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Paredes’ coaching journey takes him to Malawi

Kamehameha Maui graduate working way up UEFA license levels

Paredes

KIHEI — Keola Paredes had to pick up malaria medicine on Thursday.

It’s a precautionary measure as the 2016 Kamehameha Schools Maui graduate continues his journey toward becoming a top-level soccer coach.

Paredes leaves today for Malawi — the 22-year-old had been sitting at home after another job fell through when his opportunity to coach in Africa sprung up.

“I managed to find, through a connection of mine, he emailed me a link to an application that had gone up for Ascent Soccer in Malawi,” Paredes said over lunch in Kihei on Thursday. “This is the biggest club in the country, they are the only residential in the country. Football in general is just really underdeveloped in East Africa.

“So I went and applied. I didn’t think I was going to get it, but part of what helped me get it was my previous charity work that I’d done in high school and South America and my experience in Third World countries.”

He has his UEFA C license already — it took a year and a half to complete while in college in England — and will be working on his UEFA B license in Wales or Northern Ireland this summer, mixed in with his responsibilities in Lilongwe, Malawi.

“I’m the under-15s head coach at Ascent Soccer — we play in the national league, so we’ll be going all over the country playing and maybe the neighboring countries like Zambia, Tanzania and Uganda,” Paredes said. “I will be traveling the country every couple months to put on tournaments in the villages and towns to scout for the best players in the country.”

He added the opportunity is intriguing.

“I’m looking forward to the opportunity to help them move forward and go to places like the Dallas Cup, hopefully obtain European contracts or NCAA scholarships,” Paredes said. “To help them get out of a place that is full of poverty. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world. … I think it’s a real cool opportunity to help kids that have just as much potential as other kids I’ve seen, but don’t have access to the help.”

He will be sleeping in mosquito netting while in Lilongwe, but will require malaria pills to avoid the dreaded disease when he is on the road. He contracted the disease when he was delivering donated equipment from Maui to Bolivia in high school.

“When I went to South America, I visited all over Bolivia, my family is from Bolivia,” he said. “One night I decided to go piranha fishing. The mosquitoes in that area — all day they’re not there and then all of a sudden at 6 o’clock there are hundreds, like a cartoon, there’s like a cloud around my head, 7 o’clock they’re gone.

“I was fine for a few days, we flew back to L.A. and I felt sick, they took me to the doctor — it was the worst pain I’ve felt in my life.”

In 2021, he wants to be the coach for the Malawi under-15 team that is set to compete in the Dallas Cup in Texas, one of the biggest youth tournaments in the world.

If he has his UEFA B license in hand by then, “It will open me up for coaching jobs around the world.”

He credits his development on Maui to coaches at Maui Elite and Valley Isle Soccer Academy. The one coach who stood out is Aleks Filipovic of VISA.

“Aleks gave me my first coaching job on Maui at age 16, and put a lot of trust in me to run sessions and work with his players at such a young age,” Paredes said. “I have learned a lot from Aleks, and he continues to mentor me today.”

After graduating from KSM in 2016, he went to London for his undergraduate degree at the University of East London.

“I went there for the purposes of getting my UEFA coaching licenses because those are recognized throughout the world, rather than the American ones that are only recognized in the United States,” Paredes said. “I had the objective of using my coaching to travel and coach in all sorts of countries and at the highest level I possibly could.”

With all of the college-level work he did at Kamehameha Maui, he got his first year of college waived.

“While I was there I did some of my coaching courses– it takes quite a long time to get to a pro license level,” Paredes said. “I won’t get to that level until maybe I’m around 30.”

That would be a remarkably young age to reach the top level of international coaching certification. He got a bachelor’s degree in sport and exercise science.

“Most people play until they physically can’t anymore, whereas I knew I wanted to (coach) straight away,” Paredes said. “So I was like 15 years younger than all the people on all my courses.”

He has been on a mission for years already.

“When I arrived in England I looked up every football club, from division 1 to 7,” he said. “I went to every single front office and asked either, ‘Can I work there?’ or ‘How should I advance my coaching courses, what can I do?’ “

That door-to-door canvassing — “A lot of them said ‘no,’ “ Paredes said — led to “observations and participate in trainings” for West Ham United and Charlton Athletic.

While working with the two clubs, attending school and “coaching in football clubs around Southeast London eventually after being in the industry for awhile,” he started to have players that he worked with make professional clubs on trials.

“That’s kind of my objective and how I got noticed — I started bringing a lot of players to Arsenal, so I was hanging out pretty much in Arsenal’s training ground every week,” Paredes said. “I would go there and just observe sessions, write things down, try to continue my development.”

He came back to the U.S. with the idea of soon coaching in Bolivia, where he has dual citizenship. He was days away from going last October.

“I had jobs lined up … I had some really good opportunities there to get into the professional game without having to do any more school, which sounded great,” he said. “I was all set to move, I went to Los Angeles to get my flight down to Bolivia as well as get all my paperwork done at the embassy. Right as I was going the new elections were happening and the government collapsed because of supposed election-rigging.

“I was waiting to see if the security situation would get better, but it just got worse and worse. People started dying and it got to the point where I figured out, ‘Hey, I’m not going to be able to go.’ “

He had to scramble at that point, out of England and the job that he had lined up wasn’t working out, so he started canvassing again.

“Through the connections I made in England, I started applying all over the world — in Africa, Asia, places in Israel, in Russia, other countries in South America,” Paredes said. “Literally all over the world.”

The Malawi opportunity popped up and now it is his next destination on his worldwide soccer journey.

* Robert Collias is at rcollias@mauinews.com.

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