Brandi Caswell
Episode 402
19 OCT 2026
She is currently training for a 5K that will take place on November 29th. She grew up an athlete, playing sports nonstop through childhood. She dabbled in soccer, volleyball, and track & field, but competed at a high school varsity level for basketball, cross country, and softball, with the dream of potentially playing college softball. That dream was taken away due to a condition that tempted her to believe that she would never be an athlete again. She came back into sport in the form of coaching varsity-level CYO boys basketball, which then led her to becoming an assistant coach for an AAU boys basketball team. Thankfully, she has a remarkable comeback story that includes she and her husband’s present-day business, Hope Not Nope, which leads athletes towards elite performance in mind, body, and spirit.
Notable guest quotes:
“The trail went down and it was on very uneven gravel, and it went down a hill and then straight back up the hill and in the midst of that I felt completely out of control chaos as I was running. And I felt this shooting pain in my foot, but I had the adrenaline to keep going and to finish the race, but when it happened, I thought to myself, ‘I think I just stress fractured my foot’.”
“The condition is called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, and it’s known as the most painful condition in science. There’s a scale called the McGill Scale and if you look at it, things like an amputation or fibromyalgia or unmedicated childbirth list lower than this painful condition. And so, at 16 years old I was diagnosed with this thing and was told that I would have it for the rest of my life.”
“After the diagnosis I couldn’t walk for nine months. And it was pretty unbearable going through, almost … the entire rest of my junior year I was on crutches.”
“The Lord blessed me with a priest simply inviting me to be a coach and there was something inside me that was so excited that I would have this opportunity to be in sport again, because I had missed it for so long.”
“I later found out that the owner never answered the phone. He was just not a phone answerer. He would let it go to voicemail and then usually have an assistant or someone call or email the person. But for whatever reason the Lord had him answer the phone that day for me and he treated me so well on the phone. And so, finding that out later is just hilarious to me because clearly God wanted me at that gym.”
“For me with chronic pain, there was so long where I did not have hope. But then hope became the word that I clinged to, that if I could just hold on to hope that there would be some sort of purpose in all this.”
“Meeting this person, they told me I didn’t have to manage my pain that I could actually overcome the pain, which was something that I was told wasn’t even possible.”
“After my injury, all of those things … the eating disorder, the anxiety, the depression, and just the depths of that darkness, it heightened all the more because now I lost my purpose of being an athlete. I lost my dream of being a collegiate athlete.”
“God very quickly showed me that that was not my purpose and my purpose was to glorify Him.”
“There’s days where God will just clearly speak, ‘Hey, this is what you’re supposed to post today, so even though you have something planned, switch it because this is what I want you to do’.”
“The internal or external beliefs and lies of you’re not enough, you’re not worthy, and all of those things can be summed up as nope. And so, my personal experience is the Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, but the reality is every person has faced some sort of nope in their life, whether it’s misinformation or rejection or lies and things like that.”
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