This is what coach Joe Hyland hopes his players will take away from their time on the West Catholic football team: an enduring passion for life, for love and for God.
Those might seem like strange takeaways in a sport known for physical contact and competitiveness, and for a team that has won four consecutive state titles. However, the glory of championship trophies is fleeting, and Joe wants his boys to gain something that will stick with them long after the highlight reels have been packed away. He wants them to walk away as men of heroic virtue – men who will be winners not only on the field, but off as well.
“The only things that are eternal [in football] are the virtues you learn,” he says. Hard work and perseverance are often spoken about in sports, but Joe wants more for his players. “The bar will perpetually be held high because we are called to be saints,” he says. “The great adventure is being Catholic.”
One mother lost, another found
At age 41, Joe has been married to Andrea for 12 years and they have seven children, ranging from age 11 down to 3-year-old twins. The life he’s fashioning for his family is, so far, very different than the one he had growing up.
When Joe was 7, his mother died. “It changed my whole world,” he says. His father worked tirelessly to provide for Joe and his six siblings, and eventually remarried. Joe’s stepmother was a steadfast part of his life for 30 years, until she passed away, but the West Catholic coach has never stopped thinking about the mom he lost at such a young age.
“There’s a deep longing – an insatiable drive to meet her again,” he explains. It led him, from a very young age, to embrace the “undeniable belief that there is heaven,” and that his actions here in this life will determine whether he gets to be with his mother again in the next life.
While Joe waits for the time in which he’ll be reunited with his earthly mother, God has given him the Blessed Mother as a guide. The West Catholic football team has been consecrated to Mary, and her
miraculous medal is a constant sign throughout the school and on the field. While Joe mourns his mother, he is grateful to have found comfort and peace in Mary's presence.
The winding road to West Catholic
Given Joe’s deep yearning to connect with his mother, it’s perhaps not surprising that he decided to enter the seminary. Prior to marriage and fatherhood, “It was the greatest experience of my life,” he says. “The seminary far exceeded my expectations.”
The opportunity for quiet reflection and structured prayer provided profound insight into the mysteries and goodness of God. While not all men have a call to the priesthood, Joe says he hopes every boy will take seriously the opportunity to discern his vocation in the seminary.
As for Joe, it eventually became clear that God was calling him to something other than holy orders. He left the seminary and entered Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, where he met his future wife. They married, and the Lombard, Ill., native took his wife and kids to the state of Wyoming, where he would work as a clinical counselor.
That was followed by a move to Greenville, South Carolina, where football once again became an integral part of Joe’s life. He had played previously and held coaching jobs at a Catholic high school in Illinois,
as well as at Eastern Michigan University. In Greenville, he was instrumental in launching a football program for the Catholic school system there.
However, God wasn’t ready to let Joe and his family settle just yet. Through a mutual acquaintance, Joe was invited to speak at a sophomore retreat at West Catholic. His talk had a profound impact on many students. It wouldn’t be long before Joe moved to Grand Rapids to work as a guidance counselor and religion teacher at West Catholic. The year after that, the head coaching position for the football team opened and, given his extensive football resume, Joe was a natural choice to carry on West Catholic’s winning tradition.
Bringing Jesus to the football field
Phil Dolci, the director of campus ministry and freshman football defensive coordinator, was responsible for Joe’s appearance at that fateful sophomore retreat. Today, he works closely with Joe, both in the school and on the football field.
“He’s the most passionate man I know about football,” Phil says. “The only thing that supersedes that is his passion for his faith.”
Talking to Joe, both those passions are evident. “Where is the rite of passage for men nowadays?” Joe asks. One answer, he believes, can be found on the sports field. It’s there that young men can learn how to use their strength wisely and for the right reasons. St. Paul often spoke of imagery that compared faith to training for athletic events and striving for a prize. “It’s very natural to marry the two,” Joe says of sports and faith.
It may be very natural, but it also takes an act of courage to do so when faced with a roomful of adolescent boys. However, for Joe, it’s worth enduring the occasional eye roll to share that message. “He loves these kids,” Phil says. “He wants the very best for them, so much so that not only does he work tirelessly to help them become great football players but he also doesn’t neglect to talk to them about being young men of heroic virtue.”
Fierce and faithful
While Joe’s approach to football brings faith onto the field, don’t make the mistake of thinking he isn’t also fostering a fierce competitiveness within his team. The Catholic Church needs strong men, and Joe sees football as the perfect vehicle to prepare boys for their future roles in parishes and families.
The sport requires them to be strong – manly, if you will – and lets them tap into a side of themselves that he says modern society often asks males to repress. That can be true in the Church as well, he says, where programs often seem directed more toward women.
“We’re not reaching men,” he says. Football, for Joe, provides a platform to do just that.
Football offers a wealth of opportunities for young men to grow in relationship to one another and glean virtues that build success on and off the field. From Joe’s perspective, there is nothing better than winning and winning big, so long as his team members learn the more profound lessons that will carry them through life.
If he’s done his job right, his players will realize there is no reason to think being a champion football player somehow excludes them from also walking as a disciple of Christ. Likewise, being a faith-filled man doesn’t mean you can’t also be strong and fierce.
And so, at the end of their years at West Catholic, Joe hopes the boys he mentors will leave the school with a winning record and a state championship or two. Check that: As a coach, he wants to “win it all” every year. However, the true success will be if they also walk away with a sense of urgency to seek out and fulfill the will of God – on the field, as adults and, hopefully, for all eternity.