Every summer at FCA Camp, Marla Williams prays that God will reveal to her one or two Huddle Leaders He wants her to invest in during the week — athletes for whom she can be that sharpening iron of the Lord. This summer, her pre-camp prayers were answered with stunning clarity.

In the first staff meeting at FCA’s Black Mountain camp in North Carolina, Williams, an FCA staff member in Alabama, felt almost an immediate calling to two young women from the U.S. Naval Academy: Ali Currier, captain of the Navy’s basketball team, and Aubrey Manes, an outside hitter for the volleyball team.

Major League Baseball teams have games every Sunday from April through September. For those of you flipping through a calendar, that’s 26-straight Sundays spent on the diamond. With that kind of weekend schedule, Christian athletes often find it difficult to attend church services and stay involved with in a local body of believers.

Carey Casey wants to start a revolution. He travels around the country, rallying and recruiting men to join him and asking them to enlist for the cause. His goal: an army of 6.5 million.

Not to be confused with any militant operation, Casey's is more of an intimate and personal quest: changing the world one championship father at a time.

The faint of heart need not apply.

It takes grit to play at Rice University’s Reckling Park on game day in front of 3,000 fans. It takes nerve to battle under the shadow of a preseason No. 1 ranking. Expectations overwhelm, and stomach knots tangle themselves inside even the most tested of athletes. Why? Because players know that a single performance can make or break an entire season.

But really, that’s all hogwash ... and Rice juniors Bobby Bramhall, Joe Savery and Brian Friday know it.

“The difference between champions and near champions is the ability to play for something outside of self.” – Lou Holtz, Hall of Fame football coach

What comes first, success or confidence? For most of us, we are confident when we are successful, but how do we get that initial confidence? Can we be confident without the evidence of success? It’s like the old question: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” We want to believe we can succeed, but we need proof. We think we have to actually see David defeat Goliath before we believe it’s possible.

This month, as college football bowl games flood your television, let yourself get sucked in. Just make sure you have read below or your STV is close by. You’ll want to refer back to this article when you see a player score a touchdown and kneel in prayer. “Maybe he helps out with his FCA Huddle,” you’ll wonder.

If he’s found below or inside the magazine, the answer is yes.

We are profiling the athletes who are owning leadership roles both on and off the field. They are actively involved in their FCA Huddles and chapels and are setting positive examples for young fans to follow. We'll start with Heisman-hopeful Sam Bradford, and he is just the beginning of this tremendous list of athletes.

On paper, 15 pounds is just about all that separates John Smoltz, Mike Sweeney and Tim Salmon. All are accomplished, 6-foot-3 major league veterans who have spent their entire careers (all dating back to the mid-90’s) with one club. And if you really want to stretch out the comparison — as any true baseball follower would do — you could add to it the fact that all are right-handed men whose last names start with the letter “S.” Still, to find three men so alike is to contradict the rarity that they are in the league as Christian men serving in spiritual leadership roles in their respective clubhouses.

Today’s emerging female athlete is a new breed. Different than the generation before her, she’s noncommittal, untrusting and is far more likely to text message you than to interact personally. But this girl is also full of potential. STV investigates how — at both the college and high school levels — coaches today can draw out the phenomenal women in today’s generation.

Her name is often stretched across the headlines of sports pages around the nation: Courtney Paris, University of Oklahoma All-American. Of course, it’s hard not to talk about an athlete who frequently adds to her growing list of NCAA records, which already stood at an astonishing 16 at the beginning of her senior year.

But unlike many egocentric players who drool at the mention of having their name in print, Paris remains unfazed. Yes, it comes with the territory, but to her it is “irrelevant.” She is too focused to get caught up in the hype surrounding achievements. She knows her most significant accomplishments won’t ever be listed in press clippings. Rather, they are humbly imprinted on the lives of those she influences.

When STV caught up with Craig Kanada, he was shopping for shampoo at Target near his home in The Woodlands, Texas, accompanied by his wife, Brooke, and their three sons.

Nobody asked for his autograph. It is likely that nobody recognized him, even though at that time — five weeks into the PGA Tour season — he was outplaying Phil Mickelson, Geoff Ogilvy, Stuart Appleby, John Daly, Stewart Cink and many of the big names who had been padding their multi million-dollar portfolios while Kanada was piling up over 100,000 miles on a Chrysler minivan with malfunctioning locks.

Steve “Chappy” Hudson has been committed to full-time ministry since he was 23. After attending seminary, he joined the ministry team of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Six years later, he felt the tugging of the Holy Spirit to step out of the church setting to reach the “unequipped.” And what better place than at Charlotte Motor Speedway?