A Football Story: Or Is It?

I have been a middle school football coach for many years. The last nineteen seasons, I have been the offensive coordinator for the St. Agnes-St. Francis of Assisi Saints. Let me say up front that I am not Roman Catholic. I grew up in the Missionary Baptist Church, and I am still a believer in that faith. I had just taken a new position with a downtown firm in 1995. The previous year, I left high school coaching (for a while) at a public school here in Jefferson County after the head coach for whom I worked was fired. I assumed my football coaching career was done. But as the next season approached, a man who worked in the same firm came to me, asking if I would be interested in helping his brother-in-law coach the Saints 5th & 6th grade program. I declined. He persisted. I declined again. He was unrelenting, but he was a nice guy with good intentions. I finally agreed to help in an advisory capacity in putting together an offensive scheme. We agreed that I would give them three or four weeks. That was, as I said, almost twenty years ago. After four years, we moved up to the 7th & 8th grade division. St. Agnes - St. Francis of Assisi had joined forces a few years earlier since neither had enough boys to support a team by themselves. Neither had won a Toy Bowl championship for many years. Over the next ten seasons, we went to seven championship games, and won three Toy Bowl titles. But this story is not about our football success. In 2004, our head coach, Paul Passafiume, a devout Catholic gentleman, and a member of St. Agnes Parrish, came to me and the other coaches with a new program that he and a few others had been working on called Sports Leader. He wanted to use our team as a pilot program for what he hoped would evolve and grow into a regional, or national platform for this new character development program. The mission of the program was to teach young men the kind of values that every parent wishes for their children, values that go with football like peanut butter goes with jelly, values like courage, charity, and humility, among others. We spent the next two years developing and refining the program in practice. The coaches became mentors in life and faith, as well as in football. We encouraged our young men to "do the right thing all the time, especially when you don't feel like it". We talked about how Jesus would have been a great football player because he had the mental toughness, the courage to do the right thing in the face of all kinds of adversity, and how his charity would help his teammates to overcome all obstacles, and that his humility would allow him to listen to his elders and his teachers so that he could learn to succeed against all odds. We taught the boys to stand tall against all foes, heads held high, relying on each other for strength. We were adamant about never taking credit for our individual deeds, instead always praising our team for helping us reach our goals. And we instructed them in the power of humility; that taking criticism with a positive attitude would lead to bigger and better things in the future. In November, 2005, the St. Agnes - St. Francis Saints won the 7th & 8th grade Toy Bowl for the first time since 1976. As the boys posed for the championship photograph in the end zone at Trinity High School, hoisting the trophy high, and jumping for joy, they began to chant in a chant that soon became a yell, "Viva Christo Rey", which means "Long live Christ the King". Not a single soul among those 27 boys yelled "We're number one", or pointed to themselves, or talked about what a great team we were. Instead, they praised God for their victory! Last week, Paul Passafiume presented his program to the Vatican. That's right, the Cardinals of the Catholic Church sat and heard this Louisville youth football coach instruct them in how our program works, and how football (and team sports in general) is an important aspect of successful development of our youth. Now that is a sports story worth talking about.