“Nice shot, Cam.”
A seminary student named Keagan said it to me last week during an intramural basketball game at my alma mater in Louisville. He said it every time I made a shot over him. Not in a sarcastic way. Not as a concession. It was genuine acknowledgment between two men competing fully and still choosing to honor each other inside the contest.
I am not a student anymore. I graduated years ago, went to law school, and have practiced law in Indiana and Kentucky for four years now. But I keep coming back to that campus, and lately to that court. This season showed me why.
Basketball was my identity as a kid growing up in Columbus, Indiana. Once my young eyes locked onto that orange ball, it took over a decade to look away.
I played AAU. I played school ball. I went to point guard elite camps. It was all cutthroat and shaped by some coaches who could love the game more than the kids playing it. I had a coach who threw chairs during practice and cornered me in the locker room, inches from my face, yelling through clenched teeth until I could feel his spit on my cheek. The thing I loved most as a kid started slipping from my hands.
I did not know it then, but God was stripping the game from my life, season by season.
By the fall of 2015, the stripping was finished. A speeding Lexus. A coma. A long scar across the right side of my head. By the spring I was in a new city and a new state with a new skull that had just been put back together. I had recently relearned to walk too. The doctors were still watching the bone flap. So basketball was not on the table. I spent two years as a student on that campus and never got to play the game I loved, until recently.
Ten years later, I just finished my first season with an intramural team I love. The court I walked past as a student, I walk onto now as an alumnus, a husband, a father of four. The game has come back to me in a form I did not know it could take.
A young man named Micah played on the other team with Keagan. He had been excited to play us. When it did not go his way, when overtime ended and the result was clear, he still walked off the court with a smile. Not a forced one. A real one.
That does not happen by accident. It happens because these men are trying to honor the Lord in everything, including overtime basketball on a Tuesday night. It happens because the culture forming them takes seriously that how you lose matters as much as whether you win, and that the man guarding you is an image bearer worth your respect even when he is making your night difficult.
I haven’t found this anywhere else. Not in AAU gyms, not at summer camps, not in high school locker rooms. The game I grew up playing was a machine for sorting bodies, and the boys who loved it most were often eaten by it.
What I have found here is something the world does not believe is possible: fierce competition without cruelty, intense without contempt, wanting to win without needing to win at another man’s expense.
This is what the body of Christ does to an object like sport. It does not water it down. It does not soften the edges into nothing. It fills the thing with a beautiful subject—namely, Jesus Christ—and in that particular kind of filling, the object is remade beautiful.
Keagan competed with everything he had and still found grace for the man he was trying to stop. Micah walked off a loss with a real smile. And I think about the Lord, who used a speeding Lexus and a shattered skull to bring me, a decade late, to a court where the gospel is still the substance underneath the sweat.
If you have been bruised by the world’s competition—by gyms that sorted you and coaches who could not love you—there is a way to play again. And it sounds like honor spoken into the noise.
It sounds like “Nice shot, Cam.” Over and over again.
[Special thanks to my teammates—Eli, Cody, Paula, Anry, Jackson, and Andrew—for some awesome memories. Blessings to your finals and summer travels!]
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