While sometimes talent is wasted because children are not given ample time to exercise their passion, 42 year old Aloys Manzi believes it should change for people to support children who exhibit varied interest in sports.

Through the Aloys Manzi soccer academy, children collected from all corners are trained to use football as a tool to create discipline and impact in their lives. Sunday Magazine’s Solomon Asaba caught up with him to find more about this arrangement.

How do you think putting young people in this academy helps them?

When young people are idle, they can be forced to engage into many unproductive things. People are talented in different ways but most children are get interested when you talk about football. 

In 2012 when we started this academy in Rwamagana district, we never expected a huge turn up but since then the number has grown to 500 students.

The other thing is that students remain physically fit, you are aware that there is a rise in childhood obesity within the country, but this can’t be a problem to children who engage in regular exercises. Also with this intense training, children have limited time to think about abusing any sort of drugs since sports in itself has a part that dwells on imparting discipline. Sometimes we even take them through bible lessons.

Of these children, how many are boys and how do you select them?

We have 200 hundred girls and 300 boys. Some of these children are from primary schools, others from secondary especially. They are picked basing on the school competitions. If we happen to attend some of the competitions, we select students who exhibit good skills for sports. This is how we enroll them.

If the child is fortunate to take this path of the academy, how would he or she be integrated in this program?

Most of the children we have in the academy stay with their parents. They come for training and go home.  We have plans to make them stay together in the near future but for now, this arrangement is satisfactory.

Have you never had any challenges or any form of indiscipline from some of these children?

Yes we have and like any other area, everything cannot be perfect. It all depends on how you handle the cases because sometimes these students are influenced by other people or the actions could be a result of the phase of life they are going through. The other issue is that not all children come from perfect homes, others are from the streets so in such a situation, be sure to expect anything.

Who else do you work with and when do you convene for training?

We work with a group of three coaches, two in the Eastern province and one in Kigali. These teach them mostly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Where do you see this project in 5 years?

The plan is big. We all know that Rwanda has potential for talent in sports and if we give such children an opportunity they can go to big places. We also have our local teams here or in the EAC region. Next year we are targeting to have our boys go for second division and the girls also engage in the national women football league.