MORGANTOWN — In America, if someone is brave, we say that they have guts. If they are strong in the face of adversity, they have grit.
Finland has its own word for such qualities in a person: sisu.
WVU defensive line coach Andrew Jackson learned about the word and asked the Mountaineers’ resident Finn, defensive lineman Edward Vesterinen, to explain to the team what it means.
“I think he read about it in a book,” Vesterinen said Tuesday. “He knew what it meant, but he wanted me to tell my teammates what it means. How you need to finish things, how you need to not let people down, how you need to have courage in unexpected situations.”
Sisu does not have a direct English translation, but it is easy enough to grasp the notion of its meaning.
“Sisu is a Finnish word that cannot be translated into English because it involves a lot of words together like courage, relentlessness and not willing to be let down,” Vesterinen explained. “It’s something about always being relentless when you’re faced with an unexpected situation.”
Even easier to grasp is how, in coming to America to play college football, Vesterinen perfectly exemplifies what it means to have sisu.
Like most of Europe, American football is not an overly popular sport in Finland, where Vesterinen was born and raised.
“American football is not very popular,” he said. “Ice hockey, basketball and soccer are the main sports in Finland. The way I got introduced to football was I was watching YouTube and this video comes up, I think it was a big hits compilation, and I thought it was really cool. I looked up the local team in my city and that’s how it started.”
Vesterinen started playing in a 15-and-under league, eventually moving up to the men’s league and playing for the Helsinki Roosters. That is when he discovered that football could become more than just a hobby.
“Initially, I was playing football just for fun,” Vesterinen said. “After a couple years of playing, I started playing with the men’s team and everyone was telling me I need to go overseas to play football because I’m really good at this.”
Prior to 2017, that is likely where Vesterinen’s story would have ended. He could have tried to come to America and play high school football at a boarding school or private academy, but a European player being recruited directly into college football was essentially unheard of.
That was, until former Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Brandon Collier founded PPI Recruits in 2017 and started shining a recruiting spotlight on European talent.
Collier held a camp in Vesterinen’s hometown of Helsinki, where he caught Collier’s attention and eventually joined PPI’s tour of the US.
“It was hard at the beginning; I did not know what I was getting into,” Vesterinen said. “My first offer was to Coastal Carolina but then the coaching staff changed and they dropped me. I didn’t understand how the business world of this went and I was kind of upset. I think Brandon helped me a lot — I could rely on him. It was hard in the beginning to understand what the recruiting process was.”
Like all members of the 2020 recruiting class, COVID disrupted Vesterinen’s plans, to the point where he was worried the door to him playing college football might have been shut forever
“COVID hit and it was very depressing at the beginning because I thought all my dreams were going to be gone,” Vesterinen said. “I had a visit to UMass before COVID happened and after that, I came back home and they stopped talking to me. I thought it was over, they weren’t going to recruit guys from Europe now because of COVID. I just kept working hard and during the summer I had more interest, which led to me coming here.”
Not knowing what he could do, Vesterinen started posting workout videos on Twitter. If nothing else, he figured it would at least allow college coaches to see him.
That eventually helped Vesterinen land a scholarship offer from WVU, where he signed as a member of the class of 2020. Little did Vesterinen know, things would not get easier once he arrived on campus in 2021.
“I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about football, so it was hard at the beginning,” he said. “Back in Finland, I played with big people, older men from 20 to 30 years old. The thing I really noticed at first (at WVU) was the speed. I remember my first rep and I realized how fast the ball is snapped and I had to pay attention to it. I realized the o-line was very quick and agile.”
In addition to the speed of the game, Vesterinen also realized he and his coaches weren’t speaking the same language. Vesterinen speaks fluent English — he said it was easy to learn by watching movies and playing video games. What he didn’t speak was the language of football.
“We were kind of using sign language, drawing stuff on the board trying to figure out what the hell we were saying to each other,” Jackson said last week.
Luckily for Vesterinen, he found support from his new WVU teammates.
“I’ve had a lot of teammates help me, but I would say Jalen Thornton was the guy I could lean on my first year,” Vesterinen said. “He took me under his wing; he taught me how things work here.”
WVU also had a few other Europeans on the roster he could relate to, like tight end Viktor Wilkstrom (Sweden) and linebacker Jairo Faverus (The Netherlands).
“We share the same experience of being far away from home and the hard process of coming up here. There’s something special about it,” Vesterinen said.
Vesterinen has played in 20 games through two seasons at WVU, racking up 17 tackles with three tackles for loss and 1.5 sacks. It took time, but now with two seasons under his belt, Vesterinen has reached a point where he can talk about football as well as anyone.
“Just from a language standpoint and football jargon, he’s now able to understand the game,” Jackson said. “He’s always played hard, but now I think he knows the nuances of the game and he can reciprocate what he’s seeing and what he’s learning back to me and we can have a full football conversation.”
So, when Vesterinen gave a presentation to his teammates about the meaning of sisu last season, he wasn’t only speaking as a Finnish native, he was talking as someone who exemplifies its very meaning.
Courage, relentlessness, staying strong in the face of unexpected adversity — Vesterinen’s football journey has had all of that. The fact that he made it to Morgantown and is now one of only a handful of Finns to have ever played Power 5 college football shows that Vesterinen doesn’t just know the meaning of sisu, he lives it, and he’s brought some of it to the Mountaineers.
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