Developing Future Champions: The Impact of College Athlete Mentoring

College athletes have more influence on younger athletes than they sometimes realize. A kid at a camp may remember what a college athlete said to them years after the athlete has forgotten the conversation ever happened. Younger players watch how college athletes compete, communicate, respond to coaches, treat teammates, handle mistakes, and carry themselves when nobody is asking for an autograph or taking a picture. That kind of influence creates an incredible opportunity for mentorship, but it also comes with responsibility because once somebody starts looking up to you, what you model matters just as much as what you tell them.

That's one of the reasons I believe college athletes should look for opportunities to mentor younger athletes. They've already walked through experiences those kids are just beginning to encounter. They know what it's like to get cut, sit the bench, battle for a starting position, struggle with confidence, balance school and sports, deal with demanding coaches, navigate recruiting, and realize that being talented doesn't automatically make everything easy. A college athlete doesn't need to have every answer to become a good mentor. Sometimes the most valuable thing they can offer is perspective that says, “I've been where you are, here's what I learned, and here's what I wish somebody had told me.”

Mentoring also gives younger athletes access to something coaches and parents can't always provide. A twelve or fourteen year old may hear the same lesson from a parent fifty times and suddenly listen when a college athlete they admire says it once. That's not necessarily fair to the parent, but anybody who's worked with young people knows it's true. Different voices reach kids differently, and college athletes are close enough to where younger athletes want to go that their words can carry a tremendous amount of credibility.

That credibility shouldn't be wasted.

A mentor can help a younger athlete understand that discipline isn't punishment and that consistency matters more than occasionally working really hard. They can teach them how to communicate with a coach instead of having a parent handle every uncomfortable conversation, how to respond when they aren't starting, how to treat teammates when competition for positions gets intense, and how to handle success without becoming arrogant. They can also be honest about their own mistakes instead of presenting some cleaned up version of themselves that makes younger athletes think successful people never struggled.

That's where mentoring becomes more powerful than just being a role model. A role model can influence somebody from a distance, but mentoring requires relationship. It requires listening, asking questions, showing up consistently, and caring enough to tell somebody the truth when the truth isn't what they want to hear.

College athletes can benefit from that relationship just as much because mentoring forces them to think beyond themselves. It's one thing to talk about leadership when you're surrounded by your peers, but it's another thing when a younger athlete is watching how you actually live. If you're telling a kid to respect their coach while you're constantly trashing yours, they're going to notice. If you're preaching discipline while cutting corners yourself, they'll eventually see that too. If you're telling them to be a good teammate while making everything about your own playing time, your actions are going to teach the louder lesson.

Mentoring creates accountability because it's hard to tell somebody else how they should live without eventually examining whether you're living that way yourself.

For Christian athletes, that responsibility goes even deeper. 2 Timothy 2:2 (ESV) says, “and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”

We need to keep that verse in context because Paul isn't giving Timothy a general command about athletic mentorship. Paul is instructing Timothy to faithfully pass on apostolic teaching to trustworthy people who will be able to teach others. The passage is about preserving and multiplying faithful Christian teaching, which is much more serious than telling an older athlete to give a younger athlete advice.

There is, however, a powerful principle of spiritual multiplication there for Christian athletes. Somebody invested in you, taught you, corrected you, encouraged you, or helped you understand your faith more deeply, and you shouldn't assume all of that was given to you just so it could stop with you.

Pass it on.

If you're a Christian college athlete mentoring a younger athlete, that doesn't mean every conversation has to become a sermon. It means your faith should actually affect the way you mentor. Tell the truth. Keep your word. Be patient. Admit when you're wrong. Don't use your position to make yourself feel important, and don't make a younger athlete dependent on your approval. Point them toward Christ instead of building yourself into somebody they think they need.

That's especially important because mentorship creates influence, and influence can be abused. Younger athletes may idolize college athletes, which means mentors need boundaries, maturity, and accountability. Good mentorship should happen within appropriate structures, particularly when minors are involved, with parents, coaches, schools, churches, or established organizations providing proper oversight and safeguarding.

Being admired doesn't give somebody unlimited access or authority over a younger person's life.

Christian mentorship should also be careful about what we mean when we tell young athletes they're loved and valued by God. We shouldn't turn that into another motivational slogan promising them that God has some huge athletic destiny waiting if they believe hard enough. The gospel isn't about God helping athletes reach their dreams. Christian mentors should help younger athletes understand that their identity and worth aren't determined by whether they become college athletes at all.

That's a message young athletes desperately need because youth sports can make kids believe their value is constantly being evaluated. They're ranked, selected, cut, started, benched, recruited, compared, and posted all over social media. By middle school, some athletes already believe every tournament is determining their future.

A good mentor can remind them that sports matter without allowing sports to become everything.

There are organizations already creating environments where athletes can develop this kind of influence. Fellowship of Christian Athletes has campus Huddles that are often led by student athletes, while FCA Camps include opportunities for college athletes to work directly with younger athletes. FCA's Power Camps are specifically designed for younger athletes, generally ages eight through twelve, combining athletic development with Christian discipleship. Athletes in Action also works extensively with college athletes through campus ministry, discipleship, mentoring, camps, and leadership development.

Those are better examples of Christian athletic mentorship than treating mentorship as nothing more than an older athlete giving a younger player sports advice. Christian mentorship should care about the whole person because we're not trying to manufacture better athletes who happen to know Bible verses. We're investing in people.

There are strong secular models inside college athletics too. Auburn's current AuburnYOU CONNECT program, for example, develops selected upperclass student athletes as leaders and has them help freshmen student athletes through mentorship, relationship building, and conversations about transitioning into college athletics. Programs like that demonstrate another important side of mentorship because younger athletes don't always have to mean children. College upperclassmen can have a tremendous influence on freshmen who are trying to figure out college athletics for the first time.

That transition can be brutal for some athletes. A freshman may arrive on campus after being the best player in their high school or club program and suddenly find themselves surrounded by people who were also the best players where they came from. They're away from home, their academic workload changes, expectations increase, playing time disappears, and the confidence they've carried for years can take a beating.

Sometimes the person best positioned to reach that athlete is the senior who remembers exactly what freshman year felt like.

That's what makes peer mentorship so valuable. The mentor doesn't need to pretend they have life figured out. They need enough maturity to say, “I struggled with this too, and here's what helped me.” That honesty can create a relationship where younger athletes feel safe asking questions they might be embarrassed to ask a coach.

College athletes can also mentor through camps, clinics, community programs, youth teams, churches, FCA Huddles, academic programs, and informal relationships that develop through their sport. The structure can look different, but the responsibility stays pretty consistent. Show up, listen, encourage, teach, correct when necessary, and model what you're asking somebody else to become.

I also think college athletes need to understand that mentorship isn't about creating a miniature version of themselves. Your mentee doesn't need your personality, your career, your position, your training habits, or your exact path. Good mentors help people recognize their own strengths while learning from somebody else's experience.

That requires humility because sometimes mentoring means watching somebody eventually become better than you.

That's not a threat. That's the point.

If you've learned how to lead, teach somebody else to lead. If you've learned how to communicate with coaches, help a younger athlete find their voice. If you've learned how to recover from failure, tell somebody what that process actually looked like. If you've screwed up, don't hide every scar and pretend you always made the right decision. Use what you've learned to help somebody avoid making the same mistake.

And if you're a Christian athlete, don't keep your spiritual growth locked inside your own experience. If somebody taught you how to study Scripture, pray, compete without making sports your identity, or follow Christ when athletics became difficult, you now have something worth passing forward.

FCA describes its mission in terms of engaging, equipping, and empowering coaches and athletes to know and grow in Christ and lead others to do the same. That's the kind of multiplication I want athletes to understand. The goal isn't collecting people who look up to you. It's becoming the kind of person who can invest in somebody else and eventually watch them turn around and invest in another person.

That's when influence becomes stewardship.

College athletes spend years developing their bodies, skills, statistics, resumes, and platforms, but eventually their eligibility runs out. The uniform comes off, the records get broken, somebody else takes their position, and another recruiting class walks onto campus.

What they poured into people can keep moving long after they're done playing.

That's why I want college athletes to stop thinking they need thousands of followers before they have influence. Sometimes influence looks like one kid at a summer camp who keeps coming back to you with questions. Sometimes it's the freshman sitting beside you in the locker room who's having a terrible year. Sometimes it's the younger athlete watching how you respond after getting benched, and sometimes it's somebody who needs to hear that you struggled too and survived it.

You don't need a massive platform to mentor somebody. You need something worth passing on and enough humility to understand that what you've learned was never supposed to stop with you.