I don’t know if this is a universal experience or if it was just the handful of teams I played for, but we spoke almost exclusively in hilarious movie quotes:

• 👉“60% of the time, it works every time.”
• 👉“You sit on a throne of lies.”
• 👉“This is a house of learned doctors!”
• 👉“Well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
• 👉“Captain Insano shows no mercy.”
• 👉“It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.”
• 👉Perhaps the most quoted line was from Dumb and Dumber, “Just when I think you couldn’t possibly be any dumber, you go and           do something like this…and totally redeem yourself!”
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I still quote that line in my head at least once a week. The need and desire for redemption is programmed into us. We were not created to be failures. At creation, we were meant to live in perfection in fellowship with our perfect Creator. Then sin entered into the world, and we have been desperately searching for redemption ever since.

If sports is a metaphor for life, there is perhaps no greater place to make an impact than in how we offer opportunities for redemption to our players. They are going to strike out, drop passes, turn the ball over, and all at the worst possible part of the game. Play long enough and you’re going to have a moment where you singlehandedly lose the game—or at least it will feel that way. As coaches, we can view this moment in one of two ways. It can either be a time for disappointment, or we can see it as a beautiful opportunity to build someone back up to greater than they were before.

There is another movie quote I remember. I had just finished my first semester of college and went home for winter break. The fall had not gone well. I was still recovering from an ankle reconstruction, my first major surgery, and I hadn’t been able to play like I knew I could. My entire identity was wrapped up in how I could hit a baseball, and that identity had taken a serious blow. A few days after Christmas we went to see Rocky Balboa. I was only 18 years old, but I saw myself in Rocky—beat up, broken, spit out, but with so much left to do, accomplish, and give. In talking to his son, Rocky delivers one of the most memorable monologues in movie history, hitting his climax with, “But it ain’t how hard you hit. It’s how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”

I could lay down and quit or I could get back up and fight to be everything I knew was inside of me. I had a moderately successful baseball career, but I never came close to reaching the dreams I once had. In the process, though, I came to understand who God created me to be, and my life is now so much richer for it. As a coach, that is what you are working towards. Yes, you want to put players in a position to succeed on the field, but even more than that, you are putting them in situations and moments that will help them become everything God imagined when He knit them together in their mother’s womb (See Ps 139:13-14). You are being used as a beautiful instrument of God to bring your players into the life they were created for; or you're being used to take them away from it.

Your players are going to fail—on the field and off. They’re going to strike out, foul, and make errors. They’re also going to be late to practice, cut corners in training, talk back, and they might even forget their uniform. These are the moments where we have an opportunity to teach them what redemption really means. Yes, we see it when someone hits a home run immediately after making an error, but we see it even more when someone encourages their teammates after striking out, how they attack practice the Monday after a devastating loss on Friday, or how they accept discipline after acting out of character. And they learn that from us, their coaches. Do we respond to their failures in anger? Or in love and compassion?

As a coach, where is your worth? Is it in the product you put on the field or is it in the impact you make in the lives of players and their families? Is your value in how many games you win or is it how many young people come from your program that go on to incredible lives with incredible families far outside the lines of the playing field? You are going to fail and so are your players. Some of those players will find their moment of redemption just a few innings or minutes later, but they all have a chance to find it in life. We coach for those moments, but more than that, much more than that, we coach for players to see and understand that they have a Savior that offers eternal redemption.

We don’t love our players because of how talented they are. Their value is not in how much better they make the team or how easy they make it to put a winning product on the field. We love our players because they are image bearers of God that He has entrusted to us to care for and to lead. Psalm 103:12 says that as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. If we want our players to enter into the saving grace of Jesus, then we must model that grace for them. We need to hold our players accountable while also showing them that we care for them and believe in them even when they fail. We need to give them chances at redemption on the field and off. We need to help them understand that their worth goes far beyond what they can do on the court or field, but is anchored in the redemption offered to them by Jesus Christ.

Coaching is redemptive work. Treat it that way.