Argos hopeful trying to make one team to help support another — his family

Qwan’tez Stiggers, a 21-year-old defensive back trying to land a spot with the Argos, has another team almost equal the size rooting for him more than 1,500 kilometres away in Atlanta: wife Cheyenne, one-year-old son Legend, mother Kwanna, and 12 siblings.

“I have a great opportunity here, to be better each and every day,” Stiggers said in a telephone interview from the Argos’ training camp in Guelph. “This is the first time I’ve ever left the (United States). I had to get my passport renewed.”

He’s here on the recommendation of John Jenkins, a former Argos assistant who coached Stiggers in Fan Controlled Football. It is a league that bills itself as pro football “reimagined for the digital age.” Games feature seven players per side, with no kicking or special teams. Teams start on their 10-yard line and drive 40 yards for a score. Fans get to call the plays.

While Stiggers was the youngest player in the league at 20, he tied for the league lead with five interceptions. Now he is trying to stick with the Argos.

“He’s got a really good chance,” head coach Ryan Dinwiddie said. “He’s a young kid, not a lot of experience, now we’ll see him live in a game. He’s been good in practice but some guys, you know, when the lights come on things can go either way.”

Stiggers speaks to his mother and his family every day when he gets back to his room at camp. He has been working for them and their futures, as much as his own. He was thrust into a leadership role when his father, Rayben Harrison, passed away in September, 2021, after eight months on life support following a single-car accident. One of his brothers suffered a spinal injury playing football that “nearly left him a quadriplegic,” Stiggers said.

“Every since my dad passed, I’ve been trying to look after my brothers and sisters, putting my head down and being positive,” Stiggers said, adding his siblings come from a co-parenting arrangement between his mother and father.

He grew up in a rough neighbourhood — “You’d have shoot-ups and killings and robberies every day,” he said — and still went to school there after the family moved across town. “It was a two-bus, two-train ride to get there and I had to be out of the house at 5:30 to get to school for 8 in the morning.”

He had help from his mother, who eventually contacted the FCF to help her son get into pro football.

“My mom, she pushes me to be great, she’s not OK with me being average. She used to wake me up five in the morning, she’d say. ‘C’mon, Tez, you gotta get up, let’s go run, you gotta work out.’ So I can’t be mediocre. I have younger siblings looking up to me so I can’t be mediocre.”

It will be a challenge for Stiggers to make the mostly veteran Argos as a starter, but he’ll try to make an impression in Toronto’s exhibition game Saturday in Hamilton. And if he has to start the season on the team’s practice roster, he’ll be thankful for the opportunity.

“My family knows I’m fine, all they have to do is keep me in their prayers.”