The Roots of SportQuest Baton Rouge: A Letter from the Founder

This blog isn’t about me. But my story ties into the SportQuest Baton Rouge project in some really hard to fathom ways—the kind of ways that can only be directed by a sovereign God who pursues people with such determination that he makes plans and carries them out over lifetimes. Some of the stitches in his plan surrounding my life are only becoming clear as I look back over the past decade.

SportQuest is all about using sports as a universal language to communicate the gospel. Like most SQ staff, sports have been a part of my life for a long time. I discovered soccer on the playground in first grade and fell immediately in love. My first coach was a Catholic nun who coached in her full black and white nun’s habit. We called her “Coach Sister.”

I got brutally made fun of in elementary and early middle school, and soccer became a refuge. It was the one area of my life where I felt protected from the bullying, because I was really good at it. So I poured a lot of energy into soccer, and then softball, and over many years, I established my identity in my athletic abilities.

It worked well until my junior year of high school, when my left knee was injured. The roots of the injury were in a genetic condition I had been diagnosed with when I was 12. Doctors said I wasn’t made to play soccer. There was no way my body could sustain the running and twisting the sport required. Trying to prove them wrong by playing anyway, I proved them right. But one of the core qualities of my being is a stubborn determination to achieve my goals, so I went through surgery and rehab in an attempt to play my senior year and rescue my dream of playing sports in college.

In the emotional upheaval of losing my identity when I was injured and could no longer play sports for 8-9 months, God called me into ministry. Specifically, he called me to become a missionary. I ran away from the call for a while, but it got louder and louder until the lack of peace was unbearable. So I relented, and made some compromises. Instead of playing soccer, I would play softball (easier on the joints), and instead of playing softball at a public university, I would look into Christian schools so I could study missions while pursuing my athletic goals. I tried out and received a softball scholarship to Milligan College, a Christian liberal arts college in East Tennessee. They had an amazing softball program, and a Bible major, so I could follow God’s plans and my plans. Win-win. Right?

I learned the hard way God doesn’t compromise. He gets what he wants, and he wants ALL of me. ALL of my energy and attention, ALL of my affection. My goals and dreams, my abilities. My identity. I had been splitting all of me for a long time between God and sports. I wish it would have been as simple as stitching me back together again, but as a master life-surgeon, God knew some parts of me weren’t healthy. I couldn’t be fixed until I was further broken.

On graduation night from high school, I was at an overnight party at a gym. I was in full celebration mode, having just finished high school, winning valedictorian and the award for the female athlete with the best sportsmanship. While playing a game with some friends at around 4am, things went terribly wrong. I had the ball on my feet, when a teammate stepped between my legs trying to take the ball away. In the process, she threw me off balance, I twisted and, falling, popped my knee. In a single fall, I undid the surgery and over one year of rehab that I had completed between my junior and senior years. I knew immediately my scholarship dreams were over.

Over the next few days, I saw my doctor and physical therapists for the bad news. My dad sat next to me and cried as they delivered it because he knew how deep inside of me the breaking was going, like hairline fractures that spiral out further and further until the entire structure shatters. A competitive sports career was impossible. Another knee surgery couldn’t be done because of scar tissue and internal issues from the first surgery. Things might heal, but they wouldn’t be as strong.

Two weeks later, I was on my first SportQuest trip (which I signed up for as part of my compromise with God), and I was on crutches for most of the project. It was a hard 3 weeks in Ireland, trying to keep up with my team and processing all of the feelings of loss and anger from the injury. My mom told me losing sports was probably going to feel like losing a person who I was really close to. I still haven’t lost a close family member, but if it feels like having bits of yourself ripped out with a jagged knife until your soul is full of so many empty places that you finally go numb…that’s what it was like.

I arrived on Milligan’s campus in August as just a student. Not a student-athlete. For the first time in my life, I wouldn’t have the automatic friends of a sports team. It was hard during the first couple of semesters as I said a long goodbye to the person I thought I was going to become. But as I let go of that vision, God started to replace it with his. With extra time in my schedule, I fully embraced my studies and fell in love with learning. I double majored in sociology and humanities, minored in French, and studied abroad for a summer in France and for a semester in Uganda. I spent my evenings volunteering at a community center after school program for low-income kids.

In the summers during college, I continued to travel with SportQuest. The call into missions that God had given me so many years before was becoming more clear, and I could use sports for his glory more effectively when my ego wasn’t involved. After Ireland in 2006, I went to Belgium in 2007, then to Indianapolis for state side SQ projects in 2009 and 2010. Approaching college graduation in 2010, I started looking into overseas missions opportunities, assuming it was time to jump wholeheartedly into the life of ministry God had prepared for me.

But then God sent me to graduate school instead. It was an unexpected door, but God made it clear to me that it was the one he wanted me to walk through. I had no desire to stay in school, and definitely no desire to move to Louisiana, far away from family and college friends, where I knew no one and had never even visited. But God’s direction was clear, and I had already learned the hard way that there was no compromising. So in the fall of 2010, I started the Ma/PhD program in sociology at Louisiana State University.

The first year was brutal because I didn’t want to be in grad school or in Louisiana. I made plans to intern with SportQuest in the summer so I could get away from Baton Rouge to do something I wanted to do. Near the end of the spring semester, as I was making plans to leave for three months for the internship, I did a service project with some Baton Rouge friends in a neighborhood called Gardere. We were there to help give away much needed furniture and other items to low income families. But the project took place in a large park in Gardere, and I noticed lots of children wandering around with nothing to do while their parents worked with the volunteers to get what they needed.

I found a basketball and a soccer ball and in a matter of a few minutes plugged in my friends to play pick-up games with the kids. A football game soon started as well. I stepped back to observe 50-60 kids playing 3 different sports with 15-20 volunteers, and the Holy Spirit struck like lightening. I got way more pieces of God’s plan than I was usually privileged to have at one time. This is it, a voice said. I knew why I was in grad school in Louisiana. This park, these kids, my experience with SportQuest, the call into missions, all came together.

A few weeks later, I went to Indianapolis to begin the internship. I ran the idea of starting a Baton Rouge project by the director of SQ. He didn’t say no, but there was lot going on, so he wanted to think about it. The internship got busy and soon I wasn’t thinking about it anymore. After helping plan the Indianapolis project, I took off to lead a team in Ireland. I was supposed to lead for 3 weeks in Ireland and 3 weeks in Belgium, but things didn’t go according to plan.

During the middle of the final week in Ireland, I played in a soccer game in the place of a teammate who could no longer play. We didn’t want to cancel the game and lose the ministry opportunity, so I stepped in to play goalie even though I hadn’t played in a competitive soccer game for over 5 years. One of the Irish players took a really hard shot from less than 10 feet away from me, and when I threw my hand out to punch the ball away, my wrist shattered. After two days in and out of Irish hospitals, doctors decided that I needed surgery to fix my wrist. My dad decided the surgery was going to happen in Kentucky (where I grew up), not in Belgium, as I had hoped. The internship ended early and I found myself having another surgery. I started my second year of grad school in a wrist-brace, hardly able to write.

In November that year, near the end of the first semester of my second year of grad school, the director of SportQuest called. I was on campus working on a final paper for one of my classes. He asked if I remembered mentioning doing a project in Baton Rouge. Of course I did, but we hadn’t discussed it since I mentioned it briefly over the summer. Well, he said, if I could find support for the idea in Baton Rouge, he was giving me the green light to start something. I also had $1,000 left over in my account since my internship had ended early the previous summer, so a project budget was already in place.

In the summer of 2012, the inaugural SportQuest Baton Rouge project was completed. We had 11 coaches and over 200 kids came to camp. (I’ll let you imagine the chaos.) The project, in many ways, was a disaster. I had a lot to learn. The kids were wild and misbehaved. The team was overwhelmed. But even though nothing went according to my plans, it was clear that the Lord had plans to use sports ministry in Gardere to reveal himself to the kids and families in the neighborhood.

Three years later, we are preparing for our 4^th year of camp. Over 20 athletes are signed up to fly to Baton Rouge to coach (more than half of them returning from previous summers), and a strong team of Baton Rouge coordinators are working together to put all of the project details in place. (I learned the hard way that it’s better for everyone if I am not in charge of the details—delegation is amazing!) I don’t have space here to write about all the things the Lord has done to build SportQuest Baton Rouge, but I can look back and see how this is something he had been planning for a long time…putting each and every stitch carefully, and sometimes painfully, into place. 

I’m so thankful for all of the broken parts of me and the valleys of my story that the Lord used for the foundation of SportQuest Baton Rouge.

Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

Isaiah 43:18-19