GMC kicker shares childhood, journey to America

Published 3:37 pm Friday, September 22, 2017

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — Before Yaroslav Sherling came to the United States, he knew about as much about America as he had gathered through movies and pop culture.

“When I was watching the movies and TV and stuff, I saw these big cities, and I imagined the United States as a huge, big city with a bunch of taxis and stuff,” said Sherling, the Georgia Military College freshman and starting kicker for its junior college football team. “Then I came here to a country place and said ‘Oh, this is nice!’ … It’s different than I thought it would be, but it’s a good difference.”

For the past 3 ½ years, Sherling has lived with his adopted family in McDonough, 5,000 miles away from his native Ukraine. While today his American parents, Karol and Mark, and his three siblings, Alyssa, Madeline and Andrew, provide him with all the love and support one could want, things were not always so easy for the lanky placekicker.

“I grew up in Kirovograd, Ukraine, and when I was small my mother got separated from my dad because she was an alcoholic,” said Sherling. “My dad married another woman and had a kid with her, so my mom, because she was addicted to alcohol, tried to find a job. I had two sisters that were with me at that time, and my sisters went to my grandmother’s house because she was in a good position with having money at that time. I didn’t want to go to her because I was ‘mom-sick’. I was afraid that anything could happen to my mom, so I said ‘I’m going to stay with her wherever’.”

Through most of Sherling’s early childhood, his mother struggled to find full-time employment to provide for her and her son. After years of his mother working part-time jobs and struggling to make ends meet, one day Sherling received an unexpected visit from agents with the Ukranian government. 

“For the first couple of years, I had to live outside because my mom didn’t really have room for me,” he recalled. “In 2009, I think, the people from the government came to my mom’s sister’s house where I was at the time and they took me to an orphanage, which was a good idea, I think. If I would never have [gone] to an orphanage, I wouldn’t be here right now. The orphanage was my opportunity in Ukraine.”

For the next six years, Sherling dealt with bullying and the anxiety of being separated from his family. One day, when he was nearly 17, he got a call from a strange woman in the United States telling him she would be traveling to Ukraine to visit him.

“I didn’t speak English well at that time, but she called me on the phone and said [she and my dad] would be coming soon to Ukraine. I was like ‘Oh really? For what?’, and she was like ‘We’re adopting you’,” he said. “I came for the first time to the United States for 21 days during Christmas of 2013. My last day here when they took me to the airport, my mom asked me in the car: ‘Do you want me to adopt you?’ I honestly didn’t know what the heck that word meant, but I knew she asked me a question and she was smiling, so I thought it had to be something good. I said ‘Yeah, sure’ and she said ‘OK’.”

From the moment Sherling’s American family took him in, he has slowly but surely adjusted to life in the U.S. A lifelong soccer player, Yaroslav, or “Yaro’, as he’s known to teammates, discovered a talent for kicking American footballs. Now able to hit a 55-yard field goal, he hopes to continue kicking at a Division I program after GMC, something he would have been hard pressed to accomplish in Ukraine. Although he stays in contact with Marayana, one of his sisters, Yaro said he could never replace the sacrifice the Sherlings have made for him.

“My parents did the biggest job,” he said. “They took a lot of time from their [biological] kids leaving them in the United States while they travelled to Ukraine for all the paperwork, and just the amount of money they spent on me makes me understand how important I was to them. I’m really grateful for what they did.”