This video was shot by Shane Ewing of KAKE Sports out of Wichita.

The real reason to coach young people starts at about half way through.

It was a pleasure working with Coach Schuckman back when I would contact coaches for team information in preseason for the magazine Kansas Pregame. He had great preseason information ready to go and all you had to do was ask for it. Always very detailed and up to date.

Ten years ago, when we first started the Kansas Pregame magazine, my job was to contact football coaches for their team capsules and get the coaches thoughts on the upcoming season. Since I was not trained as a newspaper or magazine journalist and had never been one, my interviews were probably unorthodoxed.

Now at that point of my life, I had been on the radio as a part-time broadcaster of football and basketball games for about fifteen years. So I had interviewed coaches post game on the radio in moments of joy, sadness and anger. My thoughts on interviews were always as though I had just met someone new and wanted to make a friend. I would ask if they were married, had kids and how did they meet their wife and of course about their football teams.

What I learned about football coaches, during those years of interviews, was most football coaches don’t beat around the bush. They told me exactly what they thought about their teams, their competitors and media personnel. Lots of them would say after that, “Now you are not going to print that are you?” My response was always, “No sir that will never be in print. Nor will I tell anyone.” Direct, straight forward and telling it exactly how it was.

One day, during an interview on the phone, with a head football coach, who I had interviewed for the past couple of years, when I asked him how was the wife and kids? The coach said, “We are separated.” The coach told me it had just recently happened and he was crushed. He didn’t get to wake up in the same house as his children and he was hurting.

What do you say to someone who is hurt? Who is angry? Who doesn’t know what to do next?

In our society today many men are hurting. Someone asks us, “How are you doing?” And our answer is, “Just fine.” The reality is you are addicted to porn, drink too much, work too much and are bored at church, but you are “Just fine.” As men we hide our real feelings and thoughts just to get along and not rock the boat.

So what is the answer for men? Lots of men see church as a place for women and children. To be honest, a lot of churches are for women and children. The programs are all geared for the women and children. After a certain age the boys look around and see that Dad is not present and so he tells Mom, “I am not going to church anymore, because Dad doesn’t go.”

Let me give you a thought. Jesus said he came to serve and not to be served. Jesus was a man. So our job as men is to serve. How can you serve the church?

Most women love to cook, they don’t like to wash dishes. Go wash dishes after church dinners. Carry the full trash receptacles after those dinners at church to the dumpster. Go mow the church lawn. When it snows, go get your shovel and move snow at your church and any other church close to you. Go pull weeds in and around your church. Go to the local thrift store and tell them if they have heavy stuff to move or want hauled to the dump or recycle, here is my phone number, call me.

Take other men and boys with you when you are serving the church in physical ways. Once you start to do this work together you will have something in common and then you might be able to start sharing thoughts with one another. Just being able to talk about things with other men and the women not being present will do you all good.

Proverbs 27:17 Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.