Episodes

Chase Crouse

He played tennis and beach volleyball in high school and the latter when he was a student-athlete at Texas State University. Present day he participates in mixed martial arts, lifting weights, hiking, and doing Spartan races. He is co-founder of and fitness director for Hypuro Fit, whose mission is to bring a technically excellent and authentically Catholic approach to personal training. He also has a story about his own reversion to the Catholic faith, which he shares during this interview.

Notable guest quotes:

“My dad loosely non-denominational agnostic and my mom growing up was more of like a cultural Mexican Catholic, but she had her reversion later in life, so growing up we were nominally Catholic but not practicing by any means.”

“My dad actually was a semi-professional beach volleyball player.  So, I was kind of playing with that a little bit when I was in middle school but nothing too seriously and then by the time I got to high school I settled on tennis so that was kind of my main sport in high school and then eventually beach volleyball.”

“I got confirmed when I was in high school.  My mom made me go through the confirmation process.  It was kind of just like a check box kind of thing.  And I kind of got a little bit more into my faith going into junior and senior year.  I’d met some friends at the local church.  By that point I was already getting into partying and drinking and at first, I didn’t realize that those are two contradictory things.”

“Tennis was everything for me for a number of years.  I was playing on average, like, two to four hours a day.  Me and my doubles partner were ranked number four in the state of Texas at one point in doubles and colleges started emailing me and my parents probably my sophomore year going into my junior year.”

“I thought I was going to go to college.  I thought I was going to do it as a, maybe I don’t know if as a career, but something very serious and God had other plans.”

“Basically, my whole first year at Texas State I was never an atheist, right?  I was never agnostic.  I was always ‘Catholic,’ it was not part of my life at all.  I didn’t give it much thought.”

“The next thought struck me, and this was the Holy Spirit speaking to me, which was, if I died right now where would I be.  And for 19-year-old Chase that was a terrifying question.”

“I knew, like really knew, and experienced, that Jesus was real and that he loved me and that I should be striving more and more to do everything I can to honor, love, and serve him.”

“God just put this fire in my heart to serve him and so I wanted to tell others about his mercy and so I became a missionary and while I was a missionary that’s when I really fell in love with theology and knowledge for the first time and that’s when I knew I wanted to go back to school and study it more formally.”

“I eventually went to a school called John Paul the Great Catholic University to finish my undergrad, so I got an undergrad degree in what was called the new evangelization (which) was the name of the degree, which was essentially a theology and a philosophy degree.”

Related link:

Hypuro Fit website

Ryan Evans

He is in his second season as an assistant coach for women’s swimming and diving at the University of Kansas.  Prior to joining the Jayhawks staff, he was the head coach at the University of Mary, and before that he had been an assistant coach at the University of New Mexico.  Prior to moving into the college coaching ranks, he was the head coach of Reno Aquatic Club from 2018-21.  As a student-athlete he graduated from and swam at the University of Iowa, where he was named the team captain for the 2008-09 season.  He also received the Big Ten Sportsmanship Award and the Iowa Swimming Leadership Award in 2009.  He has a compelling story about his reversion back to the Catholic faith.

Notable guest quotes:

“Parents were Catholic, went to Mass, still go to Mass every Sunday, and I attended a Catholic school first through high school, graduated from Bishop Manogue Catholic High School in Reno, Nevada.”

“I grew up playing all the sports.  Baseball was probably my first love and then I spent some years playing basketball, but swimming has always kind of been a theme in my family… my uncle was a long-time swim coach, and my oldest brother was an All-American swimmer in high school.”

“One of my good friends decided to open up a specialty running store in Reno and he offered me the manager position, he wanted me to help him open the store.  So, I was the manager of Reno Running Company.”

“I told her, ‘I’ve always wanted to marry someone who was Catholic.’  I didn’t know why at that point but that was super important to me.”

“Sitting there (watching) this documentary… and a light bulb went off in my head and looking back now, that’s the moment that kick started my faith and my faith journey.”

“That was God’s plan, was for us to move to Albuquerque, and the reasons for that, there’s kind of three things that happened to me with my faith journey in Albuquerque.”

“It’s so amazing and beautiful to see how God has worked in our lives.”

“I started to do some research after reading the job description and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is a faithful Catholic university!  This is something that we’re looking for’!”

“I think our faith gets stronger and it deepens when we’re in a community that maybe isn’t as accepting or as open to the Catholic faith.”

Related link:

Ryan’s bio on UofK website

(This episode contains a prayer from the National Catholic Coaches Association’s “The Leadership Papers,” although originally credited in there to The Coach’s Bible.)

Alex DiVerde

He played football in high school but also competed in track, which became his long-term sport. Having broken a school record in indoor 4x800m relay in high school, he went on to compete for four years at Bradley University where he also broke a school record. Post-college he has continued to run, including five marathons and one 50-mile ultra marathon. He even qualified for and ran in the Boston Marathon.  Plus, since 2018 he has backpacked approximately five thousand miles across a handful of trails, including the Appalachian Trail.

Notable guest quotes:

“Both my parents were cradle Catholics, and I was as well… and then both sets of grandparents were devout practicing Catholics as well.”

“Sports were always a big part of, I guess, our family’s life and my life.  (I) played the laundry list of common sports that Americans could play growing up.  It was mostly soccer, and then track when it came around growing up, and then there was some basketball mixed in there, some baseball mixed in there, and then football and track were the focus in high school.”

“When I was taking a look at schools, I was having a number of, like, D3 schools reach out to me, but I really wanted to go and walk on at some division one school that would take me.”

“I went from playing football and running mostly sprint type training to basically running cross country or distance training.  So, I went from running 15 miles a week to 50 or 60, by the time end of freshman year rolled around.  So, I was training a lot harder than I ever had and putting way more work into running.”

“I put this, like, being a division one runner on this pedestal and it didn’t exactly live up to what I expected or what I wanted it to be and started looking around a little bit and asking God a little bit, like, ‘Okay… there’s got to be more’.”

“They had a football player for Northwestern come and give a talk basically about his faith experience in college… pretty much as soon as that talk was done, I went up to one of the missionaries that was there and was like, ‘Hey, my name is Alex.  I’m going to join your Bible study’.”

“I went on a FOCUS mission trip to the Philippines, and that’s where there was a group of four staff missionaries and maybe 10 or 11 students that went, ministered to the folks in poor areas there, and helped to build some homes while we were there, and it was through that trip and experience that God, very loud and clear, was like, ‘Hey, I’ve given you these talents in other areas for what you’re studying, but I want you to spend a couple years serving with FOCUS after college’.”

“(God is) going to speak to us.  He puts these desires on our hearts, and He’s going to speak to us … in the highest of highs and the lowest of lows… I had this idol of being a division one athlete, being able to call that my own, and, to a certain extent, He kind of broke that idol down a little bit, or, helped me to realize that He was the one who gave me those talents, but even though I had good talents at running, there’s much bigger things in life than just running fast around a track.”

“We were in Trinidad and Tobago and the main sport was soccer.  So, we’d spend the first half of the day running a soccer camp for the kids in Trinidad and Tobago in the community we were serving at.  And then in the second half of the day, we would run – most of the kids were younger, so it probably felt a little bit more like vacation Bible school or religious ed that you might experience here in the States and like that – so we spent a week and a half over winter break doing that year.”

“I find that sports is a very natural way to connect with other people to connect with other men.  So, I feel like that is, like, some of the guys there have very much, like, we have come together because we have shared common sports activities and whether it’s running, basketball, I feel like snowboarding and skiing is another very common one being in the upper Midwest and that being something you can do in winter that we spend a lot of time connecting while we’re doing those activities and that definitely helps us to be able to connect together, both together and with God for sure.”

[This episode contains a prayer (poem) by Central Catholic High School (Pittsburgh, PA) Principal Ed Bernot, as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport]

Daniel Maigler

He played football his freshman year of high school, moved on to discus and two conference championships in that sport, and then went on to a long career in lacrosse, a sport that he remains involved with to this day. He played for the Illinois Wesleyan University Club Lacrosse team, Oxford University, and Second City/Windy City Men’s Club, and he still plays in an over-30 league. On top of all that, he not only has officiated lacrosse, but has coached five high school teams since 2001, plus, Park Ridge Youth Lacrosse, which he has now been coaching for three years.  (Be forewarned of two emotional stories in the second half of this episode.)

Notable guest quotes:

“I am a cradle Catholic… So … we were a weekly Mass family.”

“In the football two-a-days, I ended up having another player step on my back and ended up with a stress fracture in my L5 vertebrae… they said I should never play contact sports again.”

“This Catholic Life Community, it filled me up and gave me a sense of purpose, mission and just reason to have hope.”

“I had this desire to live a life of service.”

“I ended up changing from there to go to work at Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Chicago.  And that’s when I was able to start doing the coaching alongside that because my passion for lacrosse that I picked up in college.”

“In so many ways, it’s not even what we necessarily say to kids.  It’s, we are an example of what they’re seeing of, what is a man like and how do we model for them?  How do we mentor them through our behaviors, through our actions, of sharing our values day to day in all the things we do in the way we carry ourselves?”

“We’re all role models, whether we want to be or not. Our only choice is whether to be a positive role model or a negative role.”

“The saving grace for me was the service work because I think … sometimes when we give service to others, it helps to heal our heart.”

“There’s … no reason why we can’t treat each other respectfully.  There’s no reason why there has to be trash talk.  There’s no reason why our victory has to be someone else’s loss.”

“For as long as I can remember my entire career, I’ve said the prayer of St. Francis every day… And when my father passed away, he actually, in going through his things, he had a little keychain with the prayer of St. Francis on a medallion, and I got to take that… it gave me a special extra connection with my father.”

Related links:

Paws For Patrick
Coaching Boys Into Men

(This episode contains a prayer from the National Catholic Coaches Association’s “The Leadership Papers,” although originally credited in there to The Coach’s Bible.)

Taryn Wright Campbell

She is the Head Varsity Volleyball Coach at St. Francis Catholic High School in Sacramento, California, where she was previously the head junior varsity and assistant varsity volleyball coach. As a student-athlete there she had led the team to the state championship as a junior in 2005 before later going on to earn three All-Big Sky Conference awards at the University of Montana. Her coaching career began as a student assistant at Montana and included a stop at Nevada as a volunteer assistant and director of volleyball operations.  She also coached club ball for Northern Nevada Juniors.

Notable guest quotes:

“I did go to Catholic school from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade.  The school I went to, my mom was actually a teacher at, and we would go to Sunday Masses as a family when we were younger.  My dad was actually baptized when I was in college.”

“I eventually started working at a Catholic school with my mom and have been there ever since, and I love being able to teach kids about the faith, talk to them about it, be able to pray with them daily.”

“It’s very important for me to raise my kids the same way as my parents did.”

“I did play other sports growing up.  I did play soccer up until my sophomore year in high school… and tournaments ended up being on the same weekends.  And so, I obviously couldn’t be in two places at once… and, my dad, in the end, he basically told me, ‘Look, you need to figure out which one you love to practice more because you’re going to do that way more than you’re going to compete.’ … That hands down turned to volleyball for me.”

“I always had my own personal prayer that I would do before every match.”

“We did a lot of projects out with the community.  We did a Habitat for Humanity project one time as a team, which was very impactful to see what we could do on a day off of practice to help those less fortunate than us.  We would go into different classrooms and read stories to the kids, and just seeing the impact that we as athletes could have to these kids that we don’t even know was huge.”

“I feel like as a coach, kind of reminding these girls that there’s more than just the sport out there in life and part of my job as a coach is not only to teach them those skills, but to teach them how to be good young women.  Because if I’m not teaching them those life lessons, those skills, encouraging them to go do these service hour things, I’m not doing my job because I should be teaching them more than just volleyball.”

“One of the beauties of being able to teach at a Catholic school is I get to talk about Christ every single day.  I get to talk about Him in science, not just in religion.”

“The last couple years we as a school incorporated the virtues into our daily practice.  We would have quotes on a different virtue and so we kind of relate back to that pretty consistently.”

Related link:

Taryn’s volleyball bio on St. Francis High School website

(This episode contains a prayer attributed to legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Fr. Edwin Leahy

He has been the headmaster at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, New Jersey, for more than 50 years.  He is a graduate of that school and has been featured on “60 Minutes” and on FOX News. On the sports side, he wrestled, played football, and captained the tennis team, and went on to coach wrestling for St. Benedict’s Prep. Over six years ago a video went viral of him on the basketball court, hitting a hook shot from three-point range, wearing his clerics. Meanwhile, he received the first Robert F. Kennedy Award for Urban School Leadership from the national Schools That Can organization in 2014 and was named a New Jersey Icon by NJBIZ in 2020.

Notable guest quotes:

“Especially my grandmothers, were pray-ers.  So, from the time I was – I can remember – I remember them praying.  And my dad was that way too.  I used to, saw my father every morning and every night before he went to work, and it might be before he went to bed, kneeling at the side of his bed praying.  So, I grew up around pray-ers.”

“My grandmother actually had a unique – and I studied a lot of theology, and I used to say, nah, this can’t be, this is not true – but she had a unique relationship with the Blessed Mother.  She could change the weather, she could get all kinds of favors done.  It was unbelievable to have the experience with her.”

“The locker rooms, any really, really good team, the locker room is critical, right?  So, I learned a lot from the conversations and the encouragement that came from coaches before games, before practices.  And this coach… had a huge influence on me and the way I looked at building a team, working as part of a team, giving up what I want for what we need.”

“I really don’t remember wanting to do or be anything else… I grew up with priests around me all the time… So, I admired them, and I said, ‘Well, maybe I can do that’!  I can remember as a little kid celebrating Mass in the house, making my sister attend.  And my sister would be in the assembly, and I would celebrate the Mass.”

“I had no idea about being a monk or a Benedictine, until I came here to St. Benedict’s.  And then I combined my experience with the priests in the parish with my experience here.”

“How God works in our history is really, really important to realize.”

“We were blessed here in the monastery with one of the monks, priests, who was a Notre Dame graduate, was doing a PhD in Physics at Columbia University.  And he knew he wanted to enter the monastery.  So, he never did the final research project.  He entered the monastery.  He had been a former Boy Scout leader… And he developed– well, we did it actually together – the leadership structure in the school.  And the mantra was, don’t do for kids what kids can do for themselves.  So, that’s kind of what we’ve operated on.”

“One of the signs you see around the place all over is, whatever hurts my brother or sister hurts me.  So, to try to get the understanding of the responsibility for the other; that God loves us as we are, and He said love one another as I have loved you, which means to accept the other the way the other is, not the way that we’d like them to be.”

“Don’t make decisions in anger that affect not only you, but everybody else around you.”

“It’s real important that kids be invested in something, and that causes them to give up themselves for the sake of a common goal.”

“I could not be a Christian on my own because I’m just not strong enough to do that.  I have the blessing of living in community with 13 other monks.”

Related link:

St. Benedict’s Prep website

Eibhlis Moriarty

She competed in a long list of sports from elementary school to high school to university and adult life. Notably, she competed regionally in running and at the world level in dance. Regarding the latter, she is a World Championship-winning professional Irish dancer, and she now dances for coaching. Meanwhile, she ran her first 10K in 2017 and has remained very involved in running. She is the Graduate Lab Coordinator at the University of Nevada Las Vegas for The Optimum Performance Program in Sport (TOPPS), which blends traditional mental health services with sport culture and customized performance coaching.

Notable guest quotes:

“My personal and my professional journey have always been deeply rooted in my Catholic faith.”

“I actually do have a relative, Tom Murphy was Archbishop of Seattle, and I had a very special relationship with my devoutly Catholic grandmother in Chicago and with her we’d gather on Sundays for an Irish breakfast with the Saint Patrick’s Fathers.”

“I played soccer, I was on swim team, I played T-ball … as a little kid, I was on track and field, badminton and tennis, and then as I got into high school, I kept up the running and badminton and dance.  And so with the running, I competed regionally and then with dance, I competed at the world level.”

“My family are very, we definitely show our faith before we do any kind of a big endeavor, anything like that, we’ll always have candles lighting or say a prayer, all these different kind of ways of acknowledging our kind of peace in a moment.”

“I found that … of these elite athletes who were all in troops touring the world for River Dance and Lord of the Dance and all have World Championship stages, over 50% of them engaged in spiritual routine, which I classified as either prayer or having a holy medal or something along those lines.”

“I was living in Omaha, Nebraska.  A lot of my friends were out golfing … And so, kind of got into it myself and I wish I got into it sooner.  I love it.  It’s great.”

“I like to start my day being grateful for my health overall and those times in the morning are just kind of where it’s quiet for me and I can reflect.”

“The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association… is a Catholic, an Irish Catholic, organization that is dedicated to just instilling the value of temperance through abstaining from alcohol and so that definitely played an important role for me.”

“I didn’t realize that there is so, how deep – I knew it was always, Irish culture and tradition is deeply intertwined with Catholicism – but I mean even when you go back to how we say hello in the Irish language is ‘Dia Dhuit,’ which means God is with you and then the response is ‘Dia is Mhuire Dhuit,’ which means God and Mary with you.”

“In Ireland there is holy wells scattered across the country, and you typically find one in most towns or villages, and they’re associated with a saint or significant event in Irish Catholic history.  And so, people typically will go to these, they’ll visit these wells, when they’re praying for healings or blessings.”

Related link:

Website about TOPPS