Character Coach / Sports Chaplain Blog

During our recent Nations of Coaches Character Coach training in Dallas, Texas, Scott Brewer - Character Coach for Baylor Men's Basketball, shared some thoughts about culture in college basketball. That word gets thrown about as a buzzword, but often without clear definition or understanding. Some of Scott's comments included, "You have to examine your own, personal culture before you can pretend to have much of an effect upon the team's culture." One must know what he values, and to what he is most committed. Scott said, "You have to constantly cultivate culture or it will die. It is a living, organic thing." A team's culture will not be embraced or acted upon if it's simply words written on the locker room wall or emblazoned on the team's practice jerseys. Culture must be cultivated like the most valuable plant in one's garden, otherwise it will not produce its intended fruit. Scott also challenged us with this thought. "Celebrat...

Last weekend, during the Nations of Coaches Character Coach training in Dallas, Texas, one of our trainees, John Corley of Louisiana Tech University Men's Basketball shared a set of questions he has used in business settings that Character Coaches can modify to engage coaches and players in trust-building conversations. The list of questions and the title of the book from which they come are below. I hope, even a few, can be of value to you and your ministry. The Real Heroes of Business by Fromm and Schlesinger Interview Questions: 1) Tell me about your 1st job. Or, for salespeople, “Tell me about the 1st thing you ever sold!” 2) What did you learn about work and about customers from that 1 st experience? 3) Who has had the greatest influence on your adult personality and/or attitude about work? Explain how this influence affected you. 4) Why are you applying for this job? Specify the job! 5) How did you get interested in this job? Again, specify the job! 6) Have you ever had any ...

During a recent meeting with several of my Nations of Coaches colleagues, Coach Dale Clayton made a tremendous statement about team culture. Coach Clayton said, "A team's culture is: determined by the head coach, defended by the assistant coaches, demonstrated by the players." That is remarkably simple and tremendously clear. I quickly wrote it down because lots of coaches and lots of others talk about team culture, but few can define it, and fewer can develop it. Coach Clayton's statement adds verbs to the discussion. Each of the three have well defined roles in the development of the team's culture: The culture is defined by the head coach, usually in terms of clearly stated values, in single words or in phrases. The culture is defended by the assistant coaches, in terms of affirming those stated values in the way they coach. The culture is demonstrated by the players, in terms of how they conduct themselves, on and off the floor. Let's take some coaching fr...

During a recent Nations of Coaches Character Coach Connection Zoom meeting, our Character Coach for Auburn University Basketball, Jeremy Napier, shared a resource called a Life Map. One of the highlights of the Map is the process of having each team member tell their stories. Here's an excerpt from the top of the one-page document. A Life Map is an autobiography – the story of your life. It is not, however, a comprehensive biography. A Life Map should focus on 6 main areas. The goal is to share meaningful information with your peers. 1) Heritage/History 2) Heroes 3) High Times 4) Hard Times 5) Hand of God 6) Honeys Few things do more to help develop a team's sense of community better than giving them permission and direction to share their personal experiences with each other. Please consider using this or a similar tool in serving your teams.

This is always an exciting time of the year in college basketball. It's preseason, official practices have just begun, and every team in the nation is undefeated! Everyone is full of anticipation and high expectations. In the midst of this ramp up to the season, we have begun weekly discussions with our coaching staff. We're all reading Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team , and I lead a roughly 20-minute discussion of a section of the book during a staff meeting. At the conclusion of the discussion, I pray, and then leave as the staff meeting continues. As we were walking through the discussions, last week we observed the team in the book participating in some team development exercises. As the discussion was winding down, I suggested we use one of those exercises among our team. The coaches agreed and yesterday we did it. Below are the five questions we asked each staff person to answer and some insights from the exercise follow the questions. 1. What is you...

Last week I met with a Division III Women's basketball head coach, her new assistant coach, and her three team captains to discuss team leadership development ideas and how to help their team embody their team culture's values. I have known the head coach since she was a freshman at Southern Illinois University. After her freshman year, a knee injury and surgery, we had a coaching staff change, leading her to transfer to a D-II program. In her senior season she was a national player of the year and her team won a national championship. After playing some professional basketball in Europe, she returned to the USA and began her coaching career. We have stayed in touch across the years and often conversed about challenges she was encountering. It has been and continues to be a privilege to invest in her coaching career and life beyond basketball. Below are the notes I sent to the head coach ahead of our meeting. They served as the outline for our discussions. I had an hour with th...

In late August I received a couple of very encouraging notes from two Character Coach teammates in response to different interactions. The first was from Lindsay Moncrief of the FCA staff at University of Arkansas. She was one of the people participating in the FCA Character Coach training I led in the first week of August. She was recently preparing for her first meeting with the Women's Basketball team and wanted to refresh her understanding of the 360 Sports Matrix that was part of the training. We had a good conversation and she went on to the meeting. The text message below was her reply to my text message asking, "How did your meeting with the team go?" Lindsay replied, “I’m so sorry I forgot to text you. I left on such a high and then in awe of God and His goodness. The meeting went so well, and I even got some extra time with them because they couldn’t get in the weight room right away. We got on the topic of relationships and girls that would avoid me when I woul...

We recently received a note from a coaching family that moved across 3/4 of the USA to their new coaching assignment. The way the Nations of Coaches Character Coach served the coach and his wife is a great example to us all. Thanks to you, one and all, as you serve faithfully and selflessly. The story is below. Over the summer my husband received a new coaching job across the country. Although there is excitement and adventure that comes along with moving, there are also a lot of challenges. As my husband was learning his new role, I was carrying the weight of mentally, emotionally and logistically making the move. When I learned our new program had a Character Coach, I was put in touch with his wife. I instantly felt like I had a local advocate and support on the other end of the trip who could assist with this transition into a new community. She didn't need to be "my newest best friend" or even help unload the moving truck, but she was willing to be a smiling face and ...

Layers of Identity Shape the Lives of Sports-people. This is my friend, Wendy Goodman. She’s 6’-2” (1.88 meters) of beautiful young lady, daughter, sister, friend, teammate, wife, mother of three, and teaches second grade. She was also #44 for Saluki Women’s Basketball. A few weeks after the end of her playing career, she called me asking, “Rog, what do normal people do with all this time?” She had encountered the sense of lost identity that most sports-people experience at the end of their sporting career. After going to the gym for practice most every day since she was 12, suddenly she had no more practice, no more games, no more team or teammates or coaches. She suddenly used to be a basketball player. Wendy is also a highly committed Christian. Her identity in Christ Jesus was well formed at this point and she had a strong assurance of her being in Christ. She still felt the sting of having lost a part of her identity in retiring from competitive sport.  Many of us in the Churc...

On 1 and 2 August I was privileged to be hosted by Cortez McCraney and his team of FCA at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville for Character Coach training. This was an excellent, hungry, and motivated group of men and women. Cortez and his team are systematically serving every team on campus that opens the door to them. They are also serving the Razorbacks' sporting community well with a weekly huddle. They have been shown tremendous favor by the athletic department and many of the coaches. In addition, I spent a few hours discussing Character Coaching opportunities with Jeb Huckaba of NW Arkansas FCA and one of his key volunteers. He is contemplating new and exciting opportunities for serving area club teams, middle schools, and high schools. Jeb is a former U of A and NFL player with a tremendous understanding of ministry in sport. It's a real privilege to continue to serve with FCA teammates and colleagues, even though I am now employed by Nations of Coaches. This spe...

One of the most effective tools I have received for both the design and evaluation of ministry initiatives in sport is the McCown Sport in Ministry Map. It was developed by Lowrie McCown and is detailed in Focus on Sport in Ministry by Lowrie McCown and Valerie Gin. Recently, I have been using a chart to simplify the ministry points of emphasis as a part of presentations in training character coaches and sports chaplains. The chart is shown below, along with a pie chart to illustrate the proportions of Spectators of sport, Novices to sport, Recreational sportspeople, Players of sport, Elite sporting competitors, and High Profile sportspeople in society. Each group's mindset and experience in sport is significantly different, thus requiring different approaches for effective ministry. ​​ Many of us have ministry initiatives that include more than one of these groups, often at the same time. The important point to catch is that one size certainly does not fit all. One must carefully...

This article is quite good and is a solid model to encourage in your coaching friends. First-year (Chicago) Bears head coach Matt Eberflus has had quite the road to lead his own NFL franchise. He played for Nick Saban and then Gary Pinkel at Toledo before starting his coaching career with Pinkel at Toledo and Missouri before breaking into the NFL ranks with the Browns, Cowboys and Colts. In Indianapolis, he had joined Josh McDaniels’ staff in 2018 and was in Indy when McDaniels backed out of his deal to become the team's head coach. Thankfully, Eberflus had developed a solid relationship with Colts GM Chris Ballard, who told him he had a spot on the staff, and then Eberflus really hit it off with new head coach Frank Reich and became his defensive coordinator. After a few seasons doing impressive work with the Colts defense, Eberflus earned his head coaching opportunity in Chicago and recently joined the Rich Eisen show to talk about his coaching journey and overall philoso...

In the rapidly changing, chaotic climate of collegiate sport in the USA, we are privileged to be agents of Christ’s peace, perspective, and comforting presence. Let's lean into this situation. Here's a excerpt from an article recently posted in Slate.com describing the NCAA and all of college sport's dilemma. The entire article is available at the link below. "Some measure of chaos has reigned since then, and the NCAA is now scrambling to settle things down with a new rule that, in its view, isn’t really a new rule. The association fought tooth-and-nail for years to keep athletes from getting paid by third parties, and as it scrapped its way to a long-inevitable defeat on that front, it declined to do any planning for what would happen once a new world arrived. Years of living in denial have caught up with the NCAA in a big way. Third-party payments to players have, in the absence of clear rules, given rise to the thing the NCAA really abhorred from the start: player...

 In collegiate sport in the USA, a couple of relatively new situations are causing tremendous upheaval in the way competitors and coaches interact with their institutions. The NCAA Transfer Portal is a mechanism where players who presently attend a college or university and represent that institution in a sport, can make themselves available to other institutions to offer them an opportunity to join their team/institution, without penalty, once in their college sporting careers. Formerly, a player could leave his or her college and move down a level (e.g. Division I to Division II) and would be eligible to play immediately. However, if one moved up a level or made a lateral move, he or she would have to sit out a year before competing. This was ostensibly to keep the more powerful institutions from poaching players from those less fortunate. Now, all bets are off. Free agency, like in professional sport, has been handed to those in collegiate sport.   The other factor resha...

During the recent NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four and its accompanying NABC Convention in New Orleans, three sports ministries serving the basketball coaching community each had a booth in the exhibition hall and they collaborated to host several ministry events. Athletes in Action, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Nations of Coaches worked together on the events which included a meeting for coaches’ wives on Thursday evening, a Coaches Edge event on Friday afternoon, a Sunday morning worship service, and then a Coaches and Spouses marriage luncheon on Sunday afternoon. One of our colleagues, Coach Terry Murphy of FCA Ukraine, was hoping to be in attendance, but was in Moldova. His changes were all abruptly changed on Thursday 24 February when Russia began shelling Ukraine and then invaded the nation. Coach Terry sent me a message one day saying, “We’re headed to the bomb shelter right now. I’ll talk with you tomorrow.” I was just hoping there would be a tomorrow. In a couple of ...

Registration is open for the Third Global Congress on Sport and Christianity in Cambridge, England. It will be held 18-21 August. This will be an outstanding event as it is the only global intersection of the academic and practitioner communities of ministry in sport. Below is a link for registration (booking).   Book now for The Third Global Congress on Sport and Christianity (3GCSC) at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, Thu 18 Aug 2022 6:00 PM - Sun 21 Aug 2022 1:30 PM (tickettailor.com)   In addition, you may be someone who has a paper or presentation to offer at the congress. The event’s leadership is really keen for people to speak about their ministries - and especially the challenges of leadership from a practitioner viewpoint - and to find out how academics can better serve the needs of those on the ground. The link below opens to information on how to submit an abstract for submission of a paper or presentation.   Call for papers: Global Congress on Sport and Christi...

Since the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, I have been serving with some Russian speaking sports chaplains in Eurasia in monthly Zoom discussions about various facets of this ministry. Many of those people are from Ukraine, and recent events have certainly strained their lives. I was both surprised and thrilled when my colleague from Kyiv, Pavel Tian (Pasha), sent me WhatsApp message asking to schedule a meeting in mid-March. My first thought was, “Your nation is at war and being invaded by its neighbor. You are a refugee in Germany at the moment. How can you even think about hosting a meeting?” After gathering myself, I replied, “Outstanding! What shall we have as our topic?” Pasha wrote, “Ministry in times of crisis, difficult circumstances, and the importance of serving.” I wrote, “Perfect.” On 25 May I prepared a few discussion questions to guide our time together and after greeting our friends, we launched into our Zoom meeting. Joining Pasha and me that day wa...

The end of a sport’s season provides unique challenges and opportunities for ministry with coaches and competitors. There is the obvious finality that comes with the end of players’ careers, the disappointment of goals they failed to achieve, or even the emptiness in the hearts of champions who realize their achievements’ thrills last very briefly and are often followed by emptiness and despair. The pressure and intensity players feel is even greater for their coaches. For most of them this is a career or a calling, much more than a job. Should they fail to achieve as expected, they stand to be privately criticized, publicly shamed, or fired from their positions. All of these factors lead to both challenges and opportunities for us who serve them. For many years of service in sport, one of my best strategies for development of ministry has been to hold an evaluation meeting with the head coach being served. Following are some suggested questions for such a meeting. I would strongly sug...

A few weeks ago I sent a note with the report from Nations of Coaches Character Coach, Billy Dunn at Lehigh University. In the note he mentioned a series of studies he had been leading title, "The Five Commitments of a Godly Man." Billy sent me a copy of the study and it is below. I hope it serves you well. The 5 Commitments of a Godly Man A question that I often face (both personally and in ministry) is this: How do I become a Godly man? Where do I start? What does it look like? The pursuit of godliness was framed incredibly well by Timothy in the NT: “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” I Timothy 4:8 His message: Train yourself in "godliness." This requires rigorous self- "discipline." However, Timothy should direct his "discipline" at the development of spiritual, rather than physical, strength. Physical self-discipline ("bod...

 Last week I received the report of a remarkable movement in a men’s college basketball program served by one of my Nations of Coaches colleagues. I asked him to send me more details and he sent me several paragraphs. I’d like to share them with you. We don’t often receive reports like this one. Please give it a read and be encouraged. I have omitted the names of the character coach and the university so as to not overexpose them. Serving as a character coach for a Division 1 Men’s Basketball program brings me some of the  greatest joys of my ministry career and it also brings some of the greatest moments of trust in  the Lord. I count it an honor each day to be able to serve the ........... Men’s team and  so grateful for the vision Nations of Coaches has to place men and women in these roles. God has been at work in our program over the past 4 years and this investment has started to  pay off in deep spiritual ways. We hosted the men’s and women’s team to di...

Last week I visited a couple of veteran Nations of Coaches Character Coaches at their universities. I observed these men and their ministries for just a little while, but I was able to get a glimpse of why each of them is so effective in serving their coaches, players, and support staffs. A brief profile of each one is below. I will not list names or universities so that we don’t create a culture of celebrity or encourage foolish comparisons. Character Coach A – he has been serving at this university for nine years, now with his second coaching staff. The transition from one staff to the next was neither automatic nor easy. It did not, however, take long for the head coach to see the character coach’s gifts and skills. As I talked with the character coach, knowing the nature of the head coach, I saw why he was quickly found to be of great value. The character coach is a tremendous complement to the head coach. The head coach is very driven and intense, but his character coach is incr...

Today’s note is excerpted from a devotional on leadership shared by Nations of Coaches Executive Director, Tommy Kyle. I hope it is an encouragement to you. 1. Great Leaders are Highly Motivated. “When God calls a person, He gives him/her mountain matching abilities.” The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah. Now it happened in the month Chislev, in the twentieth year, while I was in Susa the capitol, 2 that Hanani, one of my brothers, and some men from Judah came; and I asked them concerning the Jews who had escaped and had survived the captivity, and about Jerusalem. 3 They said to me, “The remnant there in the province who survived the captivity are in great distress and reproach, and the wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates are burned with fire.” When I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days; Nehemiah 1:1-4a 2. Great Leaders Lead from the Knees Up. “Prayer is Central for them.” 4 When I heard these words, I sat do...