St. Thomas Aquinas ready to showcase its football talent ‘across the pond’

South Florida’s premier product – high school football – will this week become an American export.

And no tariff can stifle the young men’s excitement about playing overseas.

St. Thomas Aquinas – the three-time national and 16-time state champions from Fort Lauderdale – will on Wednesday face the UK-based NFL Academy international all-star team in London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Kickoff is 6 p.m. local (1 p.m. Broward time) and the game – organized jointly by the NFL and Nike -- will be streamed on YouTube.

“We’re blessed to represent our program and it’s going to be it a memorable moment for everybody,” said Raiders coach Roger Harriott, who is making his first trip to Europe. “This is [a program] that continues to evolve high school football in the right direction. Having a global opportunity to really enhance international athletics is great and for us to be presented the opportunity to be a part of this evolution is a major blessing.”

Phillip Goodrich, a senior linebacker for Aquinas, is most excited about “the experience, enjoying the time there with my guys, having fun. Getting to see all the sights. I’ve never been out of country before, so I’m really looking forward to it.”

The Raiders better have packed their A games. As counterintuitive as it might seem, this could be one of Aquinas’ toughest games of the regular season.

The NFL has invested in growing the game by establishing two academies -- one in London and the other on Australia’s Gold Coast. The team based in England boasts 68 players from 20 countries; more than two-dozen NFL Academy alumni are playing Division I football this fall.

The NFL has invited an American high school team to play in London each of the last three years. NFL Academy beat Erasmus Hall (of New York) in 2023 but lost to De La Salle (California) a year ago.

But this is the first time Aquinas football is playing across the pond, and it comes at a hectic time. It’s the Raiders’ seventh game in 47 days. There’s no road trip in Florida high school football this year is longer than Aquinas’ 8,800-mile roundtrip from MIA to Heathrow.

Plus it’s the middle of the school year. Homework doesn’t end at the water’s edge.

But those were minor impositions for the more than 100 school administrators, coaches, and players who boarded a commercial flight Saturday – less than 24 hours after the Raiders’ 63-0 home victory over Hollywood Hills.

“To take 108 people out of the country is not an easy task,” St. Thomas Aquinas athletic director Twan Russell said. “And there’s a lot of logistical things that we had to overcome.”

Priority No. 1? Getting the school administration onboard with the plan. There wasn’t much time to deliberate; the league extended the invitation in April and based on all the moving parts, needed an answer pretty quickly.

“As a school district, we had to become very comfortable with it,” Russell added. “And I’ll tell you, our leadership, they figured it out.”

Once the school gave the team the green light, the clock started for the dozens of students without a passport to secure the necessary documentation to travel.

Just a handful of Aquinas players had been to Europe before this week. One in four hadn’t even been on a plane. The nine-hour redeye was as foreign as a home loss for the vast majority of these Raiders.

And upon their arrival Sunday, there was no rest for the weary. The NFL invited the Raiders to attend Sunday’s Browns-Vikings game – also held at Tottenham Hotspur – and St. Thomas had to leave for the stadium not long after the transatlantic flight landed.

All of their many regular obligations – school, mass, sleep, practice, and even a youth camp – are even more compressed than usual on this short week. But the adults in charge know the best education for these student-athletes this week waits outside their hotel’s front door.

“It’s going to be an exciting time for our kids,” Russell said. “It’s going to be a rare opportunity for them to experience something they’ve never experienced. It’s going to broaden their horizons.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2025 at 11:55 AM.