Building character in sports a winning brand of ministry

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 23, 1998 by Dawn Gobeau

If you really wanted to, you could probably go through an entire day using only products endorsed by Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan. You could wear Nike clothing, drench yourself in Jordan's perfume, drink Gatorade, eat McDonald's and wind down at the end of the day by watching "Space Jam."

The "Air Jordan" juggernaut may be exceptional in its size and scope, but Jordan is hardly the only athlete to achieve widespread celebrity. For Americans, sports is a cultural obsession -- especially for young Americans, who are the most likely to play competitive sports and are also the biggest spenders on the products marketed by their athletic heroes.

Because of that, Catholic spirituality expert Juan L. Hinojosa claims, young people find their imaginations -- personal, moral and spiritual -- shaped by athletics in ways they can't even begin to imagine. To help Catholic coaches, educators and youth ministers deal with this reality, Hinojosa has developed a series of conferences on sports, spirituality and character formation.

His experience in leading these sessions and the feedback he's received from participants suggest that treating athletics as a ministry can be a powerful way to form youth in light of the gospel -- but that effort must be rooted in schools that reinforce, rather than undercut, the character-building enterprise.

The saturation of youth culture with sports is remarkable. According to the 1996-97 report of the National Federation of State High School Associations, 6,195,247 American high school students played a competitive sport in that school year, the second-highest total in the 27 years of the report. Given that the overall high school enrollment in America, public and private, is a little over 12 million, this means that almost one teenager in two is involved in athletics. Short of television, it would be hard to identify a more pervasive feature of the experience of American youth.

Up for grabs

The impact of that experience, however, is up for grabs. Sports can inculcate a destructive, win-at-all-costs mentality or it can nurture virtues such as loyalty and community. Hinojosa. strives to help young people and those who work with them to understand that athletics is inherently and inescapably a moral activity.

Athletics "can form us in the direction of goodness and life or it can misshape us by adherence to various approaches that end up not being good," said Hinojosa, who directs The Hillenbrand Institute at the Center for Development in Ministry, University of St. Mary of the Lake, in Mundelein, Ill.

Athletics also discloses character as few other things do, he said. Winning and losing do this "in a way that allows one to gain a degree of self-knowledge" and to begin to plumb one's own character in "ways that can become avenues of spiritual growth."

For other branches of the Christian family, the notion of sports as a form of ministry is hardly a new idea. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, as well as more specialized groups such as the Christian Auto Racing Fellowship and even the Christian Bowhunters of America, have long aimed to bring a gospel message to sports culture.

Each of those groups, however, reflects to a greater or lesser extent its roots in Evangelical Protestantism. Hinojosa hopes to sow the seeds for similar efforts within Catholicism. He developed his conferences -- one each in 1996 and 1997 with more to come -- because he sensed "that we as a church were&t addressing a major element in American culture."

The conferences not only convey information, but also place sports in a context of prayer and spirituality by using secular readings about sports, classical spiritual readings, scripture and the use of oil in ritual anointing. Oil is "an ancient athletic sign" that dates back to the early Greeks, Hinojosa said. Those who attend can take home copies of the rituals to use or adapt for their own schools (see accompanying story).

Hinojosa's first conference drew 45 people from 10 states who work in Catholic and other schools and Catholic Youth Organization sports programs. The second attracted about 55 men and 10 women from 13 states and Canada. Hinojosa hopes to broaden participation to include people of other religions, he said, and possibly to replicate the workshops in large dioceses in other parts of the country.

The idea is to give Catholic leaders the tools to integrate ministerial themes into their work with young athletes. By way of models for how this can be done, Hinojosa points to high school coach Jim Yerkovich, who teaches conference participants to build community intentionally among players.

By developing "we teams," Yerkovich, from Salt Lake City, "builds a gospel ethic," Hinojosa said. The idea is to help young people see that athletics is really a microcosm for life, that the strength of their community is ultimately more important than any other results they might achieve.

Hinojosa argues forcefully, however, that this kind of effort will founder if it isn't reinforced in schools -- especially in Catholic schools, where many Catholic young people have their most formative athletic experiences.