Category: Over The Hump

Every coach knows the feeling. The season is slipping, a key player goes down, the parents are restless, and your job feels like it’s hanging by a thread. You’ve done everything right, and the boat is still filling with water.

The disciples knew that feeling all too well. Jesus Himself had told them, “Let’s cross to the other side.” They were exactly where He wanted them, and the storm hit anyway. Obedience doesn’t exempt us from fear. Even experienced fishermen, men who knew that lake, were certain they were going to drown.

So when life gets scary, what do we do?

1. Shout Out to Jesus!

The disciples didn’t wait until they had it figured out. They woke Him up and shouted, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown!” It wasn’t polished, but it was honest. Coaches are trained to project confidence, and we often carry our fears silently so our players won’t see them. Jesus isn’t asking for a game face. He’s asking for your voice. Bring Him the fear, the doubt, and the sleepless nights.

2. Lock Eyes with Jesus!

After He calmed the storm, the disciples asked, “Who is this man?” Fear shrinks our vision until all we see is the waves. Sitting in the boat was someone who commands wind and water, and they were only now beginning to see it. When the pressure rises, resist staring at the scoreboard, the standings, the fans, or the critics. Look at Jesus. Lock eyes with Him. Read about what He has done, remember what He has already brought you through, and let your picture of Him get bigger than your problem.

3. Make Jesus the Focus of Your Faith!

Jesus’ question, “Where is your faith?” wasn’t meant to shame them. It was an invitation to point their trust at the right place. Coaches put faith in many things: a game plan, a roster, a recruiting class, a group of assistant coaches, and a win-loss record. All of those can fail, and all of them will change. Jesus doesn’t.

Listen Closely —

Your players are watching how you handle the storm. A coach who cries out to Jesus, looks closely at Him, and keeps trusting Him teaches something no playbook can: peace isn’t the absence of storms; peace is the presence of Christ in the middle of the storm.

What storm are you facing right now? Have you actually told Jesus about it?

If not, He’s waiting to hear from you.

Tell Him today.

Over ten years ago, I was reading through the Bible, and the word “heart” kept jumping off the page at me.

I reached out to Greg Carey, a professor at Lancaster Theological Seminary, who shared this insightful nugget with me: The Hebrew word “lev” was used in the original text of the Bible. The word lev is used intentionally because it represents the central hub of our lives, rather than just the physical organ. The heart is the center of our spiritual life and the foundation for our reasoning, decision-making, reflecting, and rational thought.

“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.”— Proverbs 16:9

Proverbs 16:9 reminds us that while we may plan our journey, the Lord guides our steps.

How do we know we are on the path that God has for us?

We are called to pay attention to the moments—the breadcrumbs that God drops along our path. These breadcrumbs serve as reminders that God is guiding our steps, keeping our souls nourished and our hearts fresh.

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.” — Deuteronomy 6:5-6

We take the words we read in Scripture and store them in our hearts. We hold them close so we can keep our hearts aligned with our walk with Jesus and our service to others. This reflects the encouragement in Hebrews 3:12-13: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

Each day, we turn our heart to God.

Each day, recognize the breadcrumbs God leaves along your path.

Each day, be a breadcrumb in someone else’s journey.

Each day, live, work, and serve straight from the heart.

Lead well. Love better.

Prayer, for some, is quite easy, natural in fact. For me, it is not! I have asked many people about how they pray, and I know I’ve been given very good advice. However, what works for one doesn’t always work for another.

As a coach, depending on what level you work, you sometimes have the opportunity to pick the players you work with, while others, you are handed the players. In either scenario, the players are all individuals and all likely have to be motivated and coached “differently.”

Some might need a good motivational kick in the rear end from time to time, while others need the shoulder hug as motivation. Regardless of how you engage with the player, you still have to coach them on a level they understand as well. They all come from different upbringings and backgrounds and learn in many different ways!

I suspect prayer is much the same! God knows all about us. Nothing is hidden from Him. Our hopes, our dreams, our needs, and everything in between! What He wants us to do is bring it to Him. We need to be willing to communicate in some form or fashion with Him, all of it!

Just like working with your players, you need to find your mode of motivation and figure out what avenue best fits a way for you to get it done! Once we get there, the job isn’t over. We need to be bold, lay it all out on the table. Even though God knows all, He wants you to express in any words you can manage…that YOU know! Ask, and answers will come in God’s timeframe. But you need to pray to get answers!

Scripture allows us to see many examples of bold prayer. Above, in Matt. 28:39, is part of Jesus’ approach in the Garden of Gethsemane. Here is one from David after falling badly with Bathsheba.

David: Psalm 51:1–2

Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your unfailing love;

according to your great compassion

blot out my transgressions.

Wash away all my iniquity

and cleanse me from my sin.

Pretty direct, and there are so many more examples of bold prayer for intercession, supplication, and repentance in the Bible. Many of us are asked to pray for others and have asked others to pray for us. I’m still working on a delivery method! I believe simple works, like “Lord, heal (insert name here).” I also believe God wants us to ask for blessings upon ourselves and our family if it’s something we truly want!

You can be more eloquent and flowery with your prayer. It’s your prayer! It’s your comfort level. However it gets done, I promise you, any prayer (communication) with God is better than none! Find your niche and pray!

Be well, Build well, Serve well.

Coaches live by plans. Practice plans, game plans, travel plans. Your calendar is full, your phone rings nonstop, and someone always needs something from you. The reality is that prayer can start to feel like one more thing added to your plate.

Here’s the good news: prayer isn’t a performance, and it isn’t a formula. It’s a conversation with God. Here are three basics for building a lifestyle of prayer.

1. Get gut-level honest.

Jesus warned against praying to be seen or stacking up impressive words (Matthew 6:5–7). Intimacy with God begins where pretending ends. You spend your days projecting confidence to players, parents, administration, and staff. With God, you can drop it. Tell Him about the fear of losing, the frustration with a player, the weight of carrying a team. Hebrews 4:16 says, “We can come boldly to His throne, and we’ll find mercy and grace to help when we need it most.” God meets our honesty with mercy and help.

2. Get a plan and get started.

Luke 5:16 says, “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” Crowds were pressing in, yet He still made time to pray. He was too busy not to pray.

Try this 15-minute plan:

• Pick a time and a place.

• Set a timer for 15 minutes.

• Spend 10 minutes reading the Bible slowly.

• Start with Proverbs or Mark.

• Spend 5 minutes talking to God.

• Be honest, and use a prayer list.

You wouldn’t show up to a game without preparation. Don’t show up to your day without it either.

3. Get ready for His answer.

Jesus promised, “Keep on asking, and you will receive… Keep on seeking, and you will find… Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7). If an earthly father knows how to give good gifts, how much more will your heavenly Father? But His answers don’t always look like we expect.

Remember: Y-B-N-G-S.

• Yes: He gives what you asked.

• Better: He gives something better than what you asked.

• No: He protects you from what you couldn’t see.

• Grow: He’s building something in you first.

• Slow: The timing isn’t right [yet].

Every coach knows that a “no” or a “not yet” from the right voice can be a gift. Trust that your Heavenly Father is coaching you, too.

Listen Closely —

Where are you pretending with God right now?

What 15 minutes can you protect this week?

Which answer—Yes, Better, No, Grow, or Slow—are you waiting on today?

Whatever it is, trust God to handle it.

Play freely. Play fearlessly. These are all attributes of the teams that make the winning plays. These are also the characteristics of people who live for God.

We live this way when we bring our life to God in prayer. In my life, I’ve experienced barriers to praying. God knows what we need and is waiting for us to just bring it to Him in prayer. He tells us this in Matthew 6:8: “Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask Him!”

The barriers I have experienced are wanting to find the right words or thinking that my needs are too small for God. As we see, He already knows our needs, so stop worrying about having the right words. How can I say He knows our needs? I can say this because He’s answered prayers before.

In the spring of 2025, during our baseball season, there were two times that I got to our locker room before our players and took the time to just walk through our locker room and pray for each player. I did this because it came up in our Monday morning Scouts and Coaches Bible study when one of the coaches talked about it. I actually don’t remember who, and that’s not the point, but I learned it from others. The key piece in this was that nobody else knew that I was doing it—well, not at least another human being—but God knew.

The Monday after Easter of the 2025 season, I needed to have a conversation with one of our seniors about his life and some of the decisions he was making that impacted our team. I knew this conversation would be difficult, and it ended up taking two hours, with a lot of discussion back and forth covering many aspects of life and even faith. During this chat, I shared with our player that I had walked around the locker room and prayed for each player, including him. At that moment, the chat we were having shifted from confrontational to cooperative, and God’s presence was felt; God showed up. Or maybe I should say God was always there—we just recognized His presence. Looking back, as I walked around the locker room praying, God already knew our needs. He already knew that the players and I would need those prayers two weeks later.

Taking the time to pray allowed our players and me to align our lives with God’s plan for us. Take the time to pray. Take the time to share your needs freely. Take the time to pray and share your needs fearlessly.

If we want to live freely and live fearlessly, we are called to pray freely and pray fearlessly.

Lead well. Love better.

Before retiring, I spent 44 years in professional baseball as a player, coach, and scout. That means (not counting years I played at two MiLB levels) I had the opportunity to win 44 championships! I was fortunate to be a part of five titles. That means 39 times my season ended in disappointment. But realistically, winning anything is hard, and winning 11% might be considered good, right? Let’s tighten this up a little. Actually, all five Championships came while I played Minor League Baseball (5/10), and none came as a coach or scout (0/34).

Why do I bring this up? Am I boasting about my playing days? Was I just an adequate coach and scout? Actually, it is because I’ve had as much joy over the last 34 years as I did in the first ten. It turns out, yes, winning is fun, and I love to win, but it’s not all about wins and losses at the end of the day. I’ve learned that JOY can be found in all seasons, and quite frankly, championships are fleeting! In order to be 100% correct, I had to research the years of those championships to make sure I had it right!

As a competitor, I do love to win. Typically, to have a good chance at winning, it is nice to start well. Moreover, it is usually just as important to end well. However, how players and coaches react and respond during the hard times “in” season—that is what will truly determine not only the outcome of the season but what gets remembered in the long run about each season, win or lose!

As much as our athletic portion of life is tested, so will our Faith. As stated in James 1:3, WHEN (not if) your Faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. And that parallels seasons of competition. Name me a season when you were not tested! By a player, umpires, the team, injuries, weather! There are so many obstacles we face with both our human (coaching) life and our spiritual life! How we react can lay the foundation for growth and endurance with our human championship and, similarly, with our faith and an eternal championship!

Don’t let earthly things steal your JOY. You should work to find a way to spread that JOY throughout your team in times of struggle! Use the tests that present themselves and times of adversity to grow with your team on the field and off. It’s the perfect time for connection and building of what is needed physically and spiritually. Do not miss the opportunity to Be and build a disciple on the field and for Jesus.

Be a light, shine bright, don’t hide your Light for Christ under a lamp shade. (Matt. 5:14–16) Growth can happen on the field and off if you lead with the Character of Christ working through you. (Gal. 5:22–23)

Be well, Build well, Serve Well.

Picture this. It’s the second week of preseason, and there’s a player who is consistently showing up five minutes late to every workout. You’ve seen enough and had enough. In your mind, he’s lazy, he’s not coachable, not disciplined, and he’s a distraction. You’ve already written his story. Then a week passes, and his mom stops you in the parking lot and tells you he’s been getting both of his younger sisters to school before he heads to workouts because his father is in the hospital battling pneumonia. Suddenly, the story changes, and so does how you see him.

In a similar way, that’s what Jesus is doing in Luke 7. He’s at dinner with a Pharisee named Simon when a woman with a bad reputation walks in. She’s weeping. She pours perfume on His feet and wipes them with her hair. Simon watches and thinks, “If this man were a prophet, he’d know what kind of woman this is.” Simon sees her label, not her.

So how do we guard against our love for others becoming cold and callous?

1. Stop Playing the Critic

Where do you land right now? More critical or more compassionate? Do you have a critical spirit? I’m reminded: being a constant critic can become an easy entry point for sin to sow seeds of division.

2. Lay Down Your Comparisons

Jesus tells Simon about two men in debt, one owing a lot and one owing a little. Neither could pay, and both were forgiven. Simon thought he was the fifty-coin guy and she was the five-hundred. But nobody at that table could pay it back. Don’t get caught in the comparison game. Coach each of your players as who they are and what they can become.

3. Drink From His Fountain of Grace

Jesus told her, “Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace.” Her love was warm because she knew how much she’d been forgiven. Lamentations 3 reminds us, “His mercies are new every morning.” Allow grace to be a staple in your life personally — and as a coach. You’ve been forgiven; now forgive others.

Listen Closely—

When our love grows cold, it’s usually because we have started judging instead of remembering. You judge the players, the parents, and even yourself. However, when you remember how much you’ve been forgiven, you will stop keeping score and start seeing your players and people the way Jesus sees them. So before you walk into practice today, take a minute, drink deep, and let grace warm you back up.

In the spring of 2023, we had an experienced baseball team returning from the previous season. In our first game of the season, we faced a quality opposing pitcher and got shut out. In our second game of the season, we lost in an extra-innings walk-off affair. As we entered our third game of the season, doubt crept into my mind about how good we could be. This doubt became great as the third game progressed, entering the bottom of the 7th, losing 1-0. Lo and behold, we scored two runs in the bottom of the 7th, winning in walk-off fashion. We then won 12 of the next 13 games. Our doubt becomes the foundation of faith.

Being raised in a Christian home, we would hear biblical stories of faith from a young age. We hear of Jesus healing the sick, the lame, the blind, and the poor. Many of these healings end with Jesus blessing those that have been healed with this phrase, “…your faith has made you well.”

Jesus healed the bleeding woman, and then in Matthew 9:22, Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment.

In Mark 10:52, Jesus says these words to Bartimaeus, “Go,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you.” Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

After healing the Samaritan leper, we read in Luke 17:19, “Then he said to him, ‘Rise and go; your faith has made you well.’”

All these reminders of people having faith can lead us to feeling that we should not have any doubts or that if we have doubts, there is something wrong with us. Our doubts are reminders that we are human. Our doubts provide the opportunity and the foundation for our faith.

Instead of focusing on our doubts, we are being challenged to lock eyes with Jesus. Our doubts bring our head down, and in order to lock eyes with Jesus, we must lift our head up. Look around and look up. It is then that we are reminded of what is written in Luke 7:22-23, “Then he told John’s disciples, ‘Go back to John and tell him what you have seen and heard—the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor.’ And he added, ‘God blesses those who do not fall away because of me.’”

Each of us has a story of faith to tell. We have experiences where God shows up. It is up to us to keep our eyes up and know that God shows up. He shows up right on time to remind us that our doubts are the foundation of the faith that makes us well.

Lead well. Love better.

During my coaching days years ago, I was involved in one game I’ll never forget. My team was on the road and playing a doubleheader. This meant a long day at the field! Getting down 7-0 early just deflated the team. You could see them looking ahead to the 2nd game. However, we still had to finish Game 1. In our final at-bat, with 2 outs and an 0-2 count on our hitter, something changed! That hitter reached base, and the next and the next….. and before we knew it, we were on top 9-7 and won the game! I do not remember the outcome of Game 2!

What changed? How did this happen? I can attest to one thing: I heard from the dugout (I was coaching 3rd) someone say, “We can still do this!” What, why now? Where did his HOPE come from? With each hitter having success, HOPE rose, JOYFUL noise could be heard, BELIEF grew, and the results were something no one would forget!

In Luke 7:12-13, all hope was lost. The mother’s only son was dead, and she was already a widow. What hope did she have? She had no future! There was no one to take care of her. She was destined to beg for a living. Well, Jesus happened! He had just entered the town and witnessed the funeral procession. Jesus felt compassion for her! He saw, he felt, he acted, and raised the boy and gave him back to his mother!

Don’t miss this: Of course, Jesus knew the ramifications of this boy’s death meant to the mother. No one asked Jesus to act. However, his actions spoke volumes to the witnesses. He continued to confirm his authority and build his identity. They could see he was empowered by God.

When you coach at any level, the players will look to you for inspiration, confidence, and positivity. How you walk, talk, act, react, and simply lead your team will determine just how much influence you will ultimately have with them.

Compassion for each individual and their stories is a good place to start.

Compassion was an underlying theme in all Jesus’ miraculous acts!

What better way to lead a team but with the character of Christ flowing through you!

In Luke 7, a Roman officer had a guy dying — basically his MVP. He sends the local leaders to Jesus with a résumé: “He deserves this. He’s earned it. Look what he’s done for us.”

But when Jesus gets close, the officer stops him. He doesn’t lean on his record. He just says, “I’m not worthy — just say the word.”

That’s the flip we need too. We spend our lives building résumés: wins, rankings, and reputations. And that’s not wrong. However, when we come to Jesus, we don’t come with our stat sheet. We come with our need. Just like that officer did.

Then he says something remarkable: “I get authority. I say ‘go’ and they go, ‘come’ and they come. I know how command works — and I know You have that kind of authority over my situation.” He wasn’t looking at the odds. He was looking at who Jesus is.

That’s our second reminder: don’t coach your circumstances — trust Jesus’ authority over them. The scoreboard, the injury report, the analytic numbers, the tough matchup — none of it is bigger than Jesus.

And here’s the finish: the officer believed before he saw the healing. He trusted the word before he saw the evidence. Jesus said, “I haven’t seen faith like this.” Then the servant was healed.

Listen Closely: So here’s what to carry into today:

Bring your need, not your credentials.

Trust His authority more than your circumstances.

And hold onto His promise even before you see the outcome.

Your team, your program, your day: it may be beyond your control. It is never beyond His authority.