"Last instructions? Just keep playing. Make sure you enjoy it. Keep juggling. Give yourself a record. And what you do on one foot, do on the other."

That's been the mantra for the inaugural development officer, right until the end: work hard, get the best out of yourself and, above all, have fun.

Dedini certainly has. Gissing Oval became his second home, but this was a job with its own rewards.

"I've loved it. Every day brings a new challenge... but to see the game grow and the quality of football grow has been really enjoyable for three-and-a-half years," Dedini said.

"Seeing the kids develop, have fun and have a smile on their face, that's the main thing."

Football Wagga has overseen something of a revolution in the last five years. Dedini may not have been the general, but he was a critical player.

At the end of 2015, soccer didn't have a development presence in the Riverina. The sport, whose greatest strength is its potential at junior level, was without a person on the ground promoting the game to kids.

Football Wagga took matters into its own hands. Then-president Erwin Budde went as high as the Football NSW CEO to lobby for change. Rather than a state-appointed 'coach education manager' for the Riverina, they wanted a development officer for Wagga.

In the end, with approval, they did it themselves.

"We can self-fund our DO (development officer). It's not like the NRLs and AFLs where the money's there unfortunately. So for us to be able to generate the income to have someone like that is great," Football Wagga operations manager Dave Merlino said.

At the end of 2019, their inaugural development officer leaves a lasting legacy.

"Liam's personality, his attitude, it's just worked really well," Merlino said.

"All the kids, they just see him as a big brother, especially when he goes in to the schools. They run up to him and say, 'How are you going Liam?' He's really done brilliant work with all the schools with the way he treats the kids. He puts 100 percent care and 100 percent effort into everything he's doing."

For Dedini, it's been a rush from the moment he was asked.

"I was 18-and-a-half. I was at uni studying teaching, working at the (Riverina) Co-op. But Football Wagga were awesome. They said this is what we want you to do but go and make it your own role. It was funded about 15-20 hours a week," he said.

"It was my passion to work in football so my thoughts were, if I'm getting paid for 15-20 hours I can give 10 or 15 volunteer hours too because everyone else does their volunteer stuff.

"That turned into creating programs and doing things I wanted, which led to working 40-50 hours a week. So we sat down and Football Wagga turned it into a full-time role which has been going for the last two years.

"It was definitely needed. Obviously the numbers have grown, it's now nearly 3200 within our Football Wagga footprint."

That's at least 1000 participants more than in 2014. It's not all attributable to one development officer. But the introduction of the role was one critical aspect of a forward-thinking administration's blueprint.

"It all started back then with Erwin and the board," Merlino said.

"They completely rejuvenated Football Wagga. It's taken a few years obviously, you can't fix things overnight. But it's made our association go from something small, small numbers, to where we are today where we're having people knock on our door to join our association, to the point where we've got not enough fields to accommodate everything."

Wagga City Wanderers director Brendan Flanagan has no doubt about how important it was.

"The two key things Football Wagga did to get where it is now - it's the biggest sport in Wagga, at least in participation - was to put Liam in that role, and they created the Wanderers program. They're the two key programs that have worked," Flanagan said.

Dedini was part of the first Wanderers squads in 2015 after Martin Loy, with support from Justin Curran and Andrew Douglas, built a state league club to give promising footballers an opportunity beyond local competition.

"It was awesome," Dedini said, even coming off a 2014 premiership with Wagga United.

"I've played local in Pascoe Cup and that's fantastic, that competition has grown so much.

"But to get an opportunity to go up and test yourself. We played on some fantastic pitches in Sydney which was an eye-opener for some players who'd never been there, and playing against quality opposition."

The experience also gave him a career highlight - playing against former top-flight team the Wollongong Wolves deep into qualifying rounds of the FFA Cup.

"On the bus going up, we were saying, 'How much are we going to lose by? What's a respectable score?' and then we were pretty darn unlucky not to get a result, we lost 1-nil on the night."

It was far from smooth sailing in the early days though, with tough results on the field and political battles off it, in the form of club resistance to a state league entity.

But playing with the Wanderers gave Dedini personal appreciation of the importance of pathways for talented players.

It also put him on his own path. Encouraged by former coach Ben Schmid, he was soon coaching junior SAP (Skills Acquisition Program) teams - the Wanderers of the future.

By the time Dedini had taken the job with Football Wagga, he understood the big picture.

"He is so good to work with," Flanagan said.

"He ties in the juniors side of things with everything else. It's only been able to work with him there that we've now got junior NPL going and the women's team and the girls juniors."

Fast forward a couple of years, and the Wanderers have gone from three men's teams in a Sydney-based state league to fielding boys, girls, men's and women's teams in a national premier league (NPL) structure in Canberra.

Flanagan points out the men's under 18s and under 20s won their competitions, the junior girls teams all played finals and the under 16 boys just missed a grand final appearance.

"I think that was exciting - being able to go into Canberra and take a whole suite and have all of Wagga behind us," Dedini says.

"This year, having a lot of success with a few teams has definitely put us in good shape for next year."

For Dedini, the Wanderers' results reflect the work they've done on the ground. Getting in to schools was the key to start with.

"Especially in Wagga where it's such a proud sporting place and you've got every other sport going into schools and promoting their games and giving kids a taste of it, it was really important to get soccer in," he said.

His mini-Matildas and mini-Socceroos gala days are now a fixture in Wagga, growing from less than 200 children three years ago to around 700 now.

Sydney FC Cup competitions for primary school teams are another initiative.

The rewards have come in seeing students introduced to the game, and then turn up in talent squads and Wanderers teams.

But Dedini is most satisfied with the development efforts that underpinned expansion into Wagga having a viable national premier league club

"Definitely seeing how far SAP has grown (is the highlight)," he said.

"I think there were 48 kids in SAP three years ago, combined boys and girls. To now have two teams in each age group, it's 148 players, and we've got a girls team in each age group for the first time this year. That was a great success."

He's proud too of encouraging those SAP teams to compete against better-standard opposition, like arranging games against Canberra clubs, well before Wagga was headed for a Canberra league.

"There was a bit of backlash from some people because we were getting touched up but my philosophy was I'd rather go and play good teams and lose than play weaker teams and be the team that's dominating," he said.

"To see that, then start playing Canberra United (regularly, when they joined the NPL) two or three years later and compete and beat them was pretty cool."

Dedini reckons the best player he saw at the Wanderers was the talented Frenchman Adrien Jolly, a multiple best-and-fairest winner and standout in their early years.

Of rising talent, he thinks teenager Luke Stephens has the potential to make a name for himself in the future and also points to Cooper Stormonth's progress to Apia Leichhardt in Sydney.

Still only 23, Dedini moves to Sydney early in the new year to take up a newly-created role as head of goalkeeping for Football NSW.

"I'll be running a lot of coach ed courses, working with the NSW Institute team, working with TSP (talent support program) and doing anything in the goalkeeping space - scouting goalkeepers, trying to get them into programs, and starting a new academy up there for Football NSW with young goalkeepers," he said.

Football Wagga and the Wanderers will be sorry to see him go but say it's an off-field reflection of what they're about.

"It's great to see Football NSW have knocked on the door for him because they can see what an asset he is," Football Wagga's Dave Merlino said.

"Unfortunately we're losing that but we can say that Football Wagga brought this great person through for Football NSW. They have someone from regional NSW that's doing the work at metro level, right up to working with the Matildas.

"He's set a very high bar and it's going to be hard to replace."

The replacement process is in full swing and Dedini says he's excited by the quality of candidates and interest in the job. He believes it shows the strength of soccer in Wagga and believes whoever is selected to replace him will be up to the task.

Dedini said he couldn't have asked for better support from Football Wagga in giving him freedom and responsibility in his role.

He'll go with mixed feelings - excitement, naturally, at a brilliant opportunity to carve out a career in coaching, but something of a heavy heart too.

"I'm sad obviously. This was my first main job out of school really and in three-and-a-half years of getting stuck into football, seeing how much it's grown and what we've done here, I'll be sad to leave. But I'm sure it will continue to move on the up."

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