News > Immigration In Minnesota
Soccer? You betcha!
Posted on Sep 19 2017
When Edel Fernandez arrived in Minnesota, he came with a college degree and work experience. According to the Pew Research Center, that puts him among the 21st century immigrants, who are “the most highly educated in history.” New immigrants today are more likely to have college degrees than people born in the United States.
In the 1990s, Fernandez was working in a university in Guanajuato, Mexico. That’s when he met a foreign exchange student who stayed with his parents, a college student from Minnesota. “Katie was convinced she needed to bring back a souvenir,” he jokes, “and that’s why I am here!”
When he moved to the United States in 2000, he went to an employment agency to look for work. “After they looked at my resume and noticed that I was fluent in English, they hired me,” he recalls. His English was very good, he says, but “I had to work on my uff da and you betchas!”
Soon he was recruited away from his first job by the WorkForce Center in Willmar. After a while, he “got promoted from employment coordinator to migrant labor representative.” That seemed a strange choice, since the city he comes from is three or four times the size of Boston, and he had no experience with either agriculture or migrant labor.
“I think I got it by default because I looked to them like a migrant farmworker,” he says. Nonetheless, his work made the Willmar office number one in the state for matching jobs with people, and “they sent people from Chicago to audit us because they couldn’t believe our success rates.”
Still, he missed working in a university setting. When Ridgewater Community College started a soccer program, he saw a chance to combine his passion for soccer with a connection back to higher education. Coaching took him from Willmar’s Ridgewater to Austin’s Riverland, where he now combines soccer coaching with advising students in programs that include Cycles for Success and the Be Your Best Summer Academy.
“We have seen a 94 percent success rate over 11 years in the summer academy,” he says proudly. That means students ages 16-22 successfully completing the program and going back to high school or on to college in the fall.
Soccer remains his passion, whether playing, coaching, refereeing, or watching. His team at Riverland has international students from around the world, Chile to Montenegro. Last year the team made the play-offs for the regional championship, placing second in Region 13 of the National Junior College Athletic Association.
He lives in Owatonna with his wife, who teaches in middle school there, and their “three beautiful daughters,” ages six to 13. “It has been very eye opening to raise three bicultural girls,” he says. “Unfortunately, because of the political world we live in, we have been exposed to many things that I don’t wish my kids were experiencing.”
Edel misses his parents and brother, who live in Mexico — “I’m the only crazy one who lives in this winter wonderland” — but the family has visited Mexico often.
“I have always thought you become what you are surrounded by,” Edel says, and he loves the energy of the young people he works with every day.