‘It means everything:’ Miami Edison girls’ dream season goes far beyond soccer success
The sun has set on a typical weeknight at Little Haiti Soccer Park.
Miami Edison girls’ soccer coach Wilnord Emile is on the phone, deep in conversation while his players slowly arrive to practice.
Only about five or six are here and practice was supposed to start half an hour earlier.
A few others are taking the metro bus from where they live - a few miles away - to get to practice.
Most of Emile’s players often don’t have a ride to or from the park.
One of them realized after arriving at practice that the only cleats she has available to her are two that only fit her right foot.
Emile and his players make due with who and what they have to start the session.
This is a typical day for the remarkable Miami Edison girls’ soccer team.
A team that is making history.
The Red Raiders are undefeated after 16 matches.
On Wednesday night, Edison is playing for a regional championship and the right to go to the state finals for the first time ever when it travels to Davie to play NSU University School at 6 p.m. at AutoNation Field.
“It means everything,” Emile said.
Emile isn’t exaggerating when he says that and speaks of his team’s accomplishments in spite of its struggles.
Lack of proper equipment is just the start of what the Red Raiders constantly have to overcome on and off the field.
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 himself, 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 get her away from the violence and strife that she feared could claim her life.
“She used to stay with one of her mom’s cousins, but he couldn’t stay in Miami anymore,” Emile said. “(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.
“In Haiti right now, 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.’”
Michel keeps in touch with her mother, who coached soccer in Haiti and coached her growing up. Her dream is to earn the chance to go to college and earn the means to bring her mother to the United States.
It’s a dream shared by many of her teammates at Edison, who didn’t have an opportunity to play the sport they loved until recently.
Emile has begun seeing colleges taking an interest in his players such as Florida Memorial University and Florida National University, which had two of its coaches scouting his team’s playoff game last week.
“My mom is so happy that I’ve been able to continue playing,” Michel said in Creole with Emile translating. “I’m working to go to college so I can bring her and my brother over here to be with me.”
The Red Raiders play their games on campus, but the venue does not have lights, keeping them from playing or practicing there after hours.
This is where Little Haiti FC, a club founded in 2014, comes in.
The club, which 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.
Pat Santangelo, a Co-Founder and Board Member of Little Haiti FC, said former longtime Ransom Everglades boys soccer coach Dave Villano spoke with Edison boys coach Gomez Laleau about starting a club for his players. This led to the creation of Little Haiti FC’s club.
Until last year though, Little Haiti FC did not have a girls’ program.
It has since opened the door for numerous girls from the area and several more who have come from Haiti - many of which are on Edison’s roster - to have a place after hours to practice. The club, which has roughly 200 players, tries to provide a place where the local youths can avoid dangerous situations and illegal activities on the streets.
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 Santangelo, a former Public Information Officer for the Florida Highway Patrol. “So they funded the start of a girls’ program.”
The club has drawn support in recent years from soccer organizations and clubs including Inter Miami FC, which has donated soccer balls and equipment in the past. Inter Miami President and Co-Owner David Beckham even visited the club in recent years and interacted with the kids, according to Santangelo. The club also provided one group laptops for use in school.
The club was struck by tragedy in May 2019 when three of its boys’ players, Gedeon Desir, Lens Desir, and Richecarde Dumay, were struck by a drunk driver while waiting for a bus on the sidewalk on Northeast 125th Street, according to reports.
A mural with artist renderings of the victims’ faces was painted on the walls of one of the buildings adjacent to Little Haiti FC’s practice field.
“Sometimes these kids, 16, 17 years old, playing well, but they’re still on the run,” Emile said. “Some of them can’t even go to their house. They walk down the street anything can happen.”
Santangelo helped start Little Haiti FC and has seen it grow despite the challenges of relying on the generosity of local community organizations and high school alums, who have provided support through monetary donations for the players to buy new sneakers or boxed meals.
Emile has coached both boys teams at Edison alongside Laleau and directed the girls’ squad during his time at the school. Laleau directed the Edison boys to regional playoff victories four times from 2008-2012 and more appearances in recent years.
But significant girls’ soccer success at the school didn’t come until this season.
Emile, who has six kids of his own and is still raising his two children (one eight-year old and one five-year old) with his wife along with Michel, coached a squad of only eight players last season. Edison still qualified for the GMAC tournament, known as the annual public school Miami-Dade County championship.
This year, with their largest roster ever, Edison won the GMAC tournament for the first time after beating perennial contenders like MAST Academy and Miami Palmetto. The Red Raiders, who had only advanced to the regional round once in 1990, proceeded to win a district title two weeks ago and won a regional playoff match for the first time this past Friday.
Despite the success, Edison still hasn’t drawn the kind of fan support typically seen by other breakthrough programs in other sports. Part of the reason isn’t lack of interest from the team’s parents and fans, but lack of financial means to attend the games.
During the Red Raiders’ victory this past Friday in penalty kicks in the regional semifinals against Ransom Everglades, one of the most affluent schools in Miami, the majority of the spectators were Ransom parents and supporters.
Many of Edison’s players’ families do not have the means to come to the games or even pay for the $9 tickets to attend.
“About 90 percent of the players of this team haven’t been able to have their parents see them play,” Santangelo said. “Most of the time, we’re just worried about making sure they have food to eat.”
Emile’s squad has often needed to ask the club to use the regulation soccer balls required for each playoff match.
Edison’s struggle recently touched the hearts of some of those parents and players from Ransom Everglades even after they were dealing with the pain of a season-ending defeat.
Word circulated among Ransom’s parents after the game and they privately raised nearly $5,000 in less than 48 hours to help Edison’s soccer team with travel to Davie, equipment and the $9 tickets for Wednesday night’s game.
“We basically just wanted to do something to help,” Ransom Everglades athletic director Scott Berman said. “There’s plans in the future to try to bring them on campus one day within FHSAA rules and provide swimming lessons and do something nice. This goes beyond the game.”
Edison’s girls will strive to make more history on Wednesday night.
A victory over defending state runner-up NSU University School would bring more joy to a team and a tight-knit community that needs it.
It will undoubtedly raise challenges as to how to prepare financially for a trip to Auburndale, Florida, site of next week’s state tournament, a trip Edison High School itself will have to fund.
But the Red Raiders are used to finding a way.
Because for their girls, the impact of this season goes far beyond just soccer.
“Just coming to Edison has been a good thing for me,” Michel said. “Being part of this team and winning with them makes me proud.”
This story was originally published February 13, 2024 at 4:04 PM.
