A kid who plays club sports showed up to a basketball program at Howland United Methodist Church, took the court, and said something that has stuck with Kaila Mohney ever since. “I forgot how fun sports could be,” the player told her. “I forgot the point.”
Reminding kids of the point is the whole idea behind Ignite Youth Sports, the ministry Mohney directs at Howland United Methodist Church in Howland, Ohio. “We’re not a traditional sports program,” Mohney says. “We focus on relationships, character development, and teamwork, and we really mean it.” Here is how Howland built it, and how your church could too.
A different kind of sports ministry
Howland UMC launched Ignite Youth Sports in 2020, following the construction of a new gymnasium. The church wanted to use its expanded facility to serve families beyond the congregation, so they recruited Mohney to help them answer a single question: What could this space do for the community? She and assistant director Brandon Buratti launched basketball in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, writing a curriculum that fit the pandemic distancing guidelines. A hundred children came to the first camp.
Soccer followed, then volleyball, and pickleball. Seven years in, Ignite Youth Sports draws families from 16 school districts plus homeschool groups. Local varsity coaches have noticed. “We love the kids that come from your program,” they tell Mohney, “because they’re so coachable, and they focus on the things that can’t be taught.”
The non-competitive philosophy is not just a slogan on a banner. It is engineered into the schedule. The two teams that will face each other on game day share a practice, rotating players through stations and across sides so the “us versus them” feeling never materializes. “They’re practicing with a team they’re going to play against,” Mohney explains. “It minimizes that competitive feel.”
Keeping faith at the center, not on the sidelines
The easiest trap for a church sports program is to let it drift into a glorified gym rental, busy and well-attended but spiritually disconnected from everything else the congregation does. Howland avoids that by building faith into the sport itself, not tagging it on afterward.
Every practice runs on a rhythm of scripture. Coaches grab the day’s devotion off a “Coach Wall” on their way in. Children are encouraged to memorize a weekly Bible verse and recite it to staff, but participation isn’t dependent on getting every word right. If they forget the verse, they can check the one posted on the wall and try again. “We never want a kid to feel like they can’t do it,” Mohney says. The devotions stay deliberately broad, because many of the children have no church background at all: God loves you, Jesus loves you, here is how we live that out today. The goal, she says, is to send each kid home with “a toolbox of scripture they can use out in the real world.”
Underneath it is a curriculum Mohney wrote in-house, a three-year rotation that never repeats across sports or seasons, organized around a progression from athlete to disciple to servant. The sequence is intentional: start with who a child is right now as an athlete, move to what it means to follow Jesus, then to what a follower does for others. It is a discipleship pathway dressed in a jersey.
That connection shows up off the court, too. Dozens of families have joined the church after finding it through sports, and a couple of times a year Howland holds a “Sports Ministry Sunday,” inviting players to wear any jersey to worship while the congregation sees a promo video of what happens in the gym. Mohney is candid that bridging the gap between the ministry and the wider congregation is still their biggest ongoing challenge, which is exactly why they work at it so deliberately. For the Adams family, the bridge held. “We came for the children’s athletic program but gained so much more,” says parent Stacey Adams, whose son joined as a “tot” in one of the earliest leagues. “It has opened doors for us to participate in other church events and community outreach programs. We came for the athletic program but gained friends and fellowship.”
The program they almost cut
A few years in, soccer was Ignite Youth Sports’ smallest sport, and the leaders discussed ending it. Then, a father who had coached with them for years asked them not to. It was, he told them, the only place his daughter could play “where nobody makes fun of her, where she fits in, and where she can just be herself and still play.” Rather than cut the program, the leaders prayed about it, redesigned it, and kept it alive while opening gym time for a growing pickleball league. That instinct, to reshape rather than eliminate, is what parents notice. “It gives the kids a place to go have fun, learn, and not be pressured to perform,” says Rob Kokor, who liked the program so much he agreed to coach basketball for it. “I’ve seen my daughter gain confidence, learn to be coachable, and make new friends.”
No Gym? You Can Still Do This
Mohney is quick to say the building is a blessing, not a prerequisite. A church with limited space can still run a sports ministry by borrowing a few of Howland’s habits:
- Identify a need: Look for sports or age groups that are underserved locally rather than duplicating existing programs.
- Start small: Consider a clinic, outdoor running club or short recreational league before committing to multiple sports.
- Find partners: Connect with school coaches, parents, and neighboring churches for volunteers, expertise, or shared facilities.
- Schedule strategically: Offer programs outside school sports seasons to make participation easier for athletes and volunteer coaches. For example, offer basketball in the summer, so kids can play for their school in the fall.
- Train for the mission: Pair new coaches with experienced volunteers who understand that encouragement and character matter more than winning.
- Remove barriers: Keep fees manageable and consider scholarships or equipment assistance. Howland uses the profit from the concession stand to fund their scholarships and pay for equipment for kids in need.
- Recruit the next generation of coaches from your own benches: Many Ignite Youth Sports coaches are former players who aged out, plus National Honor Society students logging service hours.
- Listen and adjust: Evaluate each season based on the children and families participating, not simply registration numbers.
For all the structure, the aim is simple enough that a club-sport kid named it on his first day: remember the point. At Howland, the point is a child who learns to be patient, coachable, and kind, and who walks away carrying a verse or two for the road. The games are real. So is the ministry. The achievement is refusing to choose between them.
Ellen Price is a lay leader at Brentwood United Methodist Church in Brentwood, Tennessee. A graduate of Truett Seminary at Baylor University, she has served churches in Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee as both a lay leader and minister. This article was published November 13, 2026.