2 Denver-Based Catholic Youth Sports Groups Team Up In Missionary Discipleship
- Jay Sorgi
- 5 minutes ago
- 5 min read
FOCUS, Highlight Catholic’s relationship aims to mold both kids and young adults in Christ through their sport
Coaches from a Catholic sports organization based in Littleton are taking every moment possible during practices and games to joyfully and positively evangelize and make disciples. Another Catholic sports organization based in Golden is finding every opportunity to do the same thing and make disciples of college athletes.
The two groups are now teaming up on and beyond the field in Christ.
FOCUS and Varsity Catholic’s college athlete apostolate are now partnering with Highlight Catholic Ministries and its youth sports ministry, and the chances for the Holy Spirit to plant seeds of faith through the partnership could be endless.
Varsity Catholic founder and FOCUS senior director Thomas Wurtz said that Ryan O’Connor, his counterpart at youth-centered Highlight Catholic, approached him with the chance to talk to young people at his basketball camps. While both are from the Denver area, they met at a Catholic youth sports conference in Louisville.
“I got to know Ryan over the years as he continued to invite me back,” Wurtz said. “Seeing what Ryan was doing, directly impacting the young kids, isn't really that far away from what I hope Varsity Catholic can do in the future by raising up faithful men and women.”
O’Connor coached Wurtz’s kids through Highlight Catholic’s youth sports programs, which led Wurtz to recognize the ministry’s impact, evangelizing and forming kids beyond the classroom.
“They're praying, they're talking about glorifying God, they're talking about the Gospel, they're talking about Heaven, they're talking about things that matter, but still growing, learning, trying to be excellent as little soccer players,” Wurtz explained.
(Photos by Annabel Kiley, courtesy of Varsity Catholic)
O’Connor says those God moments often come from the language used in coaching moments, such as encouraging unselfish play and calling it a gift of self, drawing on language from Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
“Even in the midst of teaching how to set a pick and roll in basketball, the coach is saying, ‘John is making a gift of self right here. He's laying himself down,’" O’Connor explained. “With baseball, ‘Help our brothers get home.’ That's a common phrase we all use in our teams. We're trying to help them get to where they're meant to be, home, which is Heaven, what we're made for.”
Highlight Catholic’s Frassati Sports and Adventure ministry for boys was formed in 2016 as an extension of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Denver. Two years later, Highlight Catholic began Badano Sports as a matching sports ministry for girls.
Fernando Boschini has coached for nine years in Highlight Catholic’s soccer leagues for 4- to 6-year-olds. The devout Catholic played the sport scholastically but didn’t connect his faith with it as deeply during his career as Highlight Catholic does.
“Highlight Catholic takes it to another level, where everything we do, especially in our sport and our gift, is not only to give glory to God, but to learn about our faith in the gifts that he's given us,” Boschini said. “Doing little drills with the kids, while you're doing it, [we’re] saying, 'We're going to play hard defense now, just like we do hard defense against temptations in our real life,’ trying to assimilate the two like that. Or, ‘We're going to play our hardest right now, and we're going to look out for our teammates, just like we look out for in the community of saints.’”
He said that O’Connor leads his coaches in prayer and emphasizes to his program’s youth coaches that their purpose is not just to develop skills in their game but to foster the recognition that God is at work in every aspect of life. He adds that the young people are taking to it well, often as an extension of their faith life at home.
“They love it, especially when they start with it in the young years, four to six years old, and then it's what goes into their club teams and games,” Boschini said. “They're the ones that want to start the prayer and lead the prayer. Then, during the practices, when you ask them to think of a way how [something] correlates to something that you experienced in your faith life, you just let them kind of think about it. They gobble it up; they really see it. It really brings it all together.”
While Highlight Catholic lasers in on the faith focus in a fun way with young kids, FOCUS and Varsity Catholic do the same with the student-athletes they mold into missionary disciples on the field, the court, the ice and other spaces of youth sport.
“We were working with an All-American gymnast at an NCAA Division I university, and as she came to understand that her self-worth wasn't in what she achieved as an athlete, but that her self-worth was in the fact that she's a daughter of our Heavenly Father, that's a big aha. It's a big God moment,” said Wurtz. “She began to take her practice and her competitions around her least favorite event, and she'd offer them as a prayer for the conversion of the non-Catholic that she was dating at the time. It's just a very beautiful way to see God in your sport, to see that God is using every moment of your activity as an athlete to sanctify you and to sanctify his Church.“
Wurtz sees the coaching platform Highlight Catholic offers as the kind of place that can become a similar faithful laboratory for further growing Catholic collegiate athletes into those life-changing missionaries.
“In the Catholic world, we have a lot of institutions of education. We have 1,200 Catholic high schools across the United States. We've got I-don't-know-how-many grade schools and a few hundred universities as well. We have the opportunity to significantly impact young people with the Gospel,” Wurtz said. “We need people that are in those coaching positions that can do that.”
That’s what makes Wurtz incredibly hopeful about the connection between FOCUS and Highlight Catholic. Currently visible on jerseys, he hopes the connection becomes visible through an infusion of Varsity Catholic-molded coaches who can nurture the faith of the young lives playing on Highlight Catholic’s youth and higher-level club teams.
“My hope is that day in, day out, our missionaries are out there reaching those future coaches and then working with things like Highlight Catholic or some of the Catholic high schools across our great cities that can hire these young men and women to coach in their institutions, to become what I would call probably the most effective in potential evangelists in that school,” Wurtz concluded.
