Only a couple of mins right into his group’s very first technique of the 2023-24 period, Logan Strand currently had a notion that the months in advance could be grim.
It was glaringly evident to the Free Lutheran Bible College males’s basketball train that a lot of his lineup of 18-to-21-year-olds had actually barely played prior to.
Strand started analyzing his group with a capturing drill. One gamer heaved 6 straight edge 3-pointers off the side of the backboard.
Strand relocated onto sphere handling. So lots of crossover dribbles jumped off feet that Strand shed matter of the number of spheres he chased.
When Strand presented a recoiling drill, he recoiled at overwhelmed expressions on the faces of numerous gamers. He may also have actually been talking in an international tongue when he inquired to liquidate on a shooter, turn and box out.
“It was like, oh boy, I guess we’re going to be doing a lot of third-grade basketball stuff, the things you usually teach young kids,” Strand informedYahoo Sports “How do we fire the sphere? How do we pass the sphere? How do we established a display?”
For Strand’s hopelessly unskilled group, the beginning of the period resembled Ralph Wiggum’s “I’m in Danger” meme revived. FLBC went 0-24 against an assortment of fellow bible colleges from Minnesota and neighboring states. Nineteen of those losses were by 40-plus points. One team outscored FLBC by more than 100. The closest FLBC came to victory was a 10-point loss to its own alumni team.
With its leading scorers from last year’s winless team departing and no experienced newcomers arriving to fill that void, this season’s FLBC team is even more overmatched. Opponents have actually outscored the Conquerors 378-39 in their very first 4 video games this period. FLBC trailed 61-0 in last month’s season opener prior to guard Westin Jenson rattled in a 3-pointer for his group’s very first factors. The adhering to evening, the Conquerors faced Division III Crown College’s JV team and still lost 87-11.
Wade Mobley watched FLBC men’s basketball not come close to winning a game last season. The FLBC president said without hesitation, “I think last year’s team would beat this year’s team by 20.”
FLBC’s historic run of futility attracted some unwanted attention last month. Barstool Sports poked fun at the Conquerors with a story entitled “We Have Found Unquestionably the Worst College Basketball Team of All-Time.”
What stories like that one miss, according to those at FLBC, is the school’s non-traditional purpose for competing in sports. FLBC is the rare school that proclaims that winning games is merely a secondary consideration.
The mission
Why would a modern-day college athletic department prioritize anything above winning games, shining a spotlight on the school and generating prestige and profit? The answer lies in FLBC’s commitment to its mission.
FLBC seeks to teach young Christians to faithfully serve Jesus Christ and to prepare students for leadership roles in their congregations and communities. The Minneapolis-area bible college’s athletics program only exists as a tool to help its 100-plus students achieve those goals.
In a section of its website entitled “Our why behind athletics,” FLBC insists that it takes competing for championships seriously but that playing sports for the school “is about more than wins.”
“Our students see themselves as representatives of the school and of Christ,” the school states on its website. “They find exciting parallels between working together on a sports team and working together to build up the church. Along the way, they discover a close brotherhood/sisterhood with their teammates that extends beyond the court.”
In many ways, FLBC’s atypical approach to athletics is a byproduct of its school president’s unconventional life story. Wade Mobley grew up in a tiny speck of a town in the hills of South Dakota, the son of a single mother and an uninvolved father. Basketball became a refuge for Mobley as a teenager seeking to stay on a constructive path and avoid drugs and alcohol.
“I shot baskets, obsessively, compulsively, clinically,” Mobley said. “That’s why I’m 52 years old and I have a knee replacement surgery scheduled for next month.”
At the same time that Mobley developed a passion for basketball, he also began to take more interest in his faith. Friends invited him and his mom to attend a Free Lutheran church in the basement of a neighboring town’s grocery store. The love and acceptance shown to him at that church changed his life and inspired him to become a Christian at 18.
While Mobley studied engineering physics at South Dakota State, he soon realized that he was good at it but he didn’t love it. He became his university’s only engineering physics student who dreamed of coaching college basketball.
At first, Mobley envisioned himself coaching at the highest possible level. He found two ideal mentors, accomplished coaches who were also devout Christians. Lynn Frederick, the coach of nearby Brookings High School, hired Mobley as a volunteer assistant for two seasons. Brad Soderberg, then South Dakota State’s coach, used his connections to help Mobley land jobs working at prestigious camps across the Midwest.
By the end of his senior year, Mobley learned that what he “enjoyed most about coaching wasn’t so much the basketball.” Mobley discovered that he possessed “this pastoral impulse wanting to invest in the lives of young people as I had been invested in.”
What sealed Mobley’s decision to study to become a pastor was the blessing of Soderberg, by then an assistant coach under Dick Bennett at Wisconsin. In 1995, during a conversation in his office in Madison, Soderberg told Mobley, “You can always coach. You will always have a connection and I can always get you a job. But right now you have an opportunity to grow in your faith.”
Mobley’s new path led him to what is now known as FLBC. He has spent large stretches of his adult life at FLBC’s tree-lined campus on the shores of Medicine Lake, first as a student, then as a basketball coach and athletic director and more recently as school president.
rel=” nofollow noopener”>The 2024 Free Lutheran Bible College men’s team. (Courtesy of Free Lutheran Bible College) (dds)
‘I never had a thought of quitting’
The basketball program that Mobley inherited at FLBC is worlds apart from the ones he once aspired to lead. FLBC is a member of the Association of Christian College Athletics, “about as low as you can get on the college basketball hierarchy,” according to Mobley. Its league consists of bible colleges and tribal colleges in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Since FLBC did not have an on-campus basketball gymnasium of its own until 2021, the school paid for its men’s and women’s teams to use facilities at Minneapolis-area high schools and colleges. Wade remembers holding practices on carpeted church basketball floors and on courts so cramped that the 3-point lines nearly touched.
As recently as five years ago, FLBC’s basketball teams held 10 p.m. practices at a K-through-12 Christian school about a 15-minute drive away. Players would sweep up the bleachers after high school games ended, tape the college 3-point line onto the court and then practice until they were too heavy-legged and bleary-eyed to go any later.
The top levels of college basketball are populated with players who dream of playing at a higher level, whether that’s the NBA, an overseas professional league or even just a more prestigious four-year school. It’s not like that at FLBC, where, Mobley says, “there’s nobody coming here to further their basketball career.”
At FLBC, Strand and his fellow coaches don’t recruit by scouting high school games or AAU tournaments in search of overlooked prospects. Most of those players aren’t options, Strand said, because “they don’t fit FLBC’s mission, vision and values.” Strand’s preferred alternative is to stay in contact with community church leaders about potential players and to reach out to applicants to FLBC to gauge their interest in playing basketball.
That approach has produced enough sporadic success to fill a small trophy case with cut nets, golden balls and engraved plaques commemorating league and tournament titles. More often than not, however, FLBC has struggled to accumulate enough talent to win more than a handful of games each season.
In 2021, the FLBC men’s and women’s basketball programs went a combined 1-29, the women picking up the lone victory in their final game of the season. On the FLBC website, Mobley penned a blog post arguing the basketball seasons would have been a “success” even if both the men and women went winless.
“At FLBC we don’t play basketball to win games,” Mobley wrote. “Check that: We play to win but winning isn’t why we play. We play for the leadership development and discipleship that comes with a team effort. Everyone needs to be a part of something bigger than himself or herself.”
The past two men’s basketball seasons have shaken Mobley’s faith in his vision if only because FLBC has been so overmatched. It’s one thing to lose every game. It’s another to trail 61-0 and have even the opposing players applaud your first basket.
What has reassured those at FLBC has been the players’ positivity and resilience. Every first-year player on last year’s team came out for the team again this season. One student who didn’t play basketball his first year at FLBC actually decided to join the team this fall.
“At first it was pretty hard losing game after game,” second-year guard Kent Anderson said. “But I was able to shift my mindset from how can we win to how can we improve. It also helped remembering that I am ultimately playing to bring God glory and not for myself. I never had a thought of quitting because I just love playing the sport so much.”
The enthusiasm and effort level among this year’s players, Strand says, exceeds that of any other team he has played for or coached. He admits he was feeling “a little down” after FLBC’s 85-5 season-opening loss until one of his new players approached with a fresh perspective.
“Coach, thank you for starting me tonight,” the player told Strand. “Hearing my name announced over the loudspeakers was one of the best moments of my life.”
cpos:7; pos:1″>Free Lutheran Bible College lines up to shake hands after another loss. (Courtesy of Free Lutheran Bible College)
The; cpos:7; pos:1; elm: context_link; itc:0; sec: content-canvasStrand What cpos:8; pos:1Strand rel =” nofollow noopenerOne _ empty(* )slk: penciled an article; cpos:8; pos:1; elm: context_link; itc:0; sec: content-canvas Another web linkStrand caas-iframe-wrapper Barstool 1995ec90-b462-5bab-896a-438f93599256″ > “Wait, you laughed?” Strand < blockquote data-src =" The allowfullscreen=”Yeah caas-figure prestige-figure xlarge” >Who( dds )We re poor.(* )cares? ‘ Anderson utmost examination of FLBC’s sentence happened a month earlier.(* )had not yet completed his early morning coffee when he obtained an immediate message from the dean of the institution. Yahoo Sports created, along with web links to the Barstool tale mocking the FLBC males’s basketball group’s current futility.(* )initially, FLBC managers were frightened. The various “weren’t mad because it was them giving their opinions purely on what they see.” “They don’t know why we play and who we play for (God),” Anderson podcasts additionally teased the FLBC gamers. “There is no use in us taking it personally or letting it affect us.” That did commenters on a Coaches string and on social networks. “If we can put together a somewhat competitive team next year, I might try to do that just to buy us a little bit of a reprieve,” Mobley alleviated the FLBC management’s issue was the entertained action from gamers when “In my role I’m trying to keep a stiff upper lip and I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it, but inside this is driving me nuts.” Oddly pointed out the adverse headings throughout a group conference at his house that evening. Strand gamer was happily amazed to obtain any type of media insurance coverage. Prospective informed Strand that he discovered it funny when the To Strand podcasters split jokes regarding among his off-target shots.On reacted, unquestionably captured unsuspecting.On train bears in mind gamers assuring him,” “It’s difficult,” Strand, we understand we misbehave. “There’s a lot of people, especially now after the Barstool story, who have reached out and said, ‘I want to play basketball. I can come this semester. I can do this right now.’ It’s like, yes, but do you understand who we are as an institution? Do you understand that we’re trying to grow you in leadership in church settings? We don’t want to become good at basketball at the expense of the mission of the school.”‘We know we’ _ emptyWho slk: an area of its web site qualified
