During Shamit Shome’s initial years at Concordia, only a few of his fellow students knew they had a professional soccer player in their midst.
“When I first came, nobody knew who I was,” says Shome, a midfielder with the Montreal Impact club of Major League Soccer (MLS). “It was just easier that way. I went to my classes, got the work done and went home.”
A few of his close friends found out in the first term of his electrical engineering undergraduate program at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science. But it wasn’t until last April, when news cameras started showing up to interview Shome in the hallways, that his secret identity got out to most of his classmates.
“Some guys from Montreal knew what the team was. It’s pretty big here, so they were surprised. They were like, ‘Oh, what the heck? I’ve heard about you, but I didn’t know this was you,’” he recounts.
“It was definitely cool seeing all the reactions. A couple of people, when I first told them, were like, ‘The academy? The youth team?’ And I was like, no, the pro team.”
Growing up on soccer
Shome’s parents, who emigrated from Bangladesh to Edmonton before he was born, had him playing organized soccer at a young age.
“That was the main sport they knew about and thought it was the easiest one to get into,” he explains.
“They did that when I was like five or six. I was just playing for fun, but as I got a bit older, people started to tell my dad, ‘Hey, this guy seems like he could be really good. You should put him into a club level and take it a bit more seriously.’”
So Shome joined a club team in Edmonton. From there on, he says, he started playing at a decent level and constantly striving to get better.
“Around high school, in grade 11, I had a really good season. I played for the provincial team and signed with a professional team’s academy, FC Edmonton.”
He played a year there in the academy and signed with the pro team while he was in his first year at the University of Alberta studying engineering. He had a good first season as a young player, and got the chance to enter the MLS draft.
“Thankfully, Montreal picked me.”
‘It’s kind of like a big jigsaw puzzle’
Now in his fourth year with the Impact, Shome says what made him stand out as a young player was his intuition.
“People say I was always kind of ahead of the game and able to read the game well,” he says. “I had a lot of energy, so I was willing to put in the hard work to cover a lot of ground.”
Shome admits the transition to professional soccer wasn’t easy at first: “It’s a different level in terms of how quickly the game is played, how quickly guys are thinking, just how physical and athletic it is. So that was definitely an adjustment at first, but once I was able to overcome that, the rest was pretty doable.”
And Shome hasn’t let his challenges on the field affect his goal of getting a university education. He chose Concordia because of its reputation for having a more practical approach to learning.
“The labs were the hands-on stuff that made it more interesting,” says Shome, whose father is a civil engineer. “They gave me the experience in what I’m actually doing as an engineer.”
Shome flags time management as the most difficult aspect of balancing his schoolwork with a professional soccer career.
“It’s a heavy load, especially engineering,” he explains. “With the team, we train almost every day. We travel a lot for away games. A lot of time I’m missing classes, I’m missing labs and I have to reschedule all those and make everything work and fit in the correct time slots.”
It’s a lot to handle, but Shome found a way to make it work.
“It’s kind of like a big jigsaw puzzle. I had to figure out what I would do and when. So that was definitely the hardest part, but thankfully I’ve been able to finish and accomplish it all.”