Joy On The Pitch

On a schoolyard pitch in the west end of Toronto, there’s a match about to happen. At least that’s the sentiment from people passing by, idling their cars on the adjacent street to look or, as the group met earlier that morning at their neighbourhood coffee shop, querying them over cortados. The summer of soccer has just started, so the sight of people lacing boots and pulling on matching kits sparks added attention.

The outside interest isn’t unwelcome. It’s part of the reason why the two soccer clubs — Cold Sand and Beaconsfield Academy — meeting were founded in the first place: to drum up wider enthusiasm in a sport that is, in most other countries, the most popular by default. Still, the mood on the field runs casual, closer to the road bikes leaned haphazardly up on the chainlink at one end or the squirrels, going about their routines in the trees ringing the turf. There’s excitement too, banter and ribbing as both groups take up their positions; the thin, gold light of morning flashing on smiles and chains tucked away into jerseys, but all in all the next 90 minutes, competitive as it will be, is mostly just friends, kicking about.

This particular patch of astroturf — tucked between apartment towers on one side and a school and community centre to the other — is familiar to every player on it, but perhaps none more than Richard Smith. Co-founder of Beaconsfield Academy, Smith and his partner in the club, Theo Gibson (just then busy playing keeper), borrowed the name from The Beaconsfield, a Queen West bar run by Smith’s wife that he lived above. Gibson lived across the street.

“When we started to play football here, we’d meet there and come on down,” Smith says. “When [the bar] closed, that became the name of the club, like a tribute.”

The Beaconsfield Academy, affectionally called Beacs, started in 2016 with just eight people. “Some days there’s three, some days just two people showed up, but it grew and grew, up to about 50 people,” Smith recalls. The community came to envelop the neighbourhood their favourite field was in, with kids from the adjacent apartment buildings of Little Tibet taking notice and showing up to play.

Smith, who grew up in Northern Ireland and spent years coaching soccer all over the U.S., has seen firsthand the growth of the sport in Toronto. He points out most public parks have "football nets going up now rather than the baseball diamonds”. Kids in Canada don’t yet play from sunrise to sunset like he did, but the potential is what made him and Gibson want Beacs to mirror the European football academy systems, with developmental as much as community components.

“That’s what the academy was for, to help people. We did a couple days training, drills, never charged anything, it was always free, always for the community,” Smith continues. There are kids who’ve improved so much that he wants to connect them with Toronto FC, and other players who branched out to start their own clubs like the friendly rivals that morning, Cold Sand.

Born outside of Stuttgart, Germany, in the small town of Bietigheim-Bissingen, Michael Wagenknecht, or Wags as he’s known around the pitch, has been competing since he was three. His father enrolled him in a higher age group and Wagenknecht says he cried in his first match, but soon found his competitive feet. His family moved to Kitchener and eventually Toronto, where Wagenknecht played in TFC Academy. On a soccer scholarship to Penn State, Wagenknecht suffered a groin injury. He had surgery, but wasn’t able to recover to the same competitive level.

“It was tough because I couldn’t play anymore. Mostly because I was playing at a high level, and I was so intense about it. I played every day. So mentally it was tough, after, to have it gone,” Wagenknecht recalls. “Every time I was around it I was still getting over not being able to play.”

It was a long, lonely path for Wagenknecht to get back to the pitch, since being around the game stirred up negative feelings. He thought he was done with it for good when a friend invited him to a pickup game in Toronto. He doubted his ability but showed up, “And from there I was back in love with it, right away.”

“Once I accepted it, this was the best thing,” Wagenknecht smiles, motioning to the field where his club is up 4-2 at the half. “It was a void that had been missing.”

The entire sequence made Wagenknecht realize how many people were in similar situations. Maybe they’d played as kids, or competitively in college like he had, but for whatever reason — life, work, getting older — the game, and the subsequent community it created, took a backseat. It was the impetus to start Cold Sand (the name is a play on Toronto’s climate and Wagenknecht’s love of the beach) five years ago, an endeavour that now includes the Dundas West cafe, Sonndr, as a kind of informal clubhouse where the team and people who are interested can get together. Some of Cold Sand’s players come as far as Whitby and north Etobicoke, all have busy lives and careers, and all still find time to play as much as they can.

“Basically [Wagenknecht’s] the convenor of everything,” Leshorn Woods-Henry says, recounting how the club’s Tuesday and Thursday runs, a mix of 7 v 7s and 11 v 11s, work. “He has us all in a group chat, he’ll let us know when we gotta show up and play.”

Woods-Henry has been playing soccer since he was five when his mom, desperate to find an outlet for her son’s energy, put him on a team coached by his uncle. Now working as a plumber, he met Wagenknecht during Covid when he invited him out to a pickup run. Going stir crazy the same as everyone else, he happily agreed, and has been playing in the club ever since.

“The game’s always been like a meditation for me,” Woods-Henry says, “When you’re on the field, you zen out.”

Roberto Galle, a midfielder in the club who everyone calls a star, met Wagenknecht in 2012 when he messaged him to come to a game. Galle credits the club and its games as less of an escape than a refresh. “You go about your daily business and you come here, do something you like and take your mind off of things, and you’re refreshed to start it all again tomorrow,” he says.

Galle was already playing as much as he could — he’d grown up the youngest of three brothers who all played soccer, and is admittedly competitive — but found himself rearranging his already demanding schedule as a Toronto District School Board custodian, taking on day shifts to free up his evenings, to make it out to more runs. Asked if he’s ever felt the crunch that can come with juggling work and life and Galle shakes his head with a smile.

“It’s seamless,” he says. “I’ll always take the chance to sweat because I know one day I won’t be able to play, or play as much. I want to enjoy it as it’s here.”

That seamlessness, or easy prioritization, is a common thread that comes up throughout each of the morning’s conversations. None of the players in either club, many in multiple leagues, find it much of a sacrifice to find time to play.

“The time for soccer is just there,” Chelsey Roy, a lawyer who plays up to five days a week, laughs. “It feels too important — I just don’t know what else I would do.”

Roy has played competitively since she was a kid in New Brunswick, and having moved around a lot in her adult life, credits the game as being the main conduit for finding community. In every city, to get acclimated, the first thing she’d do was sign up for a rec soccer team. Since moving to Toronto, that sense of community intensified when Roy found a dedicated women’s team — Toronto High Park FC — and, as she puts it, “her people". Roy mentions a WhatsApp group of around 650 members, all women, who play in the city and post regular requests for team subs, plus other events. She acknowledges the beneficial fitness element intrinsic in playing, but for Roy, the most meaningful aspect as she’s gotten older is finding so many like minded people.

It’s clear that community is the undercurrent running through Beacs, Cold Sand, and anyone who counts themselves as part of the wider net of Toronto soccer. Despite the “reams and reams of teams” Beacs’s Smith stresses there are in the city, Woods-Henry, Galle and Roy agree it’s “big, but small at the same time.” For Wagenknecht, that was the design of Cold Sand, a club that tapped into the familiarity of the community to make games competitive, but also keep them accountable.

“I think it’s the replication of a real team atmosphere, where you see committed people who are positive, like-minded, and laugh. Having that consistency, knowing what it’s going to be like, no negative experiences — there’s times when people play in these leagues and take out frustration from their regular day life — we try to take out, if we have any, our frustrations with positive energy,” Wagenknecht explains. “If it ever gets negative, as a group we control that and make sure it doesn’t get to that point.”

Even watching a friendly match, that part is evident. As players sub out and catch their breath on the sideline they take turns calling plays and encouragement to everybody still in motion on the field. Before the game got underway, players gathered around phones to watch the early Euro match, and after, everyone walked north to The Dog and Bear, a pub on Queen West that Smith runs, to watch the next game over a few drinks.

“I think it’s like any team sport, you have to leave everything off the pitch and then come together as a team on the pitch. It doesn’t really matter what your values are off the field necessarily, you just have to make it work. You have to learn to communicate, you have to learn to be generous, be respectful — with your team and the other team — but especially amongst your own team,” Roy says, when asked why soccer seems to be such an equalizer.

“We’re lucky to have good people. At the end of the day it’s up to each individual to make the greater good. But I think when a new player comes in, they realize it’s not going to fly to be the star. Everyone’s in this together, helping off the field. It’s a mentality thing,” Wagenknecht adds.

Beyond cohesion on the field — there’s a very simple pleasure in watching people who are skilled at sport set their bodies loose within it — and the shared language between athletes off of it, there’s a sense of continuity in both the clubs that met there. Cold Sand came about in its own unique way, but splintered off from Beaconsfield Academy, and Beacs, also unique in its origin, was a replication of what came before. At least that’s how Gibson sees it, when asked if he recognizes what he and Smith started.

“Growing up in Toronto I remember there were other clubs, even in my dad’s generation, that existed. You had clubs like Ebony, like Toronto-Croatia, and a lot of these clubs were always a representation of the people who were here and their love for football,” Gibson says. “To me, the reason we did it was not to be like, no one else is doing this, but that this exists everywhere else, why are we not doing it?”

Gibson, who now lives in New York City, says while it’s bittersweet to see from afar he’s proud that clubs like his and Cold Sand continue to grow. Smith had the same sentiment, remembering when, early on, he and Gibson had to cut out of a practice early and glanced back as they drove away only to be hit with the realization of, We did this.

“With any interest, any passion, there has to be some people who create a narrative and the people who continue that narrative. It’s nice to know you can start a spark and someone can continue growing that flame,” Gibson says. “The sum of all these clubs is a good reflection on the tapestry of Toronto. When you have these different soccer clubs and social clubs, it allows us to feel like what’s our version of football here? What’s our experience from a Toronto perspective?”

Though no one in the span of the morning draws the explicit comparison, there’s another apt, even simpler parallel to the sense of community, devotion, continuity and even competition on display. A parallel that Tagwa Moyo, a photographer with the knack for popping up everywhere on the pitch there’s action unfolding, alludes to when he jokes a few times that “Football is a feeling, and sometimes that feeling is pain” (or joy, or fear). Because it’s clear the feeling is never just one thing and in that, a feeling that runs closest to love. Like love, it finds its basis in an infinitesimal number of people, nuances, lessons, luck, timing and actions. Like when, during a long Covid winter, both these groups shovelled snow with flimsy shovels from a pitch in Toronto’s Beaches just to get a run in. Or how they borrow each other’s gestures on the field, adapting and melding their styles to compliment each other.

Like love, theirs is a language of consistent communication on the field, inside jokes off of it; the end goal, with enough growth, is for what they’ve made to eventually exist independent of only one person.

"It doesn’t matter whose ball it is or who’s running the experience, we just all want to go play,” Gibson says with a widening smile, “That’s the simple form of it. It’s just football at the end of the day.”