Meet the coach turning gridiron glory into gospel impact

Sudden darkness hit Ratliff Stadium, home of the Odessa Permian Panthers, the team from “Friday Night Lights.”

With six state championships, Permian has long been a powerhouse in 6A, one of the toughest divisions in the country.

And yet on this November night, the Panthers were losing to the Frenship Tigers, from Wolfforth, Texas, a town without a single state championship to its name.

The underdog had scored two touchdowns in nine seconds, sealing a 44-27 upset.

"They didn’t like that at all," Frenship’s character coach, David Fraze, tells me. "They were so upset, they just turned the lights out." He laughs. "What you see on TV is real. ‘Friday Night Lights’ is a documentary."

He smiles again, thinking back to that underdog night in Odessa.

“Culture is our secret weapon,” he says. “We’re not the fastest or the strongest, but our team speed and team strength is awesome.”

Scoreboard

Fraze and I spoke on a cold February afternoon, both still recovering from the flu. Fraze, an associate professor and Endowed Chair of Youth & Family Ministry at Lubbock Christian University, has been in character coaching — an under-the-radar branch of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — for 15 years.

It started as a side project while he was with The Hills Church in Dallas. Then the FCA asked him to build it out, shaping the role so it aligned with Title IX compliance and the growing fields of sports psychology and leadership development.

'I’m a child of God, whether I feel like it or not. My lifestyle reflects that truth, whether my feelings agree or not.'

Now, character coaches work with teams across the country, blending faith, discipline, and mentorship.

“We’re everywhere,” Fraze says. “Helping athletes not just physically, but in their mindset, their resilience.”

Fraze, who has a Ph.D. from Fuller Seminary, knows Texas football. He coaches with the Dallas Cowboys Youth Academy. He understands pressure, competition, and the weight of identity that comes with performance.

But more than anything, he knows what happens when that identity isn’t anchored in something real. Three decades working with students, families, and athletes has taught him that.

Practical wisdom

In a world where winning often overshadows personal growth, David Fraze is challenging the status quo with his book, “Practical Wisdom For Families with Athletes: Winning Isn’t the Ultimate Goal.” Co-author Monica Williams, also an associate professor at Lubbock Christian University, has more than 17 years experience mentoring student athletes across Texas and California.

Fraze and Williams argue that the competitive sports arena has lost sight of what truly matters — helping athletes become the best versions of themselves rather than simply chasing victories.

Drawing from decades of experience in coaching, teaching, and mentoring, Fraze and Williams invite parents, coaches, and athletes into an honest conversation about the pressures of modern sports.

“Our book isn’t about creating superstars,” Fraze explains. “It’s about equipping young athletes and their families with the practical wisdom needed to navigate the demanding world of competitive athletics.”

Instead of promising quick fixes, the book offers actionable strategies for finding balance in a high-stakes environment. Each chapter posits new approaches to how athletes can manage the rigorous demands of training, competition, and even the pressures from external influences.

The narrative of “Practical Wisdom” extends beyond sports tactics. It touches on broader life lessons, urging athletic families to embrace rest, reflect on identity, and even re-evaluate the role of competition.

Central to the book’s message is the idea of balance.

“We have an opportunity to reclaim what sports were always meant to be — a joyful journey with friends,” says Fraze.

Meanwhile, Williams emphasizes that the book is a guide for both immediate challenges and long-term growth, offering “ready-to-use suggestions” for balancing athletic ambition with personal well-being.

The weight of performance

Competition is a furnace; it forges character, but it can also aggravate weaknesses.

Pressure defines sports. A missed shot, a fumbled pass, a split-second hesitation: Any one of these can turn a game, a career, even a life upside down.

But Fraze believes Christianity offers a path to relief from that pressure.

“When a player can separate who they are from what they do, they actually become better players,” he says.

He’s seen it firsthand. The athletes who can lay down their performance anxiety, who step onto the field knowing their worth is not tied to the scoreboard, are the ones who thrive.

And the freedom to let it go

“Our identity determines our actions and then our feelings,” Fraze explains. “That’s very biblical.”

It’s a truth that governs sports and life alike. Too often, young athletes build their identity on performance. If they win, they feel valuable; if they lose, they feel worthless. But Fraze believes that’s backward.

“You think about the walk of Christ: I’m a child of God, whether I feel like it or not. My lifestyle reflects that truth, whether my feelings agree or not. That’s love. If I start with my feelings as an athlete — if I don’t feel like playing hard, I won’t. And then I want to claim the identity? It doesn’t work that way.”

Fraze tells the story of a quarterback he coached, a rising star with a Texas Tech scholarship. During a voluntary team testimony night, the young athlete stood before his teammates and said: “Football is too important to us — it’s what we do, but it’s not who we are.”

Youth culture

Fraze is a youth minister by trade. “In the academic world,” he adds, “I also train people to do what I do and teach.”

He’s spent 36 years balancing theory and practice, the tumultuous world of academia and the unpredictable world of teenagers. His title at Lubbock Christian University reads like a legal document — James A. "Buddy" Davidson Charitable Foundation Youth and Family Ministry Endowed Chair — but he still spends Sundays leading a group of freshmen at church. (He complains jokingly that one of them insists on calling him “sir.”)

His doctorate program was a mix of sociology, psychology, theology, and philosophy. “And so we were trained to be ethnographical people. Wherever we go, we take the knowledge and we just walk in the world.”

All of those elements combined result in the freewheeling chaos of youth.

Youth, at its core, is freedom — not the lonely, self-serving kind, but a redemption bound in love, in relationships, in communion. It thrives in teams, in huddles, in the unspoken brotherhood of the locker room. It’s what drives a player to lay down a block for his teammate, what makes a team more than the sum of its win/loss ratio.

To the outside world, youth culture looks messy, unpredictable, irritating. But this is its power. It refuses to be polished, optimized, and repackaged for consumption.

Every new generation gets to formulate its worldview as the rest of us look on, out of bitterness or curiosity or nostalgia, captivated by the authority of youth.

Failure as a gift

“Eventually,” Fraze says, “we all fail to make it to the next level.”

He has seen what happens when identity gets tangled in athletic performance. He points to Michael Phelps — arguably the greatest swimmer in history — who, after winning everything there was to win, found himself lost.

“We develop athletes, but if we don’t connect it to life, they foreclose their human development.”

Failure, Fraze insists, isn’t just inevitable — it’s necessary: “Failure is a gift — it’s the only way to grow.”

He recalls his own daughter, a talented theater performer, who recently went through grueling auditions, only to be told hard truths about her vocal range. One day, she came home in tears. “He just gave you a gift,” Fraze told her. “Either he’s helping you get better, or you’ve just found out what your role is. Either way, you win.”

The same lesson applies to young athletes. Too often, kids don’t get the chance to fail in a healthy way. Parents rush to intervene — switching teams, blaming coaches, throwing money at trainers.

But Fraze sees sports as a tool for something bigger: “The Christian life isn’t about avoiding hell,” Fraze says. “It’s about transformation.”

Close call

Fraze wants athletes to have freedom — the freedom to compete with intensity, without fear, knowing their value isn’t on the line with every game.

“Does God love you? Yes. Does your family love you? Yes. So what happens if you fail? Nothing changes. So go play.”

He laughs, recalling an interaction he just had with his daughter, who walked into his office with a box of donuts.

“It’s Monday,” she said, hopeful.

“I looked at her and said, ‘Get those out of here. I want them, but it’s Monday.’” He grins. “Discipline, man. It matters.”

He pauses. “They’re really good donuts, too. And I just shut my door. I'm so glad we're talking because you've helped me avoid temptation.”