On Your Sideline

Rick Reilly recently had an article on the oddest game in high school football history. It occurred last month down in Grapevine, Texas when Grapevine Faith hosted Gainesville State School. What made it so odd?

Well for starters, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through. They even made a banner for players to crash through at the end. It said, "Go Tornadoes!" Which is also weird, because Faith is the Lions.  As the game got under way, more than 200 Faith fans sat on the Gainesville side and kept cheering the Gainesville players on—by name.  You wouldn't expect another parent to tell somebody to hit their kids but they did.

What is even weirder is the coach for Grapevine Faith Kris Hogan is the one that gave the idea for the fans to do it. Why?

It’s not because Gainesville is a great team. They were 0-8 for the year and had only scored 2 TDs all year. Faith has 70 kids, 11 coaches, the latest equipment and involved parents. Gainesville has a lot of kids with convictions for drugs, assault and robbery—many of whose families had disowned them—wearing seven-year-old shoulder pads and ancient helmets.

That's because Gainesville is a maximum-security correctional facility 75 miles north of Dallas. When the game ends, 12 uniformed officers will escort the 14 Gainesville players off the field. They will line the players up in groups of five—handcuffs ready in their back pockets—and march them to the team bus. Every game they play is a road game. 

Confused at why fans would abandon the home team to cheer for them? So were many from Grapevine Faith but the coach Hogan told his players and fans, “Imagine if you didn't have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you."  Here's the message I want you to send:" Hogan wrote, "You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth."

So that’s what they did for those kids. Even after the game as the Tornadoes walked back to their bus under guard, they each were handed a bag for the ride home—a burger, some fries, a soda, some candy, a Bible and an encouraging letter from a Faith player.

It was the best game Gainesville had all season. Even though they lost, 33-14, the Gainesville kids were so happy that after the game they gave head coach Mark Williams a sideline squirt-bottle shower like he'd just won state. After the game, both teams gathered in the middle of the field to pray.   It wasn't a player from Grapevine Faith that lead the prayer but one of the Gainesville kids. He said "Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many people in the world that cared about us."

 While this game is odd in the football world, it isn't very different from the gospel. God has always been on our sideline, even though we aren't the home team, even though we haven’t done anything worthy to be praised, even if he had to be against his son to do it.  That’s the love of God. As Romans 5:6-8 tells us, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die.  But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”