AFC Toronto gears up for start of historic 1st season next week

Sarah Petz · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 12, 2025 3:14 PM EDT | Last Updated: 6 minutes ago

When AFC Toronto steps onto BMO Field adjacent Saturday, they volition not lone beryllium playing their archetypal location game, but making past arsenic the city's archetypal nonrecreational women's shot club. 

To observe the commencement of the team's inaugural season, the City of Toronto raised the team's emblem astatine metropolis hallway connected Saturday. 

The enactment means the satellite to the squad arsenic they hole to instrumentality the transportation for the precise archetypal time, said Helena Ruken, AFC Toronto's co-founder and CEO. 

"This marks the opening of a caller question successful women's nonrecreational shot close present successful our city," she said. 

Ruken said the infinitesimal has been 2 years successful the making, since the squad was announced arsenic 1 of six franchises successful the Northern Super League, a Canadian nonrecreational women's shot league.

"We've built thing peculiar with unthinkable players, unthinkable unit and supporters, and we can't hold to amusement you all," she said. 

Over the past fewer months, AFC Toronto has unveiled a dependable watercourse of players connected its roster, who came retired Saturday to ticker their team's emblem alert supra metropolis hall. 

For Leah Pais, who's from Mississauga, joining the squad means getting to play professionally person to home. She astir precocious played for Thróttur Reykjavík FC successful Iceland.

"To really spell done the full journey, spell from state to state and to present bash it astatine the property of 23 erstwhile it wasn't a anticipation truthful galore years ago, it's insane," she said. 

"It's specified a privilege and it's specified an honour, and I'm taking each small portion of joyousness ... with maine on for the ride."

Midfielder Nikayla Small said she hopes the league's archetypal play volition animate young girls to instrumentality with the athletics by showing them they person opportunities to marque a surviving astatine it.

"I deliberation for the younger procreation especially, conscionable for them to spot america time in, and time out, to privation to aspire to beryllium similar that is truthful important for their development," she said. 

"I would emotion to beryllium idiosyncratic that a young miss sees and beryllium like, 'I privation to be conscionable similar her.' So I anticipation there's a batch of girls that travel to our crippled and deliberation that."

The squad volition measurement connected to the transportation for their first-ever location lucifer astatine BMO Field connected April 19, wherever they'll look disconnected against Montreal Roses FC. 

The inaugural play for the Northern Super League opens April 16 erstwhile Calgary's Wild FC sojourn Vancouver Rise FC astatine BC Place.

Each squad volition play 25 matches from April to October with the apical 4 advancing to playoffs.