Former Sheridan star finds home with TFC
Edwards focused on school until dream season put pro career on fast track
“He has this switch; when it was game time, you knew Raheem was going to come out.” ANDREW SEURADGE SHERIDAN BRUINS COACH
Local boy signs with local club.
It’s not an unheard of concept, not least for Toronto FC, whose roster includes players from Mississauga, Brampton, Scarborough, Newmarket and Toronto proper.
But even by the Reds’ standards, Raheem Edwards’ story is uniquely local.
The 22-year-old midfielder grew up representing Erin Mills Soccer Club in Mississauga, a small but entertaining player familiar with winning provincial championship and on the national team’s radar, if never officially identified during his youth club years.
Come time for college, Edwards wasn’t NCAA bound like so many Major League Soccer youngsters. Instead, he followed another future Red, Mo Babouli, to the much closer Sheridan College, the main goal being to get an education.
“I always wanted to be a professional soccer player,” Edwards told the Star earlier this month, after signing a first-team contract following two seasons with Toronto FC II. “But I didn’t seem to really grasp it at that time, that I could possibly play. Nothing really fell for me to say, per se, that I could possibly make this my profession.”
Until he got the call from then-Canadian men’s national team coach Benito Floro, which came during Edwards’ first — and ultimately only — season at Sheridan, as the left-footed midfielder led the Bruins to a Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association national championship in 2014. Coach Andrew Seuradge remembers Edwards as a coachable young player with raw speed who, at the beginning of his college career, had lost some passion for the game he loved and was questioning what to do with the rest of his life.
He was also the kind of player who could play at a high level at any position.
“He has this switch; when it was game time, you knew Raheem was going to come out,” Seuradge said.
It didn’t take long for Seuradge to believe Edwards had a future in soccer past Sheridan.
“During the season, it was phenomenal,” he said. “Every game he got better and better and better to the point where he probably was the best player at the national level. He started believing in himself again and believing that he could go professional.”
It was at Sheridan, Edwards said, where everything started to click. Word got out and Floro came knocking, which turned into a tryout with the Reds and an outing with Canada at the 2015 Pan Am Games the following summer.
A whirlwind two years later, Ed- wards was scoring occasional call ups to TFC’s first team.
This pre-season was something of a make-or-break outing for Edwards, who was talked about as one of the academy players ready to make the jump to the senior team.
He proved that readiness in one fell swoop during Toronto’s last pre-season game against the Chicago Fire in Tampa in February, when he caught up to notoriously quick striker David Accam on a breakaway and muscled him off the ball. Edwards knows it was a moment that made heads turn.
“I didn’t think I was going to catch up to him and I did,” Edwards said. “I was shocked myself when I had the ball. I passed the ball and I was like, ‘Wow, that just happened.’”
He caught eyes again in Toronto’s last match against the Vancouver Whitecaps, his first as a signed member of the first team, when he earned an assist in just 15 minutes of playing time.
Edwards will hope to get that chance again on Friday, this time in front of a home crowd in his hometown, a point of pride for the youngster.
“(Toronto FC defender Justin Morrow) told me how it’s amazing, how he wishes he could represent his hometown, he wishes he could have the feeling of representing his home city,” Edwards said. “I’m very, very humbled by the opportunity that I get to continue to play at home, which not a lot of players get to do.”