football coach dedicated to his team

EVEN as national Goalkeeper/Coach Eon Deviera has a keen interest in training youngsters to become sports professionals, he has also been paying increased attention to helping them with their personal development.
In trying to foster good citizens, Deviera has seen first hand how youth development encompasses more than just training them in the area of sports. To this end, he has been making an effort to invite certain professionals to have talks with the youths.

“We are trying to do life skills, and we have some professional people who have made commitments to do volunteer work with the youths because it’s more than just the sport; we need them to become good citizens,” Deviera shared in an interview with Pepperpot Magazine recently.

Now in his seventh year working with the Guyana Football Federation (GFF), Deviera also does additional work with youths through the Eon DeViera Goalkeeping Academy Inc., a Non-Governmental Organisation that he started in 2018.

Those attending the academy do not have to pay for coaching. Hence Deviera gets an opportunity to work with many at-risk youth who may have great talent but no one to encourage them to use and pursue it.
Having started his career of working with youths in school in 1996, Deviera loves his job and knows all too well the difference that he can make in the children’s lives. It is something that he doesn’t take for granted, because he knows that once they build trust in him, he has to be there for them on a continuous basis.

Doing so can be rough for him at times, especially as he is a father of three and has to find time for his own family. But he makes it work. “It’s difficult to find the balance. It’s something that consumes you a lot, but if you’re not committed to it, it wouldn’t do the youths any good because you need to follow up with them. Once they start looking up to you; if you don’t follow up and keep that contact with them, they can end up worse than they were before,” he shared.

His love for the job, though, helps a great deal with overcoming the challenges that come with working with the youths. “There are so many challenges that if it’s not something that you love and are passionate about, you can’t survive in it. It has to be a passion. It isn’t always smooth sailing, especially working in football, because football has most of the underprivileged youths and with that comes [with] a lot of different behavioural traits,” he pointed out.

Change in Mentality
Deviera wants to do more than just work with the 24 members of his academy. He has in mind doing outreaches to various parts of the country and allowing for speakers on various subjects, such as drugs and alcohol abuse, to be on hand to chat with the youths.

“We want to move it to different communities and make the outreaches into a regular thing. The initiative is basically to help them to focus on things that are more important than the mere sports, which are keeping away from harmful substances, etc. If we don’t try to have that change in mentality, we will lose most of the athletes.”

Once an area has been identified, the academy will link with people in that community to help with bringing out the children. Deviera is hoping to have this rolled out by September. “We want to start with at-risk communities, so we will be starting in Georgetown with Albouystown, Tiger Bay and suchlike areas, and then we will move out of Georgetown.”

He also has in mind doing specific training programmes for female goalkeepers countrywide. “We want to also work with possible coaches in the areas so that they would be able to continue the work in the community.”
Just recently, Deviera was able to work along with Youth Challenge Guyana, where a trip was made to Baramita, Region One, as part of the Spotlight Initiative, targeting drug and alcohol abuse and gender-based violence.
The academy has also been involved in other notable work recently.