‘This team is different’
Brian Young remembers the moment like it was yesterday. He sat in the coaches’ office at James Monroe High School in Lindside, West Virginia, minutes before he was to lead the boy’s basketball team’s Bible study. One of the team’s players entered and began chatting up his coaches and Young. The young man noted how difficult it was to read the Bible when he spent so much time focusing on school and basketball.
That’s when Young, Area Director for Southern West Virginia FCA, heard James Monroe head coach Matt Sauvage point out that one of his assistant coaches was reading through the entire Bible in just 30 days.
“Coach Sauvage said if Corey could read it cover-to-cover in 30 days, we really don’t have an excuse,” Young said.
Not long before that day, a man at Corey Miller’s church challenged others to read all 66 books of the Bible in a single month. Miller accepted the challenge. What resulted changed his life and the lives of the boys he coaches and played a tremendous role in the team’s back-to-back state championships.
An ambitious challenge becomes an opportunity
Miller knew tackling the entire Bible in a month would be a giant task. He researched and calculated that he would have to read about 42 chapters each day, which would take about an hour and a half to two hours.
Then he looked at his phone to see his average screen time per day. It was two hours.
“I realized I could spend two hours a day in the Word and read through the Bible,” Miller said. “I told my wife I was going to try it, and she reminded me that we were right in the middle of basketball season. I thought, ‘What better time than now? If I can do it during basketball season, I’ll never have an excuse not to read the Bible.’
“It was tough,” he said. “There were a lot of early mornings and late nights reading and even listening to the Bible on the way to school.”
In one of the team’s chapels, Young mentioned Miller’s desire to become closer to God and the extraordinary amount of time he had recently been spending reading Scripture. At first, Miller was reluctant to tell anyone about the challenge, but after he opened up, his players often asked about what he was reading.
“It became an opportunity to talk with the boys about it,” Miller said. “We’d talk about what I was reading, how it could be hard to understand sometimes and what you need to do if you don’t understand the passages. It became a real blessing because the kids were asking me about it and it gave me another opportunity to talk with them about God.”
“It was neat for this team to watch their assistant coach do that,” Young said. “And the importance of studying God’s Word became a part of conversations throughout the year.”
‘This team is different’
Many of those conversations came through discussions about the book of Romans, which the team was working through together during a Bible study led by Young, who was energized by the student-athletes’ desire to learn more about God’s Word.
But studying the Bible together turned out to do more than bring them closer to God. It brought them closer to each other.
Young, who has been serving with FCA for about six years, said he’s never seen a team act more like a family than this one — on or off the court. And he wasn’t the only one.
“Teams from around the state would recognize that this team is different,” Young said. “They would pick up trash in the bleachers after an away game. They were just so different compared to a lot of other teams. This team desired to look more like Jesus.
“Corey would remind them, ‘If we're going to be a team who is serious about our faith, then we're going to be serious about our faith in all situations.’”
Those situations include even the most competitive moments, where the Mavericks have excelled most, claiming state titles in 2022 and 2023. During their second championship run, they won their three state tournament games by an average of 34 points.
God’s movement at the school continues
But the team’s impact has gone well past success on the hardwood. Players from James Monroe’s boy’s and girl’s basketball teams started a Bible study on campus that includes students from all walks of life, athletes and non-athletes alike. The group also meets weekly to pray.
Recently, five softball players and four baseball players who started meeting with the group gave their lives to Christ.
And according to Young, God’s movement at James Monroe High School, which started with a boy’s basketball chapel and a coach who accepted a bold challenge, continues to spread.
“Several players from other teams at the school have called me and asked if I could lead them through the same study of Romans the boy’s basketball team went through. These are teams that have never had a Bible study or chapel before.
“God took the influence of one coach, trickled it down to the athletes and then the athletes trickled it down to the rest of the school.”
Originally written for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
