Episodes

Nick Rennpage

As a student-athlete, he competed in swimming, water polo, and sailing, and he later coached swimming at the municipal, club, and high school levels. In addition to having turned to cycling, he is the Mission Officer at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy, where he hopes to help athletes and coaches articulate a vision of sport that is deeply human, spiritually grounded, and attentive to the movement of grace in embodied experience, all while he is pursuing graduate studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, focusing on Ignatian spirituality and athletics.

Notable guest quotes:

“Well, of course, Mass every Sunday. We were one of the families that went to Mass on vacation… And all the sacraments that I could have, of course. And I went to public school, so I went to CCD class on Wednesday nights, I think. And I bring this up because there is a moment that I remember – I was probably in third or fourth grade – and it’s one of these things that maybe set me on the path I am now. But I remember just having this insight … that … studying my faith is something that is giving me a lot of life.”

“I went to public high school. I was in FCA, Fellowship (of) Christian Athletes, in high school, youth group, and the other big part of my faith and my youth was attending Spring Hill Camp.”

“I was on this cycling tour. It was a cycling and canoeing trip. And one of the counselors was riding right next to me. I was probably 13 or 14. And we were just chatting about cycling and our faith and everything, and I told this counselor, ‘This combination of things, the things we’re doing on this camp, is something that I want to do the rest of my life’.”

“John Carroll (University)… the fact that it was Catholic was a plus… we definitely had to do a good amount of studies in theology and philosophy. And I loved that.”

“I fell in love with Saint Ignatius in my coursework and continued to read afterward. It’s like, ‘I just need more of this in my life. I think I can help folks in this way.’ And that led me eventually to teaching Catholic high schools.”

“The exercises is like the main retreat within the spirituality of Saint Ignatius… the main drive of it… is to deepen your relationship with Christ as a friend, just like the apostles would have. And also, to use Christ’s love as a way to make decisions to figure out, to better know what God is calling you to in small ways, but also in big ways. Like ways that might change your life.”

“Most teams would have an athlete … and they would be voted upon to be the chaplain, and they would lead their team in prayer at four practices and competitions. They’d arrange a team Mass … and they would lead a sports examen.”

“Every week I’d come in and I’d have a little quote on what would look like a bookmark that they would put in their journals. I’d have a quote, I’d talk about the quote, I’d tie it to their sport. And the quote was always about faith. And so, these chapel talks would bring together the faith life of the team, the faith life of the individuals and their sport. And the idea of it is right at the heart of the spirituality of St. Ignatius, which is that God works in all things.”

Related link:

North American Sports & Arts Chaplaincy Conference

Gavin Doty

He last month led Siena University to the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament for the first time since 2010, by way of capturing the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship. He was the MAAC Tournament MVP, after having been the first Siena University player in five years to earn First Team All-MAAC honors. He also set a record for the most points scored by a Siena Saints player through their first two seasons. Earlier this month he announced that he is transferring and will go play at Syracuse University. Before all that he had a record-setting high school career and even starred on the Nike EYBL circuit for the Albany City Rocks.

Notable guest quotes:

“All of us are firm believers in Jesus Christ. And my mom and my grandma did a great job just being the leaders of the household, getting us all to church. I remember, ever since we were young, newborn babies, me and my siblings were always in Mass every Sunday, and just making sure our faith was a priority growing up.”

“The people I surrounded myself with, I had really good friends growing up and it really helped me to stay firm in my faith.

“My mom was my basketball coach… But I also played basketball, soccer, lacrosse, football, hockey. My dad was my hockey coach growing up too, so that was super cool. And then I had to make a decision if I wanted to choose basketball or hockey.”

“Weighing out my options and choices and stuff, seeing Jerry McNamara when he got the job (at Siena) and just him being such a faithful family-oriented guy, it made it an easy choice and then on top of it, it’s a Franciscan Catholic school. That was just another plus about it. So, I was really excited about that.”

“I took a visit to Siena with my family, my siblings and that was just great, seeing the campus, seeing what it’s about. And then obviously a lot of prayer too and it helped me make the right choices down the line.”

“We do a team prayer every day before practice, just to make that our foundation of the team, put God first and we also did some Bible studies… anybody that wanted to go and we ended up having like 15, 20 guys at each Bible study, just sharing our faith, learning differences and similarities about each other throughout the lives we’ve been through and that was the foundation for us all year is, we’re going to put our faith first. We’re going to believe in each other. And that led to a lot of success for us.”

“It’s all about spreading God’s love and I’ve been blessed with a platform to be able to do so. So that’s what I’m all about is just looking to help people find their faith.

“My faith is my foundation. My personal performance on the court and my worldly accomplishments will not define who I am as a person, but my faith in Jesus Christ will.”

“There’s Mass at Noon every day here on campus. So, every game day, I would go to Mass.”

Related link:

Gavin’s bio on Siena website

(This episode contains a prayer originally from prayers-and-poetry.blogspot.com, as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Sam Goodwin

He played hockey growing up and then went on to not only play junior hockey in Dallas for the Texas Tornado, but from there earned a D1 athletic scholarship to Niagara University. During his freshman year at Niagara, he and two teammates set an NCAA record and made number 2 on SportsCenter’s Top 10 when they scored three shorthanded goals on one penalty, in 69 seconds. He still today plays in a weekly men’s league hockey game. He is the author of the best-selling memoir, “Saving Sam,” about his having been taken hostage and wrongfully imprisoned while in Syria, as part of his travels to every country in the world – all 193 United Nations Sovereign States, having attended Mass in 65 countries and visited Catholic churches in approximately 115. Listen as he mentions having even coached hockey in North Korea!

Notable guest quotes:

“I’m so grateful to my parents for instilling a strong Catholic faith into my four younger siblings and I. We went to Catholic school our entire life. My brothers and I attended a Jesuit high school.”

“I was fortunate to have some success with hockey … and was able to earn an athletic scholarship to Niagara University … and it’s a Vincentian university, so, St. Vincent de Paul.”

“It’s interesting, when I reflect back on my … hockey career today, some of those teammates are still some of the people who I’m closest with in my life today. I think that kind of being rooted in Catholicism is probably at least partly an explanation for that.”

“(I) always just tried to be humble and just kind of stick with the plan and stay moving forward.”

“My hockey career really came to an end primarily because I had some pretty bad concussion injury and I had post-concussion syndrome for almost a year and kind of brought things to an end in a way that, at the time, I didn’t like but turned out to be a blessing in disguise for a range of reasons.”

“The next place I was going to travel to was Syria. And just two hours after arriving, I was walking through a roundabout on the way to meet up with my guide when all of a sudden, a black pickup truck roughly pulled up next to me, two armed men jumped out of the back seat and instructed me to get inside… they accused me of espionage of being an American spy… They went on to hold me for nine weeks.”

“Everything had been taken from me; my material possessions, my communication, my freedom. But no matter what, I knew that my faith was absolute and that’s what I had to hold on to when everything else was taken.”

“Faith isn’t always easy, but it is always available no matter what.”

“I did end up completing the travel journey on December 31st, 2019, and actually my final country was the nation that is home to more Catholics than any other in the world. It was Brazil.”

“My travel journey… hockey was a big part of that. I played a lot of hockey overseas in Asia, which I never could have expected. I spent a week coaching the North Korean national hockey team.”

“God will use ordinary people to do extraordinary things.”

Related link:

Sam’s website

(This episode contains a prayer by Gregg Easterbrook from the NFL.com and ESPN.com column “Monday Morning Quarterback,” as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Dr Michael Donato

He works as a sports medicine podiatrist. At Princeton University he had played four years of varsity baseball and one year of varsity hockey. In high school he had played four years of varsity hockey, freshman baseball and three years of varsity baseball, and freshman football and three years of varsity football. He also played youth baseball and hockey as well as CYO hockey for two different parishes. While he was taking pre-med courses, he even played club rugby.

Notable guest quotes:

“We didn’t learn our prayers at school. We learned our prayers at home. And then we brought that to school.”

“And at the school I went to… Our Lady of Czestochowa was always on the wall. It was in our chapel. It was everything. And there was a great teaching of the love for the Virgin Mary that we always had. And then when I went to high school, it was with the Christian Brothers of Ireland, it made me think about what it means to be a Catholic and how to grow as a Catholic. It’s not just going to Mass and that’s it.”

“My cousin, Peter Walsh is a Holy Cross father out in Portland University… my brother was a professional hockey player, Olympics and all that, my brother Teddy.”

“In the inner city at that time … thank God we were in sports because it kept us out of a lot of the other trouble things that were going on at the time in Boston.”

“Baseball team, we had a good team, when I was a junior we went to the NCAA – we won the Ivy League, we beat Harvard, it was a playoff game because we had equal, tied records – and then we got to go to the NCAA tournament.”

“Maybe it’s our Catholic faith, but it was never about money to me. It still isn’t. It’s meaningless to me.”

“I was working up in Boston… for a company in the mutual fund industry. I just did not feel like this was me… what I’m going to do the rest of my life. I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not my calling… It’s like you just know, things feel right, you pray, you try to figure out which direction I’m going to go in. And I knew this just wasn’t the direction.”

“The lessons you also learn from sports, you’re on the ground, you get yourself back up, you work hard to achieve a goal, and you just go after it. And that’s what I did.”

“Anything I do is not for my glory. It is for God’s glory. If I am able to heal a patient or make them better, it’s not that I’m so great, it’s that God allowed me to help heal that person.”

“In sports, we stay humble. And this is part of that humility. It’s just, you must stay humble and understand where anything you do comes from God originally. You didn’t come up with anything out of by yourself.”

Related link:

Website for Dr. Donato’s practice

(This episode contains a prayer originally excerpted and adapted from Day By Day: The Notre Dame Prayerbook for Students by Thomas McNally, as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Britta Curl-Salemme

She just won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Italy in February as a member of the U.S. women’s ice hockey team. She is a forward in her second season with the Minnesota Frost of the Professional Women’s Hockey League. Her international experience also includes having competed in three International Ice Hockey Federation Women’s World Championships with Team USA, winning gold in 2023 and silver in both 2021 and 2024. Plus, she won a gold medal with the U.S. Under-18 Women’s National Team at the 2018 IIHF Under-18 Women’s World Championship. As a student-athlete she had played five seasons at the University of Wisconsin, winning three national championships along the way and earning several honors.

Notable guest quotes:

“My mom was very faithful. She came from a large Catholic family … and she really brought the faith into the central part of our family. We grew up going to Mass every Sunday, no matter if we were traveling or, four kids in sports could get hectic, but she always made sure that that was a central part of our life.”

“By putting us in the Catholic schools, kindergarten through when I graduated high school in Bismarck, just, we had awesome Catholic schools, great mentors and religious teachers, priests, I just think I was so lucky to grow up there.”

“Our high school was awesome, and they provided Adoration every lunch hour all year… it was a tiny little chapel on the second floor… I just decided one Lent I was going to start going and I went once a week and then I started going twice a week and then I just found myself wanting to be there more and more. And it’s hard not to be transformed when you’re sitting in front of Jesus every day like that. So that’s something that I’ve tried to continue doing.”

“I actually … played three sports through high school: hockey, track, and soccer. And I loved all of them, but hockey was always the number one for me.”

“I still tried my best … I went to Mass every Sunday and I stayed close to the sacraments, but then my sophomore year – so, I’d been going to the Newman Center… I decided to join a Bible study in my sophomore year because I felt like I needed community. And I think that really just encouraged me and jump started my faith in college and just got more involved there at the Newman Center. And I continued to do discipleship and meet different people.”

“It’s definitely a balance and I’ve just found that having a certain detachment from my sport and putting myself in the hands of Jesus and going to church and to my faith that’s just been so much more fulfilling for me and then it makes hockey more fun. I just get to go and enjoy myself and as my mom says, use the gift that He gave me.”

“I’ve won … many championships, awards, and it’s always the same thing. You win the award and you finish your season and then you’re just kind of like left there wondering, ‘What next’ or ‘Is that it? Is it not supposed to feel a little bit better?’ It’s just not as fulfilling as you might think because you worked hard for something. So just recognizing that and knowing where your fulfillment actually comes from.”

“It’s Italy and you don’t have to go too far without finding a Catholic church. So, I was lucky enough to go to Mass a number of times there for a few weeks.”

“I didn’t really know what to expect just as far as the fans and how many people were going to show up… but I was so impressed with how many American fans showed up, actually. I don’t think we had a game where we didn’t have a really strong showing of U.S. fans that just, whether they were random people that decided to come to a game or were coming through the area, we just had really good support… and then the gold medal game was unbelievable, just packed to the brim.”

“They’re the pros of the religious life. I’m watching them pray and go about their daily life and seeing what I can learn from them.”

“I like to write on my stick AMDG… that’s just like a reminder for me of why I’m doing it and what I hope to bring.”

Related link:

Britta on Minnesota Frost webpage

(This episode contains a prayer by Fr. Brian Cavanaugh, T.O.R., as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Michael Sharman

A senior at Clemson University where he is a pitcher on the men’s baseball team. Through his first six games played in 2026 he had a 4-1 won-lost record over 32 and two-thirds innings pitched and an earned run average of 2.48 with 30 strikeouts and just five walks. He had played LAST season at Tennessee, where he went 3-1, pitching 22 and two-third innings and striking out 25 batters. He also played one season at Georgia Highlands College, where recorded 101 strikeouts in 93 and two-thirds innings pitched over 16 starts in 2024. He missed the 2023 season due to injury after playing one season (2022) at Parkland College, following a high school career that saw him letter three times in baseball and earn all-state and all-region honors as a junior.

Notable guest quotes:

“Our parents have been one of the biggest influences in our faith lives. They raised us up in the church, not missing Mass on Sundays. Just treating us how to be good devout Catholics. And I’ve carried that with me through my whole life and through college.”

“When playing a sport that I’ve put so much time and effort into, you can kind of start to worship your sport a little. So, I try to remind myself every day that you’re only as stable as what you worship. And if I worship the game of baseball, my life’s going to be very up and down. So obviously, I keep Christ as my center, and I’ve done a lot better with not worshiping the game of baseball.”

“The one that I remember the most is Catholic heart work camp that I went with my older brother… in high school… that was a week-long trip… we kind of go serve others … whether that’s putting out mulch in front of a church, picking weeds around a neighborhood or just doing whatever it is to serve for the community where we were at. And so that’s what we would do every morning and then we’d come back, have adoration, Mass.”

“It’s definitely not been a smooth road transferring four times, but I always tell myself it’s God’s plan. I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.”

“I tore my ACL, so I had to sit out and that was a big leaning on my faith moment for that whole year, just like reminding myself that, Jesus, I trust in you. That’s my biggest motto. I have it written on my glove and on my hat.”

“God always has a plan. And I truly believe that. So, leaning on my faith and staying grounded and having my parents and family around me to support me … was huge and truly impactful.”

“I think God really wanted me here at Clemson. I’ve never been more strong and grounded in my faith. I feel like I’m in the best spot I’ve ever been with my faith life, and I just feel super blessed to be where I am and I’m at peace and that’s how I know that God has me right where He wants me.”

“We all know that we need to follow Jesus, but if we’re not renewing our mind every single day, I think it’s so easy to fall apart and to be distanced from God.”

“I have it on my wall in my room and I love (Romans 12:2) and I think it’s so true because it’s very easy to fall into fleshly desires and to fall into the patterns of this world and it’s not easy to follow Christ and we know we need to follow Christ.”

“I feel like any chance that I get to express my faith and be unapologetic about my Catholic faith, I’m going to do it and I’m not afraid to talk about it.”

“Without the faith I would not be where I am and with baseball and reminding myself that God has given me the ability to play this game and if I push Him off to the side, I could only imagine where I would be in this game and I don’t think it would be a very good place.”

“I just try to give all the glory to Him whether it’s going good or bad because I know that my performances in baseball do not add or subtract the love that God has for me.”

Related link:

Michael’s bio on Clemson baseball site

(This episode contains a prayer adapted from one by an unknown Confederate Soldier, as seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Mike Hoendorf

He has been coaching and working within the game of baseball for over 20 years and has been working in Catholic ministry for over ten years. He has previously spent time coaching at every level of baseball from youth to NCAA Division 1 baseball. During his coaching career he has spent time on the University of Dayton baseball staff, where he helped lead them to their first ever A10 Championship. He coached at the high school level, helping to lead two programs to their first league championships, and helped many players move on to the next level, including 2024 8th Round draft pick of the San Diego Padres, Nick Wissman. On the faith side, he is Director of Strategic Development and Midwest Sports Missionary for Catholic Athletes for Christ.

Notable guest quotes:

“I grew up in a house where my mom was very faithful. I remember many times saying, ‘Mom, why do we gotta bring faith into everything we do?’ Now I’m a sports missionary that says, ‘Yeah, faith is a part of everything we do, including athletics’.”

“Once I got to high school I made the baseball team, had more opportunities in that sport, and as I played it more and more – and my dad was a college baseball player, so baseball was also an important part.”

“It just kind of was a runaway freight train of being involved in the game of baseball and then growing to love how much it was a tool to grow as a person as well as a great game.”

“I also realized very quickly I did not want to coach at the college level because I did know I wanted to have a family and have kids down the line. I attended our – the head baseball coach at U. of D(ayton) – the year I was on staff, I attended more of his son’s baseball games than he did.”

“We intentionally did a preseason baseball retreat where we would spend a half a day in prayer and fellowship and talking about what we wanted to do to integrate our faith, having an alumni come in and give their testimony from a faith perspective.”

“I was like, all right, I’ll do another Marian consecration… I’ve had success with those, I’ll do another one, and … I’m gonna do one that where it’s gonna end on Our Lady of Lourdes feast day, and so that’s how I’ll prepare and if at the end of this consecration I feel called to go to Lourdes at that point I’ll go.”

“I got sent to a sports missionary conference that was being hosted down at the seminary in Cincinnati and that was my first introduction to, that there was this whole world and there were these organizations that did this type of work.”

“After the dinner they have time to be in fellowship if they’re staying in the dorms and all of a sudden, they were doing prayer and some meditation stuff together. All of a sudden, the walls started to break down.”

“We’re actually going to introduce adoration and confession as a part of the Friday night… All the teams that stay there, on Saturday morning we have Mass together, and so just all these different pieces where we are intentionally integrating athletics with faith opportunities that hopefully help these kids really start to put their lives in perspective and put their faith as a key piece to what they’re doing.”

Related link:

Mike’s bio (Catholic Baseball Showcase)

(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.)