Thinking Christianly About Excellence in Sport

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Will Durant

In the film Friday Night Lights, Coach Gary Gaines (played by Billy Bob Thorton) leads the Permian Panthers through an entire season under the crushing expectation of a town that has turned football into a religion. His repeated charge to his players throughout the film is for them to “Be perfect.”

(Spoiler alert) At halftime of the state title game, with his team losing and deflated, Gaines delivers one of the great locker room speeches in sports movie history. He redefines what he means by the phrase “Be perfect.” He explains that perfection isn’t about the scoreboard. It’s not even about winning. It’s about knowing in the quiet of your own heart that you gave everything you had for the person next to you. It’s about love and joy, not fear and results. And in doing so, he frees his athletes to play from a completely different place.

It’s a great perspective. Although, let’s be honest, sharing “what you really meant all season” twenty minutes before the fourth quarter is less-than-ideal leadership and communication skills. 

I want to do something similar with a word that’s tossed around frequently within our coaching vocabulary and included in many of our program’s principles: excellence. And I want to do it without the Texas high school football and Hollywood theatrics. Because like Coach Gaines and his use of “perfect,” I think we often use the word excellence in a way that slowly distorts what we actually mean—and what the Bible is actually asking of us.

What does excellence mean to us?

How would you define excellence? Or better yet, during your next staff meeting, ask your fellow coaches how they define it. Of course, you and your staff will come up with a better answer than this, but most coaches understandably list wins, performance benchmarks, statistical improvement, and championships as defining markers of what it means to be excellent.

In a sports saturated culture, excellence is usually a measurement, something that lives on a scoreboard or in a box score—or maybe even a highlight on social media. 

As we noted in The Christian Athlete Report, “The pressure to produce results related to performance is likely not going anywhere,” and that for coaches especially, their livelihood is often tied directly to performance metrics. This creates real temptation: define excellence by what can be measured and rewarded, and organize your program accordingly.

But when the currency of excellence is exclusive to outcomes, competing becomes transactional. This means that athletes don’t just lose games, they fail as people because we’ve taught them that their worth fluctuates with the scoreboard. And research consistently confirms what the Bible has always taught: athletes who root their identity primarily in performance results are most likely to operate out of a fear-of-failure mindset. Research also shows that fear-based motivation positions athletes to play anxious and their performance dips over time. 

All this to say: we should absolutely pursue excellence in sports. But how we pursue it and how we define it matters. 

What Should Excellence Mean to Us?

Here’s where Greek words become surprisingly relevant.

When the New Testament writers wanted to describe something as excellent, they often used the word aretē. You can find it in Philippians 4:8 (the verse Paul uses to describe the kind of things worth filling your mind with). It’s found again in 2 Peter 1:5, where believers are urged to “add to your faith aretē”—often translated as virtue, goodness, or moral excellence.

What’s the point? Aretē was never primarily about measurable outcomes. It was a moral and character term. Even Aristotle, whose concept of virtue the New Testament writers were in conversation with, used this Greek word (aretē) to describe the kind of person you were becoming through repeated action. A person of aretē was characterized by courage, justice, wisdom, and self-discipline. These are virtues that showed up not just in competition, but in the whole of a person’s life. It’s more about virtue than victory. And yes, it can be both of those. But it certainly can’t be less. 

When Paul says, “if anything is excellent,” he is describing a quality of character.

Here is where it matters for coaches wanting to pursue excellence Christianly. If excellence is primarily a virtue—a condition of the heart and character being formed—then the question we ask of our teams and of ourselves changes entirely. We stop asking only “What did we achieve?” and start asking “Who are we becoming?”

Let’s keep hammering this point home: this doesn't mean outcomes stop mattering. It doesn't mean we lower expectations or stop pursuing wins. Colossians 3:23 is still a guiding biblical principle to strive toward excellence: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord.” 

But here is what a growing understanding of aretē offers Christian coaches: excellence is not just the product at the end. It's the person in the process. 

The research on this is striking, especially at the youth level. Athletes in programs where coaches emphasize a mastery climate that’s focused on growth, effort, and character develop more positive character attributes toward themselves, their teammates, and the game than athletes in programs focused primarily on performance outcomes. A mastery climate, it turns out, is the sociological depiction of what the Bible calls us to build. Coaches who emphasize who athletes are becoming (and we do this through love, not fear), not just what they’re producing, develop something the scoreboard can’t capture: Christlikeness.

This is what Paul means when he writes in 1 Timothy 4:8 that “physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things.” Practice matters. The weight room matters. The hidden moments that contribute to a culture of winning matters. But the formation happening underneath all of that—the courage, the integrity, the love, the self-discipline—that’s the excellence (aretē) Paul has in mind.

Consider what this looks like Romans 5:3-5: “But we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,  and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” 

Notice the trajectory and the destination. The suffering doesn’t produce a Texas high school football state title. It produces endurance. Which produces character. Character, in turn, produces hope. Excellence in this framework isn’t a destination you arrive at after accumulating enough wins. It’s the person you are becoming through how you move through the whole experience, which could mean winning or losing. Aretē can live in the highs and the lows. That’s why expanding our understanding of excellence can serve us, and the athletes we coach. Win or lose. Success or failure. Biblical excellence is attainable. 

How Do We Practice Christianly Excellence in Sport?

Let’s get practical on this. What does this look like Monday morning, in your program, with your coaching staff and with real athletes who have real goals?

1. Change the scoreboard you talk about the most. You have at least two scoreboards. One probably feels the most familiar. It tracks wins, losses, and stats. And how many times do we need to say this? At least once more: You should absolutely pay attention to it. But the other one is concerned with questions like: Is this athlete more courageous than she was last October? Is he quicker to encourage a teammate after a failure than he was freshman year? Are they competing with more freedom and less fear? The athletes in your program who will look back in twenty years and say their coach changed their life probably won’t be pointing to a trophy. They'll be pointing to the person they became. Talk about that scoreboard out loud and often. And have a practice plan in place where you can train for it. 

2. Build a high standards + high grace culture. Jesus modeled this. In fact, He was one of the first people to demand perfection from His team (Matthew 5:48)! And yet, Jesus still met every failure with patient grace. The research confirms what the Gospel already teaches: high expectations combined with high grace creates freedom. Why is this true? Because athletes in that environment are the ones who, more often than not, take risks, learn, grow, and compete more fully than those in high-expectation, low-grace cultures, where fear runs the program instead of love. 

3. Ask different questions in your team talks. Rather than only asking “What did we do wrong?” also ask questions like:

• “Who competed with integrity tonight?” 

• “Who chose a teammate over themselves?” 

• “Who showed up differently under pressure?” 

These aren’t feel-good consolation questions when you lose. They are the questions that train athletes to recognize what God wants us to prioritize—that excellence is a condition of the heart, not just a final score.

4. Let your identity anchor theirs. Coaches who have a secure identity in Christ model what they’re asking their athletes to pursue. When your worth isn’t on the line with every game, you lead differently. You admit mistakes. You choose the hard conversation over the easy one. And as athletes under your leadership experience you this way, they form their understanding of what it means to compete from watching you. Coach, as your understanding of excellence grows, you begin to embody a new way of excellence for your team. 

Coach Gaines waited until halftime of the state championship to tell his players what he actually meant by “perfection.” You have an entire season to teach a different version of excellence. One that isn’t built on what the scoreboard says, but on who your athletes are becoming.

Aretē. 

Virtue. 

Moral excellence. 

It's a deep character formed over time. It's a character that’s forged in the relational trenches and competitive culture of sport. And it’s Christianly excellent.