  

‘We’re all just basketball players’

Aseel Ishtaiwi, a senior at Salam School, said she appreciated the representation in the novel. 

“I lived some of the things that were going on in the book and it was just like, ‘wow,’ like a ‘wow’ moment that other people can see this book, pick it up, read it and they know more about us and what we do here,” she said.  

Coach Kassidi Macak and the team went to a September book launch in Milwaukee. Macak started coaching in 2016. 

Macak said Coach Jess in the graphic novel is similar to herself. The character has high expectations for the players. The biggest difference in coaching roles is that demand for playing on the real-life Salam Stars is so high that Macak now has to cut players. 

“It’s just the environment that we’ve built as a program since I’ve started,” Macak said. “Everybody wants the same thing. We all know what our goals are for that season and all work together.”

Macak said this year’s roster is full and the team has tough opponents in their conference, including Faith Christian Academy and St. Joan Antida High School. But the Salam Stars are still hoping to take home another conference championship. 

As far as the students, their season started Nov. 22. They absorb the media attention, but once they hit the court, they are focused on the game. 

“There really is no difference, except maybe our attire if you want to say that,” Ishtaiwi said. “We’re just all basketball players.”