Ex-NFL player shares faith in Campbell Co.

“I had the chance to the play for one of the greatest teams in America,” Steve Fitzhugh said Sunday from the track at Brookville High School’s football stadium.

Naming the Denver Broncos didn’t garner much of a reaction from the few hundred, mainly young people, sitting before him in the stands. That led Fitzhugh to ask what team they cheer for.

“Patriots! Cowboys! Steelers! Redskins!” followed several yells.

Fitzhugh, 46, said his final pro football appearance was a 42-10 championship game loss to the Washington Redskins in 1987.

“When we lost the Super Bowl, I cried,” he said, adding, “all the way to the bank because I got paid!”

That sense of humor consistently produced laughter among youth at the student-led Fields of Faith, a nationwide ministry event sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Sunday evening’s gathering was the second year the school’s FCA group hosted the event, said Tim Hill, area director.

The several hundred in attendance was about twice the size of last year’s gathering, Hill said. There is a similar event planned Oct. 14 in Roanoke at Northside High School, which event organizers said is expected to draw several thousand.

Fitzhugh, who speaks to young people across the country, urged local teenagers Sunday underneath Brookville’s stadium lights to make important life choices. He shared about his turbulent family upbringing and how choosing God’s plan at a young age “flipped the script” for him personally.

True champions are those “who have enough guts to go against the flow,” he said.

“You were not designed to live life without the designer,” he said. “My challenge today is that you make those tough decisions and you make them now.”

A native of Ohio, he played two years for the Broncos and suffered a shoulder injury. He said he learned NFL means “not for long” and reaching young people is a God-given “assignment.”

Fitzhugh serves as a national spokesman for the FCA’s ‘OneWay2Play-Drug Free’ program and recently spoke at a Fields of Faith event in Las Vegas.

He was 12 when he first embraced a faith lifestyle, he said. Not previously involved in drugs or alcoholism, he said God’s word “didn’t rescue me from those things — it kept me from those things.”

If not for God’s grace, he said, he could have been another “statistic athlete” who made poor life choices.

Several local students involved in sports also spoke of the importance of faith in their lives at Sunday’s gathering.

O’Shawn Bryant, a senior at Heritage High School who earlier this year suffered an injury that has kept him from playing, said he has maintained a positive outlook.

“Things could be worse,” he said. “The Lord has a different plan for me to fulfill my dreams.”

Mike Rocco, a Liberty Christian Academy senior who is verbally committed to play at the University of Louisville, said an injury this year also taught him how to be a “servant leader” on the sidelines. God taught him lessons he never would have learned if he weren’t hurt, Rocco said.

“Whenever something is going wrong, God does have a plan,” he said, “so be encouraged.”