Juan Cotto
Episode 298
14 OCT 2024
He has spent many years working in sports, from being the Head Football Coach at two different high schools in Washington state to having been an assistant football coach at a third. In addition, he developed a program with the Washington Officials Association and the Pacific Ten Conference in tribute to a high school football coach who passed away from cancer. His work in sports also extends to having been a part of two Major League Baseball front offices, the Atlanta Braves and then the Seattle Mariners. On the faith side, he was Director of Development at the largest Catholic elementary school in the Pacific Northwest.
Notable guest quotes:
“It was very much a Catholic household… I was baptized at St. George Church on Beacon Hill… And we did attend Catholic school. I attended St. Edward’s Catholic school in Columbia City in the South Seattle area… And I attended O’Dea High School in downtown Seattle… that’s an all-boys Catholic high school.”
“By the time I got to high school, I participated in the sport of football, but my personal favorite sport was baseball; ended up taking it and going to a small school in Oregon after two years of community college here in the Seattle area, I went to a small school in Western Oregon… It’s now Western Oregon University… I had a nice little decent baseball career on the side.”
“He was the one that connected me with the Chicago Cubs organization. And they flew me out for an interview. And the interview went very well. And Miss Lewis offered me the position.”
“When I was in Chicago… it was the Catholic community – I would go to Mass on Sunday nights – they would have meals at the Mass, and I would eat and get to know the community there and share with them.”
“In Seattle, the African American community, we have St. Therese Church. But the Black community is very, very small in the Catholic Church in Seattle. I just found it was really refreshing to be in a Catholic community that was much larger in Chicago and to be able to exercise that part of my faith with people who looked like me, which was something that was just a little bit different from the community which I grew up in. So, my Catholic faith certainly served me there.”
“That to me was an opportunity to really reconnect myself, not only with God and my faith, but also with myself, and to figure out, to kind of redefine myself.”
“You spend a bulk of your life trying to be somebody, and I realized through my Catholic faith, I am somebody… You start to realize that being a child of God and being connected to this faith and then the teachings of Jesus Christ and the relationships you build through that, that is ultimately what makes you the person you are.”
“By golly we won football games too. We didn’t win as many as we wanted to but when I had got to the high school there were 68 kids in the program out of 80 were academically ineligible. So, I knew that we had to connect with them on an academic level. What I found out was that a lot of the kids were raising themselves. They had family situations where the parents were either not involved or in many cases had problems with the authorities and then were incarcerated. So, a number of them had been emancipated to different family members and you really were a father figure.”
“A lot of gospel singers over the last decade have built a connection to my Catholic faith through a lot of Christian music because I feel like I had to kind of immerse myself in it to make sure that my mind was right because when your mind is right then your body and your spirit can be right. When your spirit is right, then you can really impact people.”
