ITHACA, N.Y. – The bus is mostly quiet.

After a Sept. 7 victory against Lafayette, the players from the Big Red men's soccer team are occupying themselves in various ways during the three-hour trip back to Ithaca. Some are reading or doing homework. Many listen to music. Others sleep.

But there are also a variety of languages being spoken. Passengers on the bus can hear English, German and Indonesian if they listen carefully enough.

All three are coming from the same mouth.

Senior forward Nico Nissl is on the phone with his parents in Shanghai, China, well across the Atlantic Ocean and in fact much closer to the Pacific. Along with those three languages, Nissl can also speak Mandarin Chinese.

An international student, Nissl came to the United States as a stranger. Though his foreign tongues may not be shared by anyone on the team, Nissl has found that wherever he goes, soccer is always a common language.

“Soccer is really what makes me feel accepted in the community,” he says. “It's played a huge role in wherever I've gone.”

Now, nearly four years after he first came to the United States, Nissl and his Big Red teammates are closing in on what could be an Ivy League championship season. While all the seniors on the roster have come a long way from the 1-15 season the year before they came to Ithaca, only Nissl has physically come a long way – literally from the other side of the world.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

When people ask Nico Nissl where he is from, he has a hard time answering.

“There's usually this awkward pause, and I usually tell them I'm not too sure,” he says. “It's a very hard question to answer.”

Here are the basics: Born in Indonesia to a half-German, half-Austrian father and an Indonesian mother, Nissl moved to Shanghai at age 13 and spent all of his high school in China. Accepted at Cornell, he moved to Ithaca to go to college.

Things get more complicated, though, when you consider that he holds an Austrian passport and considers the town of Bruck am Ziller, Austria, one of his home towns despite never living there.

Even government agencies are confused. On his Indonesian birth certificate, the country lists a middle name. His Austrian passport has a blank spot where a middle name should go.

Though even his legal documents may have some inconsistencies, there is no doubt that soccer was king in Indonesia, the country where he spent the first 13 years of his life.

“On the weekend, on all the TV channels it is just soccer,” says his father, Stefan, via phone from Shanghai. “You can see all the major leagues, Premier League, from Germany, from Spain, even from Mexico. So soccer is a very huge sport in Indonesia.”

With that environment around him, it's easy to see why Nissl picked up the sport. Playing from before elementary school, he quickly developed talent and even got to hone his skills on a full-sized field built on site by his father's company. The field was so renowned in Indonesia that professional teams wanted to have their turn on it.

At age 12, Nissl was good enough to start playing against much older competition, including fully grown adults.

But at 13, Nissl's family moved to Shanghai when his father, who works for an international garment company, changed jobs. His passion for soccer didn't change.

“When we first moved to Shanghai, the first thing he did was to check the internet for soccer clubs in Shanghai,” says Nissl's mother, Emy.

GETTING SCHOOLED

Nissl attended an international school in Indonesia, which helped him pick up English with the Indonesian and German his parents spoke. But when it was time for a move to Shanghai, Nissl switched to an American school and had to learn Mandarin to complete his quartet of languages.

His accent when speaking English is hard to place. Sometimes he'll say a phrase that sounds distinctly British, and other times it's a flawless American accent. Even he gets confused on occasion, adapting his accent depending on who is on the other end of a conversation.

“If I'm speaking to someone from England, I will somehow automatically put on this English slang that you would never hear,” he says. “When we visited Australia, I started speaking in an Australian accent, and my sister just looked at me and she was like, 'What on earth are you doing?' And I said, 'What are you talking about? It's just automatic.'”

Soccer continued to be a huge part of his life in China, where he attended the Shanghai  American School and helped his team win the first conference championship in school history during his senior year. They had battled against other international schools from South Korea, China, Japan and the Philippines, but fell just short in his sophomore and junior year. The tournament victory as a senior, he says, is the greatest soccer moment of his career.

“It was just hard sweat and tears from all four years finally coming together, and you finally see and reap the rewards that you've been working so hard for,” Nissl says.

There may be a similar situation coming for Nissl at the end of this season, his final year at Cornell. But back when he was winning conference championships in Shanghai, he wasn't really considering college soccer as an option. He had played in camps with professional clubs in Germany and Italy, and his father always thought professional soccer was the way to go.

After his junior year of high school, though, American college soccer became an option when he heard good things about Cornell through a high school teacher whose son – David Browning '08 – had been on the Big Red roster.

Nissl and his parents had never been to the United States before, but they made the full-day voyage to Ithaca that summer. He met future teammate Rick Pflasterer at a Cornell camp during that trip and made an impression that Pflasterer still remembers for more than Nissl's bright blue shoes.

“I had heard rumors of this kid from Shanghai who was always relentlessly attacking,” Pflasterer says. “Naturally, that is unsettling as a keeper. In the first 10 minutes of the game, I see him barreling down on me. He was on the left side of the box and ripped the ball past me into the right side netting. I hardly moved. I usually am quick to forget goals against me, but for some reason this one was engraved in my mind; possibly because I thought my career was over.”

Nissl made an impression on the coaching staff as well, and he earned an offer to play for the Big Red. With the promise of a degree from one of the best hotel schools in the world and a chance to keep playing soccer, Nissl was sold.

He showed up on campus the next year essentially knowing no one, but he immediately found family with his soccer teammates.

“I ended up coming here all by myself with two suitcases and a bike,” he says. “You'd think that you feel all alone, but if you've got a team like this who's really supportive of you, it always feels like home.”

HOME SWEET HOME

Though he's still physically far from home, Nissl keeps in touch with his parents over the phone and makes trips back to Austria or China when time affords it. Last summer, he even brought Pflasterer along for the ride and had to school the goalkeeper on appropriate dress in Europe.

“I'm pretty sure he was embarrassed to be around me,” Pflasterer says. “We spent at least a week shopping for a pair of shoes that we both considered reasonable for me to wear.”

Over the last four years, Ithaca has increasingly felt like home for Nissl and his Big Red teammates. Starting with a six-win season their first year, the team has steadily improved and is now on an 11-game winning streak to start the 2012 season.

Nissl has transitioned from an athlete who did not understand the structure or importance of the Ivy League to a player whose focus is solely on the all-important league title and the automatic NCAA berth that would come with it.
Even though he is still far, far from his birthplace – nearly 10,000 miles as the crow flies – and even though his parents are on the other side of the globe, Nissl has found yet another place he can call home at Cornell.