Eric Schon
Episode 393
17 AUG 2026
He was the top-ranked offensive lineman and the fourth-ranked player among all positions heading into last year’s CFL Draft. Following last year’s Gator Bowl, in which he played for Duke University, he stepped away from the game due to a neck injury. He had started playing football at a young age and went on to award-filled years in high school, and then at both The College of the Holy Cross and then at Duke. Along the way he also competed in wrestling and track & field. On the faith side, he had only attended Catholic schools until he got to Duke, and is about to head off on a very special trip that will resonate with brothers and sisters in Christ.
Notable guest quotes:
“It was a huge blessing to potentially have an opportunity to go back home and pursue every child’s dream of playing professional sports.”
“Everything happens for a reason. Now I’m blessed with a great career, living an amazing lifestyle here in Boston, surrounded by people that I love.”
“Candidly, I had gone into (the Gator Bowl) having already made up my mind. Mentally I was going into that game knowing that that was going to be my last time stepping on the football field.”
“I really gave the game all I had; all I could give it. And it gave me back in return something tenfold. It gave me back not just the lessons in resiliency and the good habits of waking up early in the morning and understanding (that) if you want to accomplish something, you have to work hard to actually achieve it. But just the friendships and the camaraderie that it gave me is just something that you can’t put a dollar value on.”
“That decision to step away from the game is something that took a lot of prayer. I knew that physically I wasn’t necessarily in it anymore. I knew that my body couldn’t really take it. And I think it took a lot of relinquishing myself from an expectation, right? Removing my attachment at least to an expected outcome and kind of just submitting to the will of the Lord and submitting to what God had in place for me. And being content with that and trusting that.”
“I really want to emphasize the word faith here, having faith that God our Father had the perfect plan in place for me. And no matter how hard I tried to push against it or how hard I tried to make my own plan work or do everything in my human power or my human desire to make a certain outcome come to reality, it just wasn’t in the cards for me. And it’s not what God had in store for me. And trusting in that and having faith in that, I think is incredibly liberating, or at least it was for me. But to come to that conclusion took a lot of prayer and took a lot of conversations with God for sure.”
“There was also the questioning of, ‘Why is this happening to me,’ right? Anybody that goes through a certain, some sort of adversity, I guess you could say, there’s a tendency, I think, in the human psyche, to question things, ‘What did I do to deserve this’?”
“Somewhere along the way, you have to… just let go and look up at God and say, ‘You know what, God, I don’t fully understand why this is happening to me, and maybe I never will understand that, and that’s okay, that’s fine, that’s fine with me. As long as I have faith in Your plan for me, and as long as I have faith for what You have in store for me, my life, and my family, then I’m content with whatever happens’.”
“The most important relationship in my life is my relationship with God and Jesus Christ and really leaning into that relationship.”
“I think that those were the most formative years of my entire life. The most growth that I ever underwent were during those four years.”
“When you walk into our front door, there’s a statue of St. Francis there and the Catholic faith is a huge pillar of my family life.”
“I’ve always had the mindset or had the temperament to understand that football is just really one piece of my identity and one sliver of who I am as a young man and really just trying to remain humble in that and understanding that the physical talents that I’m blessed with are much less a product of my own doing and much more a product of God’s blessing to me.”
“St. Francis is a saint that we hold very, very close to our hearts in my family and he has shown up in our lives in some very big, big, big moments throughout our lives and throughout some pretty tough times that we’ve had as a family.”
Related link:
Pre-CFL Draft article on Eric’s retirement announcement