Miami Edison girls’ soccer wins Miami Herald’s Leo Suarez/Walter Krietsch Courage Award
Most sports teams face adversity.
Sometimes it’s on the field. Sometimes, it’s off of it.
Many on the Miami Edison girls’ soccer team faced adversity every day from the moment they woke up and long before they set one foot on the soccer field.
Homelessness. Lack of proper equipment to play the sport. Lack of transportation.
Sometimes even the lack of proper nutrition.
And yet, the Red Raiders made history this season.
Edison’s girls won their first GMAC championship, went unbeaten in its first 16 matches, and won its first two regional playoff games in program history.
And they may just be getting started.
For their courage in dealing with both real-life and sports-related challenges, the Miami Herald is recognizing the Red Raiders as this year’s recipients of the Leo Suarez/Walter Krietsch Courage Award.
The annual award is named after two former Miami Herald Sports Editors who passed away well before their time, and it is bestowed upon individuals or groups in the South Florida high school sports community who, like them, showed extraordinary courage in the face of adversity.
Under the tutelage of their longtime coach Wilnord Emile, this year’s Class 4A-2A Miami-Dade Girls’ Soccer Coach of the Year, Edison defied the odds to advance to the Class 3A regional finals.
Although their dream season ended with a 2-0 road loss to NSU University School in Davie, the accomplishment meant everything for Edison.
Nine of the 17 players on Edison’s team, comprised entirely of Haitian players, ended up homeless after they emigrated from their home country in recent years.
They live with parents of teammates or coaches who have become their legal guardians.
Emile, a coach at Edison the past 22 years who works as a security guard at the school, took in senior defender Ketchmay Michel, whose mother stayed behind in Haiti after her sending her daughter to Miami to flee the violence and strife that plagues their home country.
“(Michel) came up to me one day and said, ‘Coach, I have no place to sleep.’ I had to call my wife and I told her, ‘We have a situation.’ As parents, we couldn’t let that happen. When we eat, she eats. I’m trying to get her into college so she has a future,” Emile told the Herald earlier this year. “In Haiti, there are a lot of kidnappings right now. You could be sitting in your house and take a bullet and not even know where it came from. There’s gangs who will try to have sex with these girls not even caring what age they are. As long as they have a visa, their parents would rather see them come here than see them die so they buy a ticket and send them here.”
“With Ketchmay, it’s not easy, but I make sure I make it easy. At first, my other kids were like, who is Ketchmay? And I told them, ‘That’s your sister.’”
The Red Raiders play their games on campus, usually in the afternoon since the venue does not have lights. Often, his players need equipment as basic as proper cleats to be able to play the sport or to be able to practice after hours. Often, his players must take the bus to get there with no one at home able to take them back and forth.
Little Haiti FC, a club founded in 2014 that operates out of Little Haiti Soccer Park, allows youths from the local community to participate in the program free of charge and has teams comprised of players as young as age 4 to early 20s, who compete on their UPSL (United Premier Soccer League) team, currently ranked No. 1 among squads in that league.
The club assists Edison’s players and has become a haven to help them play the sport, graduate high school, and potentially land college scholarships to further their education and playing careers at the next level.
Since the club’s inception, every one of its alums have graduated high school and roughly 80 percent of them have gone on to attend college.
“The Miami Rotary Club came here to give us a few soccer balls and they saw a bunch of girls here but not practicing. They asked why we didn’t have a team,” said Pat Santangelo, a Board Member and Co-Founder of Little Haiti FC, earlier this year. “So they funded the start of a girls’ program.”
Emile coached both boys teams at Edison alongside Gomez Laleau and directed the girls’ squad. Significant girls’ soccer success at the school didn’t come until this season.
This year, with their largest roster ever, Edison beat perennial contenders like MAST Academy, Miami Palmetto and Ransom Everglades.
Edison’s struggles inspired even rivals to try and help out as parents and players from Ransom Everglades privately raised nearly $5,000 in less than 48 hours to help the Red Raiders with their trip to Davie for the regional final.
“Just coming to Edison has been a good thing for me,” Michel said before the regional final. “Being part of this team and winning with them makes me proud.”
