By: Nina Kersnik
For students, both past and present, Humber was a home for several years, before they entered and after they graduated. Even though the campus itself had gone through numerous renovations and technological advancements since then, the newsroom is one place that has remained the same. Students worked as fast as worker bees in a large common room with polarizing coloured walls, tuning up the mics and adjusting the levels to go live on air in the radio station. The floor manager counting down, the anchor from ten in the brightly lit and hot tv studio, taping a live show and the constant sound of clattering and computer keys to file stories before their deadline.
Eric Smith, now a Humber journalism alumni, was one of these students. Born and raised in Burlington, Ont., Smith lived in a family-oriented city. Also, one that’s filled with factories and a downtown that is slowly turning into a hustle culture – the change was quite a culture shock when he came to Etobicoke.
Now, in a city where people have their heads down who make little to no conversation, Smith called Etobicoke home for almost a decade. He lived in North campus residence in room S1 for two of his three years of study. Smith later moved to an apartment behind Humber’s Athletics Centre on Humberline Drive when he entered his final year.
At that time, he enjoyed doing everything in the TV studio, from being in front of the camera, to writing the scripts and even behind the scenes in the control room, with the sole purpose of entering the broadcast world.
Fortunately, all the hard work he put into that sector of the industry ended up in an internship opportunity in the big leagues. At just 25 years-old, Smith weaseled his way into Sportsnet’s 590 The Fan, where he now works almost three decades later. He says to get to where he is today, it required pure skill, luck and just being at the right place at the right time.
He spent his time in the broadcast booth, covering the Raptors as a sportscaster on both 590 The Fan and Sportsnet TV. Now, with all that experience and connections made throughout the years, he released his first book about basketball.
The novel titled We The Raptors released on Nov. 4, 2025, is divided into four eras: The Expansion Era (1995-1999), the Vinsanity Era (1998-2004), the Bosh Era (2003-2010) plus the Golden Era and Beyond (2013-2025). This was done to fully encapsulate moments of joy like the 2019 Championship parade, the team’s first game at the ACC Centre, but also difficult times like the struggles of being traded, all through short chapters.
It was written by him and his co-writer Andrew Bricker. Bricker, who is also the brother-in-law to Smith, mentioned the far-fetched idea to him sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic, during his job as an English history professor in Ghent, Belgium.
He thought the idea came completely out of nowhere – for a person who only envisioned himself in the path of broadcast and television. He eventually accepted the idea with the help of his counterpart who mentioned he wanted to do this as a passion project, while also being a huge sports fan and missed the Canadian landscape, but most of all the National Basketball Association (NBA).
“Hoping to find something to occupy our brains as we were wondering what the hell was happening in the world,”
-Eric Smith
He was against it at first but eventually caved in. They couldn’t have done the project without each other.
Smith says he decided to call this project We The Raptors because he felt it was an accurate description of what a true team was. This was also done to have a little fun with the words, eventually bouncing off the well-known phrase: We The North.
“The ‘We’ is very symbolic in that the ‘We’ could be me and you. The We could be the collection of these role players, the We could be the team itself being the lone team in the country, the alone non-American team inside the NBA. The ‘We’ represents everybody,” he says.
Smith also says the title in the literal sense means being the collective; the Raptors as a family, an organization and of course, the fanbase.
When starting this project neither Smith nor Bricker wanted it to be seen by consumers as an encyclopedia.
Instead, it was a collection of stories – which came around the time of the thirtieth anniversary of the team – that included snippets of their lives both on and off the court, their impact on the city of Toronto and showcased the key moments through the eyes of the greats and the secondary guys too.
With the help of Alvin Williams, a former Los Angeles Clippers player and current NBA colour analyst from Sportsnet, Smith captured the reader’s attention through former Raptors’ point guard Kyle Lowry who wrote The Forward. In it, the Philadelphia, PA., native discussed his own experience during his time in the city, while also touching on the significance of being united, humble and the deeply-rooted connections the players hold with Raptors fanbase, but most of all, Toronto.
Smith says despite all the options he could’ve picked, he felt that Lowry was the one piece that fit into the puzzle, who encapsulated everything about what it means to be a Raptor.
Created by Julia Sequeira, Managing Editor Online
“I could’ve reached out to Vince [Carter], or Demar [DeRozan], or Chris Bosh or Kawahi. But I left Kyle, in a lot of people’s eyes – they call him the GROAT, right, the greatest raptor of all time. People will argue if that’s the case or not,” he says.
“I believe that he is for the fact that his ten years in Toronto, his success in Toronto and the fact that even though Demar would’ve loved to have been here still, Demar unfortunately, wasn’t a part of the championship team,” Smith says.
“So, Kyle with that title, let alone all the accolades, to me he’s the number one guy and number seven is gonna hang in the rafters one day,”
-Eric Smith
Moving forward, inked on the nicely printed pages were about eight months’ worth of conversation, done by Smith and Bricker. They were tweaked multiple times as the interviews progressed, all with the end goal of finding a way to fit those puzzle pieces together, press it between two paperboards and get it published.
One which surprised Smith and me was the interview with former professional basketball player Chris Childs. Originally from Bakersfield, Calif., Childs was a part of the Raptors organization from 2001-02.
His nine-page chapter looked over his time with the Quad City Thunder of the Continental Basketball Association (CBA), which began in 1993 and later touched on Childs’ journey to the Raptors. The CBA was a men’s professional basketball minor league in the United States from 1946 to 2009.
The scene is set right from the first sentence where it reads “Chris Childs had finally hit rock bottom.”
From there, I was pulled in from what felt like the neck of my sweatshirt, to get an inside look into his redemption arc. Childs’ chapter in particular dove into themes like substance abuse and addiction and the substantial amount of appreciation he holds for his time within Toronto.
Smith says seeing the success of the book continues to have after its release makes him great.
Within the last few weeks, the project, published by Simon and Schuster, has not only been recognized as an instant bestseller and a national bestseller, but it has also been featured in reports from news outlets across the country.
Some of them include CTV’s The Social, Breakfast Television and CityNews Toronto.
In addition to the success over the past few months he mentioned that as of the date of this interview, Nov. 25, 2025, their book has been placed at the top of the podium on Amazon in the category of all basketball books.
Something Smith believes is because the team is doing equally well too, being 14-5 and second in the Eastern Conference, just one win behind the top-ranked Detroit Pistons (15-3).