A college football team makes a spiritual touchdown

When I was 28 years old, I became head coach of the football team for Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. The job offer came suddenly, and to be honest, I was intimidated at first. While I had six years of coaching experience, I wasn’t expecting to be offered a job at that level so early in my career.

Some experiences I had around that time had taught me how wise it is to trust God. As I prayed about this opportunity, I saw how developing this trust had helped me prepare spiritually for this position. I accepted the job and moved forward with confidence.

Among coaches, there are different schools of thought about ways to bring a team together. Many have adopted the “winner-take-all” attitude. Some use the threat of retribution as a motivator—they believe it brings out a competitive fire. If the team doesn’t win convincingly on Friday night, the players show up early Saturday morning to run punishment sprints.

But I don’t think doing something out of fear builds team spirit, and I wanted the exact opposite attitude to permeate my team. I wanted love to be our motivating force. And the only way I knew this could happen was to have our team working from a solid spiritual basis.

Since Principia is a school for Christian Scientists, I was able to speak openly to the team about religious matters. But I feel the spiritual concept of love is so universal, it would work for any coach.

Before the players reported to football camp at the start of the season, I sent them all a letter to let them know what to expect and what to bring with them.

I asked them to read these words of Jesus from the Bible: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

I asked them to think about what it means to love God supremely. Is it possible to really love our neighbor (their brothers on the team), or ourselves, if we don’t understand who God is and how to love Him?

I told the players we’d discuss this at camp, and they should come prepared to share their thoughts. By aligning ourselves with divine Mind and its guidance, I felt our team would be as unified and successful as possible.

In my personal as well as professional life, I’ve seen over and over how events work out better and more smoothly when my goal is to love God. I do this by showing my gratitude for all He has given me.

And the way I do that is through practicing Christian Science. Fully identifying myself and my team as complete and perfect spiritual ideas of God makes it easier to keep clear of anger, frustration, and any other negative suggestion that tries to enter my thought.

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, wrote “Beloved Christian Scientists, keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them. It is plain that nothing can be added to the mind already full.” She continued, “Good thoughts are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 210 ).

The team and I had some good discussions at camp, as well as throughout the season. We focused on this idea from Science and Health: “Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being, and His reflection is man and the universe. Omni is adopted from the Latin adjective signifying all. Hence God combines all-power or potency, all-science or true knowledge, all-presence. The varied manifestations of Christian Science indicate Mind, never matter, and have one Principle.”

That statement really covers all the bases. We related everything back to the idea of God being All, and each of us expressing God completely as His spiritual idea. Since God is omnipresent—meaning everywhere, all the time—then there is no room for anything else to exist.

And since God is omnipotent, He has all the power. There is nothing else that could have power. If God has 100%, nothing is left over. God is omniscient. He has all the knowledge and wisdom, so there can be no other source from which to gain understanding. And because each of us is His idea, we are sustained and empowered by Him. When we’re really striving to be spiritual and to express God, then we don’t need to accept the feeling that we’re too tired or not good enough to do something. Because God is All, and God is good, we can never be cut off from good.

We worked together to understand and apply these ideas. Understanding that we reflect God alone breaks down every type of limitation.

And we certainly faced some challenges. We had a young, small, inexperienced team. Of our 30 players, one third were new to the team. But we were up to the challenge—and I credit this to putting God first and gaining a better understanding of who we were individually as God’s children.

The guys responded amazingly and had some healing experiences that proved it. An example: Clayton is a defensive lineman. During one practice, his knee went in a direction it wasn’t meant to go. It looked like a season-ending, maybe even a career-ending, type of injury.

But instead of giving in to that idea, he prayed about it. He let his parents know, and a Christian Science practitioner was called to pray for him. He had the support of his teammates, too. A week and a half later, Clayton was able to walk without crutches and even lightly jog. Within four weeks he was completely healed and back on the field. Not only that, but he was running freer and playing better as well.

A couple of years earlier while on another football team—one that focused heavily on punishment as a way to motivate its players—Clayton had hurt his other knee in a similar fashion. That injury held him back for the entire season. Clayton says that the biggest healing was experiencing the difference between love and hate as a member of the team. The love expressed on the Principia football team helped him move much more quickly towards complete healing. This healing and its added blessings were right in line with the philosophy of the team.

The object of the game is to win, of course, but the spiritual purpose of playing is to express God. I told my team not to look at the scoreboard. The scoreboard can’t tell you whether or not you’re doing the best that you can.

We won one game and lost eight during that season. If you looked at our record, you might not think we were a good football team. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

We were a solid team. The players never gave up. We knew we weren’t on the field to prove we were better than the other team. We were out there to be the best that we could be.

We kept our eye on the real prize—to be Godlike. And it showed. We had seven players who gained all-conference honors. We also had three who were ranked in the top 20 in the country for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division III. One was seventh in QB sacks per game, another was tenth in all-purpose yards, while the other was nineteenth in receptions per game. Players from at least 228 teams were considered and the average team consists of 50 players. These are impressive accomplishments. I see it as a natural step. These guys were doing their best to demonstrate the reality of being, which is that God made man in His image and likeness.

This spiritual approach to football gave the team a solid foundation for next season and far beyond their time in college.

I see the team as being like the house-builder Jesus talked about in one of his parables: He was a “man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock.”

In the end, such a foundation is really a basis for progress, whether you build it when you’re in college or later. The team’s motivating truth, that God is All-in-All and that each of us reflects Him perfectly, was as important off the field as on it.

This spiritual truth is a building block for life—and football is as good a place as any to prove it.

Winning spiritual ideas:

Science and Health
465:16-6

King James Bible
Luke 6:48
Matt. 22:35-39