We have one of your own on our Football team this year.

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1. that website can’t be accessed inside the EU because it doesn’t comply with GDPR.

2. MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) — Eddie Vesterinen started playing football in Finland when he was about 14 years old, which would be considered a little bit late if he’d grown up in a West Virginia hollow or a cornfield in Iowa or on a farm in Wisconsin or near a Florida beach or in view of the Golden Gate Bridge in California.

   But the junior defensive lineman they simply call “Eddie V” lists his hometown as Helsinki, Finland, and, he points out:

   “American football is not very popular in Finland. Ice hockey, basketball, soccer are the main sports.”

   So how does a kid from Finland wind up battling for a starting job on the West Virginia defensive line?

   Let’s just say it wouldn’t have happened without YouTube and Twitter; without a dream that drove him from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean to America and without what the Finns call “sisu,” a word that has no Finnish to English definition but which may best be described as “stick-to-it-ness.”

   Eddie V’s story began one day as he was watching YouTube.

   “A video compilation popped up,” he said as he met with the Mountaineer media for the first time Tuesday. “It was a video compilation of big hits, and I thought, ‘Wow! This is pretty cool. I’d like to do this.’ That’s how it started.”

   He was hooked from the moment he saw what went on in an American football game.

   He began playing football for fun in a youth league, but after a couple of years, he joined a men’s team. He must have been good, because, “Everyone was telling me, ‘You need to go overseas.’ That’s how I got into having dreams like this,” he said.

   The dream led him to Brandon Collier, the man who started PPI Recruits, which markets European prospects to U.S. colleges.

   “I got involved with Brandon Collier, who had a camp in Helsinki. There were people who contacted me and said I could go to the camp. I did well. I ran fast, was pretty agile, and he saw I was pretty good, so that’s how he got me onto the tour to the United States,” Eddie V. said.

   Normally, recruiting is a tough enough endeavor, but doing it from Europe added a new dimension, and the timing, shall we say, was anything but good.

   “I did not know what I was getting into. My first visit was to Coastal Carolina, but the coaching staff was fired and they dropped me. I didn’t understand how the recruiting business world worked and was kind of upset, but I kept working, and Brandon helped me a lot.”

   So, too, did Twitter.

   “I think Twitter helped me market myself. Twitter makes the world much smaller. Coaches can actually see my video and my workouts. That was the most important way I got in front of coaches,” he said.

   In 2020, he had scheduled a trip to UMass, but, you might remember, COVID screwed up everyone’s schedule and life.

   But first, there was a stint in the military for Vesterinen.

   “After high school, I had to do my military service. In Finland, you have to do it, and I wanted to get it out of the way. You have to do it before 30,” he said. “I went to a special sports unit, and they gave me the possibility to train and go to practice.

   “Then COVID came, and at the beginning, it was very depressing because I thought all my dreams are going to be gone. I was to visit UMass before COVID happened, and then the COVID came and they stopped talking to me. I thought it was over, that they wouldn’t recruit people from Europe then,” he said.

   But he kept working, and WVU, which was scouring the world for recruits and getting heavily into the foreign market, turned to Collier, who set it up.

   So Vesterinen was playing a new game to him on a level he didn’t know, in a new land, learning a new language.

   Learning English was far easier than learning football.

   “English is not that hard to learn because of all the movies I look at, all the games I play, they are in English,” he said. “I liked ‘Forrest Gump.’ That was a good one.”

   Learning football was harder.

   “I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about football,” he said, an admission that we’d all like to hear some fans make. “It was hard at the beginning.”

   But that’s where “sisu” came in.

   Now his football is ahead of his English, which is solid.

   “Eddie V. is a dog, man,” head coach Neal Brown said the other day. “I love that guy. He can play. He has the same energy every day. He’s consistent. He works extremely hard and has a great motor. That’s one of the best compliments I can give a defensive lineman.”

   He’s good enough that his mother, who didn’t know much about American football, stays up until 2 or 3 a.m. to watch him play now when the games are on in Finland, and she understands there are four downs to make 10 yards and is catching onto the basics.

   They have accepted his departure from home to chase his dream.

   “I had to show my parents I was willing to take the steps to be independent and chase my dreams and maybe step aside from their shelter and experience new things,” he said.

   His parents have not yet been to the United States, but he’s hoping they come soon, and he is making a trip home this summer, although the Americanization of Eddie V. is going just fine.

   “I like the long summer. Usually, our summer is from June to late July, beginning of August. I think maybe I am getting too soft,” he joked.

   And barbecue … he’s developed a taste for that.

   “That’s something Americans are very good at,” he said. “I think about American culture and how much more socializing people are and small talk is more popular. Back home, we keep to ourselves and it’s a little bit different. I like the more openness here”.