Character Coach / Sports Chaplain Blog

If you’re not present, you don’t have a chance for ministry. Establishing a presence with the team or individual competitors sets the tone for all the ministry opportunities that could follow. Your regular presence with the players will create an identity for you among the coaches and the competitors. The following points are meant to help you establish a presence with them in the most important places. Once you’ve established your identity through presence, you can have influence with them without even being there. Your presence at practice is worth more than your presence at competitions. Dozens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of people attend the competitions, to scream, second-guess and support the team. Who comes to watch practice? Only those most highly committed to the team are at practice. If you are there, your presence communicates commitment. The coaches and players are at practice every day and they know exactly who’s there. They also take note of it. There is nothing tha...

wired4sport promotes the value of, integrity in and love of sport. My earliest memories of competition took place almost daily at the neighborhood playground. I remember delightedly hanging in mid-air, reaching and grabbing, reaching and grabbing, metal bar after bar, my legs wildly swinging, going from one end of the monkey bars to the other. The official scorekeeper, my dad, would count out loud how many bars I conquered. When my arms gave out, I would rest and have him start the count all over again. The goal...to set a new world record by going one bar further than the last time. As a young child, my competitive drive and spirit was alive and well. There is no doubt in my mind that I am wired4sport. My need to run, jump, shoot, hit, slide, throw, catch...to go one further, have the most points at the end, run one second faster was there from the beginning. I've had a love affair with sport ever since I can remember. wired4sport promotes the value of, integrity in and lo...

People of sport are unique in society because their best days and their worst days are out in the public for everyone to see. Their flesh, its best parts and its worst parts, are the easiest parts of them to see. How often have you watched an important contest on television and just as an official makes a call that goes against the coach, the camera zooms right in on his face and all the lip-readers in the nation know he wasn’t blessing the official. His flesh is now on display for a national or even international television audience. If I took offense to every curse word and profanity that I’ve heard in my years on the field of competition, I’d be forever upset. As it is, I’ve had to learn to see past such behavior and to pursue the hearts of our coaches and athletes without respect to their failings. Having a sober view of my own personal weaknesses has also tempered my reactions to others’ bent to outbursts of anger or other foolish actions. It requires more insight and more fa...

While attending the Illinois Football Coaches Clinic in Champaign last Thursday through Saturday, I observed some things about the coaches. 1) They love what they do. It’s almost an obsession with many of them. 2) Some of them seem very comfortable in their football environment, but much less so elsewhere. 3) Many of them are more controlled by peer pressure than the most insecure 13 year old kid. 4) When we talk with them about how their lives in Christ can shape their coaching, it’s sometimes seen as an intrusion (would rather not integrate those two) and other times they’re like little kids on Christmas morning unwrapping a huge gift. 5) When we talked about leadership development from Jesus’ model, it was energizing and fun for them. (Even with a 9:45 pm start…) 6) They will invest tons of time and energy to improve their knowledge, insight, skills and network for their teams’ benefit. All these make me more committed to serving them well because when they are c...

Most competitors that I’ve known live with a constant tension between their lives in sport and their lives of faith. Many of them cannot justify the two and many more cannot live out their faith in the context of their sport experience. I’ve heard too many coaches or athletes say, “I’m a Christian, but I’m a coach/athlete.” BUT… In their minds those are contradictory. This must not continue to be so. Such attitudes are perpetuated when we simply import religion into the arena of sport and don’t work to integrate faith into the sport experience. This is not easily done, but must be pursued within the context of the sport culture. Thus we must speak of matters of faith as they appear in the fabric of the sport in which your team competes. At the end of one college football season, I wanted to make one final, direct approach to an All-American punter who was about to graduate. I asked him to join me for lunch. I was all set to be very direct about his faith in Christ or the lack...

When you encourage good attitudes, enthusiastic competition, hard work and good behavior they will notice. When you silently endure foolish behavior, coarse language, bad attitudes and laziness; that too will be noticed. You will usually not even have to say anything, they’ll apologize right away. There’s no need for you to criticize. If they want your opinion, they’ll ask for it. When you’ve earned the right to be heard, they will ask directly. Between football seasons one year, a player with whom I’d prayed individually each game day through the previous season, made a foolish mistake and received a ticket for driving under the influence of alcohol. I saw the notice in the newspaper and heard about it through the rumor mill, but he was racked by guilt. He was terribly embarrassed and had to face his parents with the matter. Later he summoned up the courage to call me for a lunch engagement. I knew what he had on his mind, but wasn’t about to cheat him out of the growth oppor...

As I prepared my talk for an upcoming event, I gathered some thoughts about leadership with volunteers. As we serve the people of sport, many times we are in volunteer roles and we also find ourselves leading other volunteers in such service. Below are some thoughts about such leadership. I hope they are helpful to you. Late last summer I was reading “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” an addendum to Jim Collins’ tremendous book about business leadership which I had read a few years ago. One of the main points in both books is to determine what drives the resource engine for an organization – whether that is the profitability of a company or the effectiveness of a non-profit organization like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a local church or something like a healthcare corporation. · As I thought and analyzed how our ministry works, I came to the realization that our greatest resource was not necessarily money; rather it was the amazing team of highly committed volu...