Gene Zannetti
Episode 225
22 MAY 2023
He was a nationally ranked All-Ivy League wrestler at the University of Pennsylvania AND he was an assistant wrestling coach at Springfield College. He is a certified School Psychologist, Personal Trainer and Nutritionist, and, along with his brother he now runs Wrestling Mindset, to help wrestlers reach their full potential in wrestling, school and life. He has two master’s degrees, including one in Sports Psychology, and his master’s degree thesis has been published in the International Journal of Wrestling Sciences. On the faith side, he is the founder of Spiritual Strength, whose aim is “building the total athlete for Christ.” And his book, “Spiritual Strength: Building the Total Athlete for Christ,” was reviewed and endorsed by Cardinal Burke.
Notable guest quotes:
“I had an interest in the faith from a young age. Both my brothers and I, we were all altar boys growing up.”
“If anyone were to ask me at any period of time in my life, how important is God and my Catholic faith to me on a scale of one to ten, I would always have said a ten.”
“I had a priest when I was an altar boy in fourth grade, he told me, ‘Every day you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is you bless yourself, you say thank you Lord for this new day. Help me to do everything for you.’ I did that almost every day.”
“I knew faith was important and it definitely gave my brothers and I, we had that rooting, we had a grounding, so we knew that wrestling wasn’t, we weren’t identified by wrestling.”
“When you look back, you realize there’s no coincidences, only God-incidences, right? I could see how the Lord was calling me into a deeper relationship with Him. I could kind of piece it back, looking back in hindsight.”
“The main spark was, really, in 2015, when my brother Greg started discerning priesthood.”
“My brother discerning priesthood brought my whole family way closer to the Lord.”
“I knew that there was Padre Pio. I knew about Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Guadalupe. So I was hanging on by the mystics.”
“The Lord was working on both my heart and my head at the same time.”
“I could give them great sports psychology information, but I really can’t take them all the way without knowledge of Christ and His church.”
“We have to pray the rosary every day. We have to consecrate ourselves to Mary. The scapular – wearing the brown scapular. Offering up our sufferings. And Saturdays, the first Saturday devotion. Those are the five things Our Lady wants all Catholics to do.”
“Prayer is kind of like an analogy for stretching because when we stretch, when we pray, God stretches our muscles further than we can stretch on our own.”
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