It’s 2 a.m. on a cold, rainy March morning and Rene Ramirez is getting off work. He works to pay his share of the rent in a home he shares with friends. He works the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift two or three weeknights and on weekends at the McDonald’s in Fife.

As he leaves the fast-food restaurant after work, he has about four hours to get home, get some sleep and get up to go to school - and after school - soccer practice.

“I get a little tired, sometimes,” says the 17-year-old student from Lincoln High School. “But, that’s the way it is.”

Ramirez is a member of the high school soccer team that isn’t the best in the city, but they are, according to their coach, the team with the most grit.

“These kids have a mental toughness that dwarfs anybody else in the league,” says Lincoln coach Monte Gibbs, who, before coming to Lincoln in 2004, coached a combined 13 years at Curtis and Lakes.

The Lincoln roster includes kids from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Vietnam, Africa, Kurdistan - many who come from families living under extremely tough economic circumstances.

Under Gibbs, the soccer team has grown from 13 kids in 2004 to more than 40 this year. The school is in a community with many Latin and Central American families and the culture of soccer is appreciated and many kids are attuned to it.

The biggest challenge for Gibbs has been to help the kids get past economic disadvantages and to expose them to the positive influences that can come from being part of a hard-working group whose goal is, simply, improvement.

“We see it over and over again, where a kid has to drop out of soccer because of the economic stresses of his family. He has to work to get a car, or an apartment because things are tough at home, or just to help his family out,” Gibbs said.

“A lot of these families simply can’t afford the expense of their kids participating in sports. There is the insurance, the physicals, the student activity cards.”

Gibbs hunts down shoes for some of his players, finds health facilities willing to do a few free physicals, and has helped them pay for their student activity cards and insurance, without which they would not be able to participate in any sport at their school.

After finishing his workday at McIlvaigh Middle School the other day, Gibbs was off to buy a pair of socks for one of his kids prior to a game against Mt. Tahoma, a game they won, 2-1.

“We are slowly growing the sport here. We are up to 40 kids. We are fielding two teams now, a varsity and a JV. More kids are being attracted because they are hearing from our players that it is a good thing to do, it is fun. And as more kids come out, many who know how to play the game, we are getting better. The better we get, the more kids want to be associated with being a soccer player at Lincoln.”

In addition to shaky economics, Gibbs faces interesting language obstacles.

“We have mostly non-English speaking kids from countries all around the world. It makes communication less than precise,” he says.

That has a direct impact of Gibbs’ coaching style, which primarily involves physically placing the players in situations on the field, like pieces on a chessboard, using a lot of big gestures in place of complicated sentences, setting a play in motion, then stopping it with a whistle to show the players where they need to be.

“Now we are getting players with some skills coming out for the team. So the job for us, as with any soccer coach, is to get the players to understand how to play a distinctive style that fits them,” he says.

Gibbs relies on a small core of experienced players, like Ramirez, to help a young team start to gel.

Ramirez, a senior, whose family moved to Tacoma from Acapulco three years ago, moved out on his own recently into an apartment with friends.

“It’s better this way,” he says. “I’m doing okay with school work, not great. The school work and my job and soccer, it’s a lot, but so far I am managing,” he says, without a hint of gloom.

Ramirez, along with senior goalkeeper Jose Talavera and junior midfielder Gustav Quiroz, sort of look after the team that started five freshmen in the first game.

With coach Gibbs being off-campus during the school day, he depends upon his upperclassmen to keep the younger players on the team on track.

Quiroz has been playing since he was 6 and is one of a handful of Abes players who has played on a select team.

“Some of our guys have experience competing at a pretty high level, and we have some guys who are almost just starting. Sometimes they might want to give up and we tell them to keep trying and try to teach them the right way to do things,” he says.

Talavera, whose family moved from Mexico seven years ago, has been playing the game six years.

“One disadvantage for us is that we don’t play in any jamborees, we just have 13 practices - and not everybody is ready with their physicals and things like that - so we have such a short time to get ready for teams that have been doing that,” he said. “And then you add a lot of young guys, and it is a challenge.”

On the field, Lincoln is competitive.

Gibbs continually reminds them of the tenacious, hard-fought games they have been in, beating quality teams in the Narrows tournament the past two years, despite not making it to districts yet.

“If we play a team that is faster than us, better than us, they should beat us if they are playing smart, probably,” Ramirez says. “But we don’t want to beat ourselves.”

Ramirez, Talavera and Quiroz all say they feel a sense of belonging to something - and they hope that something continues to grow, and they will feel some satisfaction being a part of that.

Ramirez tried to express how important playing soccer is to him. “Without soccer,” he says, leaning forward, turning his palms up. “I don’t know.”

The unfinished thought hangs there - anything but weightless.

At Lincoln High School, there are trophies symbolizing a great sports tradition - state football championships, state basketball championships.

“When those teams were winning, the community around the school was unbelievable. There was a lot of school pride,” Gibbs said.

He would like to one day see a soccer program with that sort of elan.

“Our mission right now is to create an environment that brings more of our kids out to experience this feeling of belonging to something that’s good.”