Episodes

Steven Thomas

He spent years playing basketball, including grade school, high school, and college, and then went on to coach basketball for close to 15 years.  Along the way he also coached football, including jobs at two Catholic high schools.  Two years ago, he walked with a group of guys in the form of a cross across the United States, covering approximately 4,500 miles. He spent five years in the seminary, has written a novel called, “Catholic Joe: Superhero,” and is working on another book to be called, “The Team,” which he talks about during this interview.

Notable guest quotes:

“I went to all Catholic school until I got kicked out of Catholic school in sixth grade, and then they sent me to the public school.  And then I went to Catholic high school, which was just a really, really great influence on me.  And we had Nashville Dominicans.  I think it was their first year teaching at that school, Providence Catholic High School.  And just had some great role models.  Had a priest who was a principal, Father Kaffer, and he was very instrumental in my life, as well as Father Lee Ryan.  He was another person who had great influence, as well as one of the Nashville Dominicans, Sister Philip Joseph.  She was probably the most influential because she had such a presence and such a sense of peace.”

“The principal would always have, for instance, when we played football, would always have confessions and then Mass… He was like a father figure.  He ended up becoming bishop in our diocese in Joliet.  And he was there for me in a lot of different ways.”

“Basketball, for me, was kind of my outlet.  It was kind of my God, because I would turn to basketball when, you know, you start feeling down and whatnot.”

“I think I was 16, 17 years old.  I read this story of Fatima, and it just changed my life.”

“I would go at lunchtime, there were a lot of girls that were going to pray the rosary during lunch.  I would go in and pray the rosary at lunchtime and these girls were looking at me like, ‘What the hell is he doing here?’  But it was really where I would say God just kind of infused me with His grace.”

“When you experience God’s goodness and His love and His mercy, you want to kind of reciprocate.  You want to do, ‘What’s the best I could do for God?’  And I thought the best that I could do for Him was to be a priest.”

“I was… praying; I’m saying, ‘Blessed Mother, what’s something I could do just for your Son, just for Jesus?’  And the whole idea of a national eucharistic procession was really given to me, very powerfully.”

“We decided to walk in the form of a cross.  We had a relic of the true cross.  So, the cross that Jesus shed his blood on, we had a little tiny sliver of that cross, and we, basically, we prayed as we walked.  So, I walked from the east coast to the center.  So, we walked from the shrine of the Immaculate Conception to the grotto at Notre Dame.  It was about 650 miles.”

“When you see these teams that don’t really have any, like, really great superstars but they play so well as a team, there’s something so selfless and something so beautiful and holy about that.  And so, to me that’s just so, that’s just, again, to see everybody executing for the sake of the team and not themselves is a really awesome, beautiful thing.”

Related link:

Website for Steve’s book

Mark Bruener

He is a College Scout with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was a first round draft pick in the 1995 NFL Draft and went on to play nine years with Pittsburgh and then five years with the Houston Texans.  In total he played in 188 regular season games and five in the playoffs.  He also served on the NFL Players Association Executive Committee.  Back in his days as a student-athlete he played college football for the Washington Huskies, earning All-American honors in 1993.  Five years ago, he was enshrined in the Pacific Northwest Hall of Fame.

Notable guest quotes:

“I was raised in a Catholic household… I actually went to the same Catholic grade school that my dad went to [St. Mary’s Catholic School].  And I would joke … that the same nuns that taught him were teaching me.”

“The number of times that my dad was like, ‘All right, we’re going to go to church,’ and I would drag my feet and dread to go.  And then once I would get there, I was happy that he ended up making us go and was able to learn from him and learn from the priest and the church that we grew up in.”

“I played sports as a youth: soccer, little league baseball, and then basketball and flag football.  My first year of contact football wasn’t until seventh grade.  That’s just what was the way things were back then.  So, flag football was what I played as a youth growing up and then contact football for seventh and eighth grade. But basketball was my first love.”

“I was able to catch a touchdown from Billy Joe Hobert and it was right in the back of the end zone and there was just inches between my foot and the end line.  And that was the score that actually put us up and kind of gave us that momentum that we never gave up.  And so many great things about that game.  Obviously, you know, we beat Michigan.  We were national champions that year as a result of that game.”

“We talked about my childhood and the importance of going to church in the Catholic faith and in my family growing up.  That was something that my parents continued to instill in me, and I was involved with … the team chaplain at University of Washington at the time and still involved in different Bible studies and things.  So, I was able to continue with my faith there at the University of Washington, which I felt very fortunate of.”

(on being drafted into the NFL) “I was very much giving praise to God and praying that I would be selected and hoped to go to the right team because you don’t know, there’s 32 teams and you don’t know who you were going to go to.”

“I’m one of those people that likes to tackle adversity head on.  I know that when we hide from adversity it’s always going to be there, and I think you show your true colors when you deal with adversity, and I use my faith every day and I try to walk the walk and talk the talk to be an example of what a godly person is like.”

“It’s extremely important that you have something to fall back on, you have something that’s going to allow you to persevere.  And your faith is truly tested when you are faced with adversity because when the going’s good, when everything is good it’s easy to say, ‘Oh yeah, praise God, God’s great, look what He’s doing for me, He’s doing all these great things.’  And then when you are faced with adversity … that’s when you’re really tested and you’re sitting there saying to yourself, ‘Okay God, like, what’s going on here?  I thought things were really good going last week.  What did I do wrong’?”

“I would lean upon my faith a lot and say, ‘Hey God, thank you for the day you’ve given me and help me to be a shining light in what you want me to be for the people that I interact with’.”

“Every day I pray for my kids and for their happiness and pray for the happiness of our entire family.”

Related link:

Mark’s career NFL stats

(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)

Juan Cotto

He has spent many years working in sports, from being the Head Football Coach at two different high schools in Washington state to having been an assistant football coach at a third. In addition, he developed a program with the Washington Officials Association and the Pacific Ten Conference in tribute to a high school football coach who passed away from cancer. His work in sports also extends to having been a part of two Major League Baseball front offices, the Atlanta Braves and then the Seattle Mariners. On the faith side, he was Director of Development at the largest Catholic elementary school in the Pacific Northwest.

Notable guest quotes:

“It was very much a Catholic household… I was baptized at St. George Church on Beacon Hill… And we did attend Catholic school.  I attended St. Edward’s Catholic school in Columbia City in the South Seattle area… And I attended O’Dea High School in downtown Seattle… that’s an all-boys Catholic high school.”

“By the time I got to high school, I participated in the sport of football, but my personal favorite sport was baseball; ended up taking it and going to a small school in Oregon after two years of community college here in the Seattle area, I went to a small school in Western Oregon… It’s now Western Oregon University… I had a nice little decent baseball career on the side.”

“He was the one that connected me with the Chicago Cubs organization.  And they flew me out for an interview.  And the interview went very well.  And Miss Lewis offered me the position.”

“When I was in Chicago… it was the Catholic community – I would go to Mass on Sunday nights – they would have meals at the Mass, and I would eat and get to know the community there and share with them.”

“In Seattle, the African American community, we have St. Therese Church.  But the Black community is very, very small in the Catholic Church in Seattle.  I just found it was really refreshing to be in a Catholic community that was much larger in Chicago and to be able to exercise that part of my faith with people who looked like me, which was something that was just a little bit different from the community which I grew up in.  So, my Catholic faith certainly served me there.”

“That to me was an opportunity to really reconnect myself, not only with God and my faith, but also with myself, and to figure out, to kind of redefine myself.”

“You spend a bulk of your life trying to be somebody, and I realized through my Catholic faith, I am somebody… You start to realize that being a child of God and being connected to this faith and then the teachings of Jesus Christ and the relationships you build through that, that is ultimately what makes you the person you are.”

“By golly we won football games too.  We didn’t win as many as we wanted to but when I had got to the high school there were 68 kids in the program out of 80 were academically ineligible.  So, I knew that we had to connect with them on an academic level.  What I found out was that a lot of the kids were raising themselves.  They had family situations where the parents were either not involved or in many cases had problems with the authorities and then were incarcerated.  So, a number of them had been emancipated to different family members and you really were a father figure.”

“A lot of gospel singers over the last decade have built a connection to my Catholic faith through a lot of Christian music because I feel like I had to kind of immerse myself in it to make sure that my mind was right because when your mind is right then your body and your spirit can be right.  When your spirit is right, then you can really impact people.”

(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.)

Bob Katz

He independently produces faith-based films. His most current film, “Average Joe,” releases exclusively in theaters nationwide this Friday, October 11th, and is based on the true story of a high school football coach, Joe Kennedy, whose fight for religious freedom — the right to pray on the field following games — went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won his case. This guest was also executive producer of the film “God’s Not Dead.” He played on his high school golf team and went on to be an avid racquetball player for most of his life. He also has a story of conversion to the Catholic faith, which he shares during this interview.

Notable guest quotes:

“I was born, actually, and raised – ‘til I was about 13 – Jewish, and I think we were reformed Jews… the equivalent would be Christians who go to (church on) Easter and Christmas and that’s about it.”

“I went over to join the Marine Corps, was an officer, went to Vietnam for a year, came back.  It was, I don’t know that I was necessarily that aware of it and they didn’t have PTSD back then, I just was angry.  I was in grad school but just always on the verge of exploding and didn’t know what was wrong.  And one day I came home from school and I’m flipping through the channels and Pat Robertson’s on, and we weren’t allowed to watch Christian TV as kids and I was watching him… and then I noticed I’d rush home the next day to watch him.”

“A incredible bright light went off in my room.  I don’t know how I got from laying in bed to standing straight up in the floor.  There were no voices, no angels, but something happened.”

“It was just one of those milestones, one of the most important milestones of my life, was just giving my life to Christ.”

“Ever since I was in the Marine Corps, I’ve known you have to work out.  So, I’ve always worked out, exercised, played some sport.  I’m 73 now, I still work out four days a week, and racquetball is just a great, great sport.  I mean it’s an intense cardiovascular workout, balance, coordination, and you don’t realize you’re working out because you’re having so much fun playing.”

“If you’d have told me five years ago that I would be a devout Catholic I would have told you there’s just about as much chance that I will walk on the moon.”

“The saint of that day happened to be Saint Faustina, and they started talking about this lady who died when she was just 33 years old, she had this stigmata… she was walking – literally seeing and walking and talking to Jesus almost every day – talking to the Holy Mother and predicting things that came to pass and still had predictions yet to come and I was just mesmerized by it.”

“I was confirmed and became Catholic, and … I immediately knew I was home … just a peace came over me to this day that I’ve never really truly had before.  The Eucharist came alive.  The living presence became alive… sacred scripture and God’s Word, it all just came alive.”

“My life is just kind of, I’ve learned to jump in the middle of the stream and let the stream take me where God wants.”

Related link:

“Average Joe” trailer

Jessica Cox

She is an author and motivational speaker who has been featured on TV shows like “Ellen” and “FOX and Friends,” and on networks such as CNN, BBC News, and National Geographic. Despite being born without arms, she is a fourth-degree black belt in taekwondo. She has participated in numerous other sports – either competitively or recreationally – including cycling, scuba diving, surfing, golf, horseback riding, and Philippines martial arts arnis / escrima. In 2011 she received the Guinness World Record for being the first person certified to fly an airplane with only their feet. She not only met Pope Benedict XVI but gave him her Guinness World Record Medal.

Notable guest quotes:

“There was no other way for us children.  We were in a very profoundly Catholic household.  Every Sunday, no question about it, we were in church.  We said rosaries every night… It became my rock in the midst of any adversity in life.”

“It was definitely a choice at the beginning, whether I was going to be a victim of being born without both arms or whether it was just going to be something that made me different.  And I think my parents really helped create that understanding that I am not a victim of anything.”

“There was always that doubt of people telling me you can’t do it, you don’t have arms, there’s no way.  And sure enough, I developed this, ‘Yes I can, and I’ll prove it,’ that I can do this.  With God all things are possible.”

“I had gone to the priest and asked that the priest pray to God that I be given arms.  So, I did know that I was seeking out support from my own Catholic community for the understanding of why am I in this situation.”

“This is something that can be used for the greater glory of God and has continued to do that every single day of my life.  And that acceptance and that really cherishing it and understanding that it may not be the way we all think of things, but it’s amazing how God will see through the challenges that we’re facing and turn them into our greatest dreams.”

“I’m a fourth-degree black belt.  At one point in time, I was a state champion.”

“The circumstances again, a lot of intervention from above to make it possible for this meeting of Pope Benedict.  First off, I was invited to go to Milan, Italy, to get a Guinness World Record medal for becoming a sport pilot and the first sport pilot to do so without the use of arms.”

“Afterward, the Pope meets with everyone individually and the last two people to meet him after that papal blessing is myself and my sister.”

“You have something so special and a faith so profound that you can’t help but change people around you.”

“Most recently in Kazakhstan, we found the only Roman Catholic parish in the capital… And we went in there and it was so beautiful to be able to do Mass… it was so beautiful to be a part of that.  And that was just two months ago.”

Related link:

Jessica’s official website

Dr Max Engel

He has a long résumé in sports as an athlete, coach, and educator. After being a varsity soccer captain and varsity basketball captain in high school, he went on to compete in rowing at Boston College. Next, he became a boys basketball coach at St. Jude High School in Montgomery, Alabama, and then a girls basketball coach at Mercy High School in Omaha, Nebraska, and now for the last ten years he has been youth soccer and basketball coach at St. Pius X / St. Leo School. He is a life-long bicyclist and from 2007-2013 was a recreational triathlete. Two years ago, he co-authored a book called, “On the Eighth Day: A Catholic Theology of Sport,” and teaches in the Theology department at Creighton University.

Notable guest quotes:

“My parents were both Catholic-educated, and my father had studied for the priesthood, and so he had discerned out as a young man, but it was a key part of his life from then to this day.  So the Catholic faith was a big part of our household.”

“When we would travel, we would always make sure that we would find a place to go to Mass, because that was part of our family tradition.  That was part of what made our family who we were.”

“We pray as a family, before meals, we pray liturgy together, we attend Mass.  Unfortunately, with our schedules a little bit today as my kids have gotten older, sports being a big part of that, sometimes Father will tease us, like he saw one of my daughters the other night before, saw two of my sons at the 7:30, and my wife and I, and my other daughter will be at the 9:30, that kind of thing.  But it’s part of our life.”

“My interest in cycling started when I was cycling with my dad … we would do some … triathlons … It was a really important way to connect with my dad as I became a man, was just becoming a father.”

“Sports bring families together in meaningful ways, and that certainly is true for my family.”

“Boston College and the Jesuits and the education that I received there really opened those doors with a sacramental worldview, seeing that sports very much can be part of a life of faith, that I can encounter God through the community of sports, or I can encounter God through those moments of transcendence that made me say, wow.”

“As a 18, 19, 20, 22 year old undergrad who encountered the gospels, I encountered the Old Testament as a story of God encountering God’s people, God encountering me and how I could find myself within those narratives.”

“I could really explore my own faith as I was helping young men and women – the high school students that I had the privilege of teaching – helping them sort of have that same encounter with the scriptures, encounter with the stories, encounter with the God who loves them through all things, including sports.”

“It’s the camaraderie or those moments that just defy explanation, you know the transcendent, and then boom, okay, let’s talk camaraderie, let’s talk about love of others, let’s talk about God as love and the Trinity as community.  And suddenly we’re talking theology; that any experience of authentic love, which often, you know, teams at their best always have, is an experience of God’s love for us.”

“The soccer club or the basketball program, it’s an apostolate of the Catholic church.  It’s, the uniform says St. Pius St. Leo, like, what are we doing?  You know, we have to be different because we’re rooted in the gospel.”

Related links:

(Use code 8day30 for 30% off) “On the Eighth Day: A Catholic Theology of Sport”

Max’s bio on Creighton University website

Megan Harrington

She played volleyball, tennis, and basketball in high school and then went on to be a decorated athlete in college, playing Division I basketball, including being co-captain, getting named to the Holiday Classic All-Tournament Team, and her team having four NCAA appearances. She is the producer of many films, including last year’s “Native Ball: Legacy of a Trailblazer,” about a Native American female basketball player, and the documentary, “Playing Like a Girl: The House That Rob Built,” which will be available to PBS stations nationwide and the PBS Amazon Prime documentary channel starting November 1st.

Notable guest quotes:

“We had daily rosary before school, and it was non-negotiable.”

“To be able to just stay home and play for family, for friends, for my university, that’s all I ever wanted since I was a very, very little girl.”

“(The University of Montana is) not a Catholic university.  My faith still, though, was very important to me and to try to keep that faith dialed in, I’m sure I did it imperfectly, but it was a very important aspect along with the studies, along with school, basketball, you know, faith, (I) tried to keep that at the forefront.”

“I remember seeing the Pope, Pope John Paul II, Saint Pope John Paul II, and it was like he was glowing.  I mean, there was just something… when I think about that, I think about just the holiness; just the way that seeing him made me feel was like, wow, there is something divine here… seeing him was profound.”

“You’re looking for a story that’s out there… and I was like, ‘This story’s right in my backyard and it needs to be told,’ and by the grace of God and Family Theater Productions we were able to finish the film.”

“She talked about her grandma saying if God gives you something He’ll help you through it.  If He gives you this, it’s a privilege and an honor.”

“We have a Catholic series for Catechism, Catechesis, and we have that also in Spanish.  So, there’s a lot of different things.  We’re not a sports company, but these are two sports stories.”

“I’ve done the total consecration to Mary a number of times, Saint Louis de Montfort’s… and then the total consecration to Saint Joseph.  And that consecration to Saint Joseph was such a game changer in my life on fatherhood and has inspired some thoughts even on productions or ideas that we’re going to do, for within our company.”

Related link:

Website for “Playing Like a Girl: The House That Rob Built” documentary

(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)