Meet Coach Kelly Herrmann – Faith Formation in Athletics
Today, I’m joined by Kelly who I’ve known for about 30 years. She’s coached, refereed, umpired for decades in sports of all types and is now a wife, mother, grandmother, and health coach, author and speaker. Kelly has a passion for forming athletes in faith and spirituality and really integrating the two. She grew up on a dairy farm in Michigan and played basketball in the upstairs of their hay barn through the winter. She was living the student athlete life, doing the scorebook, coaching junior high leagues, announcing games even in high school and was truly involved in every aspect of sports year-round.
Kelly gave up a full ride to play division one sports to attend Franciscan University of Steubenville back in the 1980s for the sake of being in a place of faith formation. She had three older siblings who attended FUS and having visited many times. She had visited a lot and felt a certain fulfillment at the university in the people, the atmosphere, and the faith culture. Even though early on she had protested coming to Franciscan, she realized it was the place where she could become more of who the Lord created her to be. While it was difficult to give up the dream of being a college basketball player, Kelly got deeply involved in intramurals and never regretted making that choice.
Focusing on doing rather than being is a trap we can all fall into but keeping the Lord the priority is essential to developing a faithfully Catholic athletic environment. What is the most important thing? Is winning everything? No. What we want to be saying to our kids is “how was your game?” How did you do? How did you play?”. We play to win because the virtue of magnanimity calls us to do our very best! God wants us to strive and do our best, but that doesn’t always result in winning. The process of day-to-day dedication and growth is the real core.
We discuss forming faith through athletics – the topic addressed in a chapter Kelly authored in the book Coach Them Well with St. Mary’s Press.
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