Alex Riggi’s face breaks into a wide grin, his speech picks up pace and his overall contentment becomes more and more obvious with every syllable that comes out of his mouth.

It’s early in Valour FC’s training camp and while the wind howls and the snow swirls outside the Winnipeg Soccer Federation South complex, no one among the gathered is soaking up and enjoying every nanosecond more than Riggi, the 28-year-old midfielder/attacker.

There are no bad days on the soccer pitch, Riggi will insist. And when the game is taken away for a long stretch due to a serious of injuries and unfortunate events, well, let’s just say he learns to cherish all the little things.

A sample of that is here in this clip — https://valourfc.canpl.ca/video/alessandro-riggi-training-camp-feb-15 — where Riggi not only raves about IG Field and Valour’s workout facility, but the breakfast and lunch provided daily for the team. Heck, he even raves about his kit being washed every day, the cubby assigned to him to store his stuff and the free protein shakes at his disposal.

Appreciative? Heck yeah.

“You hit that spot on. That’s the biggest blessing,” began Riggi in a chat with valourfootball.club. “I tell myself during the offseason when the days are long, ‘I can’t wait to go back. I’m so lucky.’

“One day – not because of an injury but just because it’s time to stop – this will be over. I got a taste of what that’s going to be like and I’m definitely not ready for that. Every time I get to put on the boots, I try to enjoy it.”

Riggi’s taste of life without football came during a long stretch during the 2018-19 seasons when he suffered a torn ACL, MCL and meniscus in his left knee all on one play while suiting up for the USL’s Phoenix Rising.

“Do I remember the injury? I can’t get it out of my head. It’s there forever, for sure,” he said. “It was the ninth minute of the game, and I got the ball in our offensive third, on my left foot, and there was a player in front of me, so I shook to one side and pushed toward the inside and as I did he followed me and just tugged my jersey a small enough.

“But it was just enough that when I planted my left foot my knee buckled super-fast and as I went down all I heard, in a rhythm was ‘Clock, clock-clock’ and I knew it wasn’t good.”

Riggi had season-ending surgery a month later and for the first three months he was making progress in his recovery. Then came a series of complications with his knee, with the calves and shins on both legs.

“Stuff just wasn’t working properly and to this day we don’t really know why,” he explained. “We did all the tests you could possibly name – heart tests, lung tests, body tests, scans, x-rays, cold tubs, hot tubs, massages, acupuncture… the list just keeps going.

“I’m a very humble person, but honestly speaking I think 99 percent of people would have quit with what I’ve gone through. I had issues with my legs for 3 ½ years and after my surgery didn’t play for almost three-four years – not a single minute, not a single practice. But there’s just something about the game that always pulls me. I tried quitting during that period, mentally, for about two days but there was like this magnetic force that wouldn’t let me let it go.

“That journey made me uncomfortable, but I grew a lot. I had to get outside my comfort zone every single second of the day.”

The combination of physical setbacks led to some mental challenges, too. There can be dark days in rehabilitation for an athlete – especially when there is little sign of progress.

Riggi lived all of that, and then some, during his recovery where the days, weeks – months, even – of a man’s career just slip away before his very eyes.

“It was constant. You go to training, and you see guys and they’re happy which is normal because we have the best job in the world. But every day you have to watch them train, you have to watch them be happy doing what they love,” Riggi explained. “You have to watch them win games, lose games and you have no say as to how it plays out in any outcome. You can’t help them in any way, and you’re isolated 24-7.

“Every day, every single day, is like a new challenge. You’ve got to learn to walk again. You have to learn to jog and run again. You have to learn to lift again, to get your knee extension back… there were so many steps to get to the end goal. I was completely fine with that, but it was when the unexpected came and I’d wake up from one day to the next and had extreme amounts of pain where I could even stand or do stairs or even walk, let alone watch and think of playing football again.

“It was not just having to deal with an ACL-MCL-meniscus injury and all the tests in the world, it was just a lot to handle.”

Even in the darkest moments Riggi was pushed by his desire to return to the pitch. He read a lot of motivational books and searched for the motivational stories of other athletes who overcame challenges to succeed.

“Luckily, I mustered up enough strength every day, bit by bit, with the support of your loved ones – and luckily I found a good girl, as well – and it was just enough to keep my head above water to start seeing some light,” he said.

“I just couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and I didn’t want the end of my career to be an ACL injury. I didn’t want that to be my last moment on the field with everything I’ve gone through, including leaving home at 14 years old and venturing the world because of this game. I wasn’t ready to say, ‘OK, that was my last moment in this game.’”
Ultimately, his return to play came with the HFX Wanderers during the 2020 Island Games and he played 17 matches with the club again last season. It was during this offseason, just as he was contemplating an opportunity with another team, that Riggi took a call from Valour FC boss Phillip Dos Santos, whom he had known during his days playing in Quebec and as an assistant coach for Canada’s U-20 squad at the 2013 Francophone Games.

“The timing was perfect,” said Riggi, “because we had one other opportunity we were almost finished going with — not in the CPL – and when this came and knowing Phil and his professionalism and this project he’s got going here it was a no brainer to let the other one go and here we are today.”