Nobody’s ever going to suggest that anything about 2020 was normal. With the turmoil caused by COVID-19, we all had to adapt to life’s curveballs and uncertainties.
The Liberty Football team was no different. In a year rife with change, though, we came through with a season for the ages — the best one in the history of the program. One of the things I’ll remember most about the year is how our players and coaches handled the craziness going on around them.
Liberty Football takes on Coastal Carolina University at the FBC Mortgage Cure Bowl at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Fla., on Dec. 26. (Photo by Andrew Snyder)
We determined from the season’s outset that we would only worry about what we could control. When we had three players and two coaches out because they tested positive for COVID, we weren’t going to blink. All we could control at that point was our preparation to win and our performance on the field.
And winning is what we did, week after week. We won 10 games on the season, including victories over two Atlantic Coast Conference opponents (Virginia Tech and Syracuse) and one over a top 10-ranked Coastal Carolina in the Cure Bowl to end the season. Many considered that game to be the year’s most exciting bowl game. Our only loss, to North Carolina State, was a one-point heartbreaker that kept us from a perfect season.
Our core values for the team are faith, attitude, mental toughness, integrity, and love. When I came to Liberty, one of my priorities was to establish a culture in which those core values permeated everything we did. Our coaches and players know them by heart and know what they mean. Everyone in our program can recite and explain them. It didn’t take long for those values to take root and begin to shape and define the culture of the Liberty Flames Football program. That culture was a huge part of our success in the 2020 season.
Wins, however, are not the main marker of achievement for our program. Yes, it’s great to see our planning and preparation rewarded with a victory on the field each week. But I’ve never put quantitative numbers on what a successful season looks like. That’s just not the way I’m wired.
The reasons for that are simple. One week this season we had five players accept Christ in a team meeting. That’s far more important than the result from that week’s game. We also saw a tremendous amount of spiritual growth in our players over the course of the season.
Early in the year, our team adopted a creed for the season, crafted and approved by the players. They expressed their belief that our team’s unity should be a display of how the world should be, that all people are created equal and that equality is for all, that our first identity is as Christians and glorifying God is our priority, and that we are called to love and should operate with love as our foundation. That creed helped provide cohesion for us all season long.
The Lord is indeed good, trustworthy, faithful, and just. When life seems to contradict that — as it often did in 2020 — and when our circumstances appear to be chaotic and turbulent, we have to return to our foundational belief in God’s faithfulness. One of the Bible study lessons we taught this season was about David, and we talked with our players about what gave David the confidence to run with courage toward his battle with Goliath.
That confidence sprang largely from David experiencing God’s faithfulness in the past. David saw how God had provided for him as a shepherd time and time again. He knew what God had done, and he trusted that God would do it again.
Like David, I’ve experienced God’s faithfulness through good times, bad times and crazy times, through great decisions and poor decisions. And the lesson I wanted our players to learn was that we control what we can, and we trust God with the rest. That’s what they did this year, and the outcome speaks for itself.
