Sam Riddell is considered as the Grand Father of organized soccer in Mississauga — and rightly so.

There was no youth soccer to speak of — there wasn’t even a Mississauga on the map — when Sam planted the first seed. “I became involved with soccer in 1957 when it was called the Township of Toronto,” he recalls, taking a long trip back along memory lane.

     By the time Mississauga got around to induct him into its Sports Hall of Fame on June 3, 2004, the once cozy Township of Toronto has become the sixth largest city in Canada and the seed Sam the Soccer Man planted five decades earlier has grown into a blossoming success as Mississauga’s most popular youth sport.

     Sam first became involved with the “beautiful game” because his 10-year-old son was keen to play. So he decided to form a team. “My wife, Marjorie, became the backbone of the project,” Sam recalls. ”She was making shirts and shorts for the boys.”

     The team’s first games were at a tournament in Barrie. “As I recall, we lost both games, but all wasn’t lost, I saw potential in the players I had recruited.”

     While Marjorie played den mother, Sam got himself involved in various ways. He coached, received an on-the-job lesson in administration, took up refereeing and even got to know first aid. He badgered the Recreation and Parks Department and haunted the newspapers to get the game a foothold.

Soon this all-out effort started paying dividend as recreational leagues were formed in Dixie, Malton, Erindale, Cooksville, Port Credit, Clarkson and the Lakeshore. Improved levels brought a prized invitation to enter a team in the Youth Division of the semi-professional National Soccer League. “This youth league had produced a number of talented players for the senior division over the years,” Sam recalls.

     In 1964 South Peel United put the city on the soccer map by becoming Eastern Canadian Under-17 champions.

     “It goes without saying that the game would not have blossomed without the help of people too numerous to mention who took the time to help in its promotion,” Sam says. “From those early days, the game has grown into a first-class organization that has produced some very talented teams.”

     Mississauga paid tribute to Sam when he became the first recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Community Sport award for 1974 then again selecting him among the august group of 20 Most Influential People in Mississauga Sports two decades later.

      His involvement came to a halt when his wife Marjorie died in 1981 and Sam went into a limbo for a couple of years. But the call of the game proved too much and soon he was active again with the Ontario Soccer Association, first as a referee then as a referee instructor and assessor.

     Eventually he remarried and moved to Truro, Nova Scotia where he continued his soccer missionary work training referees and, he himself assuming refereeing into his 80s. When he reached 84 and got inducted into the Mississauga Sports Hall of Fame, he was still handling two or three games a week as the oldest active referee in Canada and one of the oldest in the world.

     And he still clocked 9.3 seconds running a 50-metre sprint. In 2002, Sam was chosen recipient of the nation-wide Fox 40 Award for his contribution to sports in general and soccer in particular. This latest bit of recognition goes well with some other notable awards he has received: 1974 Man of the Year Award from the Ontario Soccer Association, and the 2000 Meritorious Service Award from Soccer Nova Scotia.