There are so many reasons to list like winning championships and wearing rings but there is so much more. Now it would be easy to say I can make that point because I don’t have any state championships or rings so I am trying to make an excuse. However, I think the men who win those championships realize after a while those will all be meaningless in the end. The treasure of coaching is watching boys because young men. The battle they have with the evil influences in life. We all have battled those influences and many of us have fallen to it, but it has been the coaches who have given us those multiple chances at making it right that have allowed many of us to become coaches and not statistics in jail or dead. I was definitely on the track on the latter but a coach saved me. I believe Jesus placed a heaviness on my moms heart to have her go to my coach for help. It was a feeling she had and she was right.
This coach came and asked me to start being a part of what he was doing. I should have been away in college playing football and doing school and instead I was living the Miami life ( If you are from down south you know what that means!) It was through coaching and watching men coach that I saw the impact coaches truly have on their athletes. I wanted that because I felt like I missed out on that as a player, especially in high school. It was God who opened up the doors for me to start coaching and he closed the doors for me to play college football. I have been coaching since I was 20 years old and I am now 41. I meet so many kids, who are now men, that I have coached and they tell me the impact I made on them. God is constantly reminding me the lives that I have impacted because of the path he set me on.
I coach to develop these athletes into strong competitors but mostly for them to become men of integrity so that their word means something. So many people we encounter today have no integrity they are simply for them self and that’s it. Now it doesn’t mean you cant have success and be this type of coach as well. I coach in an area where I am surrounded by Championship programs and wrestlers and it keeps me on my feet to want to be the best. There is a love your guys have to have for you. It is not how much wrestling you know, but how WILLING are your athletes ready to run through a wall for you. When it comes down to that deep down fight, how much does their love for you, their teammates and their team matter. That’s why I coach, these kids I have now WANT to be Champions and honestly they all are. The rings and championships may come but they are all champions by committing and sacrificing to work to be the best. Dealing with the off the mat issues brings the father figure out in all coaches. We have to deal with what the outcome of some bad choices can be and then guide them in a way where they learn to make the right choices. I am Happy and Solid to know my calling and it is in the trenches of this evil world where we as coaches reign. Be a light in the darkness of most of these kids lives. The relationships created through coaching become, for the most part, life long friendships with the athletes and their families. I am excited to extend my crown of life and pray that Christ will shine through me,
One Love, One King, All Christ
Live Like You Are Loved
