In a survey published in the 2025 Ontario Coaching Report, one in two athletes said their coach was the adult they trusted most outside of their parents or guardians. If you’ve hung around student–athletes very long, that statistic isn’t surprising. Rather, it reminds us of the extraordinary opportunity (and the sobering responsibility) athletics programs have. Coaches are not merely teaching how to execute a play, improve athletes’ form, or prepare for an upcoming opponent. Coaches are part of the athletic environment that shapes how athletes understand identity, success, failure, authority, relationships, and purpose.
Plain and Simple: Athletics Is Formative.
There is no question that athletics is forming our students, but the question is whether that formation is intentional.
Without a biblical worldview, our students can easily absorb cultural ideas about sports. That culture isn’t always outside the walls of the Christian school—sometimes it’s in our locker rooms and on our benches. We learn it through what coaches praise, what parents celebrate, how teammates treat one another, and how everyone responds when the outcome is disappointing.
A worldview of sports is often caught, not explicitly taught, so we can pick up this approach to athletics accidentally. The way we see, interpret, and engage with athletics is often shaped by the culture it lives in.
- What does the prevailing secular sports culture teach?
- Individual value rises and falls with performance.
- Playing time proves importance.
- Winning justifies almost any behavior.
- Self-promotion is necessary.
Additionally, the dominant sports culture works against biblical teaching of human flourishing by offering opposing views of self and others. Positive ideas such as hard work and excellence can become distorted idols when they are disconnected from a biblical worldview. Disrespectful behavior and language towards opponents, officials, coaches, and parents when things aren’t going well can be dismissed as inconsequential.
But a biblical worldview gives athletics its proper purpose and place. Athletics can be an environment where students learn to compete wholeheartedly while rooting their identity in Christ, honoring others, stewarding their abilities, and using their influence to serve. An environment where winning matters and excellence should be pursued, but neither is ultimate.
Moving Beyond Weekly Devotions
Biblical worldview formation in athletics must involve more than a weekly devotional or a prayer before or after a game. Those practices have value, but they cannot bear the full weight of forming a student’s worldview. Biblical truth must enter the ordinary rhythms of athletic participation.
Coaches can move beyond devotions and capitalize on their role by considering six areas of biblical worldview formation:
1. An athlete’s heart orientation asks what he or she ultimately loves, desires, and strives for.
2. Cognitive truth claims address what the athlete believes about identity, competition, and success.
3. Habitual ways make those beliefs visible through effort, sportsmanship, preparation, and self-control.
4. Awareness helps athletes recognize the influences and assumptions shaping them.
5. Ownership calls them to take responsibility for their growth rather than remaining passive.
6. Finally, processing helps them interpret their experiences and respond with greater wisdom.
That doesn’t mean coaches have to give mini-sermons and class lectures in these areas. In fact, it’s more effective when taught in practical ways.
- Athletes can rotate responsibility for leading warm-ups, learning both leadership and followership.
- A team can be taught exactly how to respond to a disputed call rather than merely being told to “respect the officials.”
- A coach can end practice by asking athletes to identify evidence of effort, humility, or encouragement in a teammate.
- Even conflict can become an opportunity to practice truth, empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
The goal is not to force a spiritual message into every drill. It is to recognize that every part of athletics is already communicating a message—and to make that message increasingly consistent with biblical truth and the worldview formation process.
Processing Is the Key
Experience alone does not guarantee intentional formation. Athletes can experience victories, losses, injuries, conflict, and disappointment without ever learning to interpret them well or respond appropriately. Experience becomes formative when it is processed.
Consider film study. Coaches often show athletes the film and immediately tell them what they should see: where the defender moved, why the play failed, or what decision should have been made. That may produce a quicker correction, but it can also keep athletes dependent on the coach’s interpretation.
What if the coach began with questions instead? What happened? What did you notice? What were you feeling in that moment? What did your response reveal? What is true about this situation? What needs to change next time?
Those questions move athletes from receiving correction to developing discernment. The same approach can be used after a loss, during conflict, following an injury, or when an athlete is disappointed with a role. Asking athletes to process first, and not doing the processing for them, helps them to connect experience with truth and turn that new understanding into future action.
A Different Kind of Athletic Program
Parents, players, and coaches naturally want a winning season. Christian schools do, too. But if Christian schools claim to approach education differently, their athletic departments should look different, too.
Different does not mean less competitive. It means we know what competition is for. It means we evaluate the season by more than a final record.
The challenge is to examine every athletic rhythm—practices, games, film sessions, team meetings, celebrations, and disappointments—and ask: What kind of person are these experiences and this environment shaping our athletes to be?
-Dr. Maggie Pope