Episodes

Jadin O’Brien

She competed three months ago at the Winter Olympics in Italy as a member of Team USA bobsled. She is a three-time NCAA indoor pentathlon champion, having competed for the Fighting Irish at the University of Notre Dame. She competed at two U.S. Olympic Team Trials (Track & Field) and finished fifth in the women’s heptathlon at the U.S. national championships in 2025. She started in bobsled in August 2025 and made the U.S. Bobsled team for the 2025-26 season as a push athlete. At her IBSF World Cup debut later that year in Latvia, she would finish fourth in two-woman Bobsled and be named to her first Olympic team for the Games earlier this year in Milano Cortina.

Notable guest quotes:

“The Catholic faith was the central part of my family. Growing up a very Irish Catholic family, we went to weekly Mass, including multiple times throughout the week. We’d go to Adoration as a family as often as we could. We’d say the rosary daily, practice confession multiple times a month, and made sure that God was talked about consistently in our everyday lives.”

“I developed a disease called PANDAS and essentially that disease took full control of my brain. And so, I lost the ability to just function in everyday life, such as brush my hair, put clothes on, brush my teeth, turn on the shower.”

“My whole family developed a very strong relationship with St. Thérèse of Lisieux. And by studying her life, they discovered that she suffered with OCD. And severe OCD was one of the symptoms of PANDAS… And so, we kind of latched on to her as a source of hope and through my experience with PANDAS, there was quite a few little miracles actually that happened. And we attest a lot of that to St. Thérèse’s intercession. And eventually, … through St. Thérèse’s intercession… we were able to find a doctor who was able to tell me what I had. And eventually become healed.”

“Going to Notre Dame was by far the best decision I have ever made. I loved it. Everything about the university. What it stands for, the opportunity it gives you in all areas of life. It really is unmatched… I chose Notre Dame for three reasons, the first being faith. I wanted to go to a place where I could practice my Catholic faith openly and proudly and grow in it.”

“I assumed that I’d make it to the Olympics in track and field. So, God does work in mysterious ways.”

“My high school was Divine Savior Holy Angels. It was a Catholic all-girls school out in Milwaukee. And for my whole life though, I attended Catholic grade school, high school and college.”

“During my college career, every season, I had what seemed to be a season ending injury. So, my freshman year, I had to compete on a torn quad. My sophomore year I had to compete with food poisoning and then later redshirted that season. Junior year I had a stress fracture in my shin, a torn ligament in my elbow, and after that, another stress fracture, then a strained hamstring, dealing with all that while having to compete on it. So, for a lot of my college experience, when another injury would happen, I was constantly finding myself asking why. Like, ‘Lord, why? Why do you keep putting me in these positions to suffer? Like, what? Why? It doesn’t make sense. Let me compete’!”

“I’d pray a lot. I was like, ‘Lord, please just help me heal fast. Please help me get through this.’ He was absolutely building me up and building up my mental fortitude to be able to handle some very difficult things. And he also built up my resilience.”

“I was able to overcome these seemingly serious setbacks in my sports career and glory to God that I was able to not let that stop me and was able to do some pretty cool things in my college career.”

“I had to really learn the sport and then somehow get good at it fast enough to make the Olympic team later that year, while being in six different countries with people I had never met, learning a sport I had never done.”

“For many people, when you’re in such a position where you feel like you’re so out of control where you have really nothing tangible you can hang on to because your life is just all over the place, that is absolutely when God can shine his light.”

“It was absolutely a dream come true. The environment was magical. It was so exciting. Everyone was super patriotic, super excited, people from all countries were just so alive. Everyone was so energetic. The opening ceremony was one of the most special experiences I’ve ever had just being in Cortina, Italy, waving the flag, clapping hands with the fans, just everything about that experience and representing the United States was, there’s almost not a word for it. It was that amazing.”

Related links:

Jadin’s Team USA profile
Jadin’s track & field bio at Notre Dame

(This episode contains a prayer seen in Play Like A Champion Today’s prayerbook for sports, God, Be In My Sport)

Fr. Jon Polce

He played basketball and baseball in high school, when he also umpired the latter sport for about four years. He has also refereed some basketball games, plus, he has continued to play in pickup leagues his whole life, including cricket, curling, soccer, baseball, basketball, and golf. He also coached freshman baseball at Strake Jesuit for two years. Furthermore, he played in the national seminarian’s basketball tournament in Wisconsin in 2022. Meanwhile, he was ordained to the priesthood in 2022 in St. Louis and two years ago was missioned to Jesuit Dallas to be the VP for Mission and Identity, which is the role he currently still holds.

Notable guest quotes:

“My dad was not a Catholic when I was a kid. He was a fallen way Catholic, but he came back to the faith when I was in high school. So, that was a big moment for our family to have my dad back in the realm of the church.”

“I’d say … I caught my faith from my mom and then my grandfather and my father nourished it (over) time.”

“Very much as a kid I defined my identity as being really good at sports because I didn’t have that traditional school culture and so that’s how I kind of made friends and I loved it. I loved it a lot.”

“When I joined the seminary, I was looking for ways to play pick up ball, which led me to that seminary basketball tournament, playing for the Archdiocese of Boston as a Deacon.”

“University of Dallas kind of helped me become an adult in my faith.  When you move away to college you have to decide if the faith your parents passed on to you is going to become a lived reality in your life.”

“It led me to take a job in Rome… and interestingly enough I played for an Italian basketball team… for a semester, not to get paid but just to have fun.”

“The Jesuit vocation, the Jesuit heart, is the grace to blossom in multiple locations. And so yeah, I would say there is a challenge in that because you have to love deeply when you go to a place and then you have to have the freedom to not get attached to that place. And that’s a hard grace to pray for, let me tell you. It’s not easy because it’s human to get attached.”

“For all of you that are having transitions in your life, just because the Lord doesn’t answer right away doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an answer. And then secondly, he’s also developing trust in him.”

“I had played my whole life, I had coached a little bit, and I started having this love for wanting to stay involved in sports. But I didn’t think I could continue being a coach in my life as a priest with the demand of that schedule. So, when I was sent to Jesuit High School in New Orleans, I was the Director of Campus Ministry, and part of my job was to oversee teams and their spiritual care.”

“Part of my work was to say Masses for the team and then to walk with the team in the dugout, around the fields, or on the sidelines. And so my primary ministry was through the homilies, the chapel talks and the homilies and the Mass, and inspiring the boys to see their life of prayer before a game oftentimes, or on the road, as not separate from their life as an athlete but as an offering of God of their athletic talent.”

“Your time as an athlete won’t be forever. So, if your identity is just in that and then you lose it then you’re in an identity crisis. But if your identity is as a son of God or a daughter of God who plays, then you can not only give glory to God in the ups and downs of your season but when that sport is no longer in your life or is in your life in a new way you don’t have the same identity crisis.”

“St. Paul actually uses running and boxing as spiritual analogates for the life of Christ.”

“When you’re crunched for time, it feels like it’s a time waste; I could be lifting, I could be practicing. Why do I want to give 15, 20, 30 minutes to God, right? But if you can remind them, thinking of the Old Testament, the tithing, you can tithe with money, you can tithe with time. Giving God your time is not a waste; it’s actually an offering. And the Lord doesn’t bless you, necessarily, with athletic success but he blesses you with something far deeper – success in your heart and peace and love and joy. And so, from that heart, you then can compete in a different level.”

“We know from St. Ignatius, St. Paul, Jesus himself, injury and suffering is not when God stops working but sometimes when he works best.”

Related link:

North American Sports & Arts Chaplaincy Conference

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)