Lions grapple with religion, sports

As sons, daughters, and students, we constantly feel like we’re being pulled in one hundred different directions. Everyone wants us to be something, and more often than we’d like, those visions of our future tend to conflict. Sometimes we try so hard to reconcile those conflicting images of who we are expected to be, with who we want to be.

For religious athletes, this conflict happens in Division I proportions. In the Mormon faith, there’s a social norm that young men will go on a mission for the church during college. It’s a two-year commitment to missionary work, service, and very little physical activity. These athletes suddenly become a recruiting liability, and understandably so—coaches have limited resources and time to spend on their athletes, and their jobs depend on getting athletes that they can count on to perform and win.

“It’s definitely something we need to think deeply about—as a coach, nobody wants anyone to take a two-year break—so a lot of it depends on what our needs are,” said Columbia wrestling head coach Brendan Buckley. “Sometimes it can influence how much we recruit that person, because we may need that weight class really bad and may not have people in that weight class waiting in the wings to step up.”

For Kevin Lester, a sophomore wrestler at Columbia and a Mormon, there was another layer of conflicting interests—he was a multi-sport athlete in high school, and was even recruited to Boise State to play football, but his dad was his high school wrestling coach.

“I started [wrestling] when I was eight, with summer leagues, and as I got into high school it got more serious and more competitive. With my dad there, I knew it was going to be something big in my life.”

Kevin was very lucky that through his athletic career there was often someone else to fight the first battle for him, to set a precedent so that he could make his own decisions and feel the freedom to follow his own path. In high school, that battle was fought by his brother. As a multi-sport athlete himself, he and their father had a conflictual relationship because their dad had expected that the older Lester would go into wrestling in college. He instead chose football. He played, and left midway through his college career to do his mission. “When my brother left and came back,” Kevin said, “he didn’t have the desire to come back and play.” Add another layer of complexity to the situation: what if Kevin came back from his mission and decided that wrestling didn’t have a place in his life anymore?

“I have other friends who wrestle at other schools, and their coaches said that if they leave, not to expect to come back,” he said. “I owed that loyalty to the coaches here.”
Fortunately, the coaching staff at Columbia is not inexperienced with Mormon wrestlers. Alum Dustin Tillman paved the way years earlier. Tillman went on his mission after his sophomore year at Columbia and came back after two years to face an ugly reality—he had lost a huge portion of the physical abilities that he’d worked so hard to gain during high school and college. Buckley talked about the realities of the transition from athlete to missionary to athlete: “It’s hard work on a mission. It’s not like they have a lot of free time. The hardest part [upon returning] is getting your timing down—not even the cardiovascular shape, but getting back into sync.”

Despite the drawbacks for the team chemistry and makeup of losing an athlete for two seasons, there was an upside: when both Tillman and Lester came back, they brought a maturity and focus to the team that the younger athletes didn’t have.

“I don’t know how freshmen look at me, but my friends who weren’t Mormon felt like Dustin was the ‘dad’ of the team,” Lester said. “He was on a whole different maturity level.”
Tillman’s leadership wasn’t temporary—even today, he is still actively involved with the program, helping student-athletes find jobs and internships. Lester, too, has been a mentor-like figure towards other athletes, including another Mormon athlete who needed guidance on how to talk to a coach about the decision to go on a mission.

Thanks to Tillman, Kevin had another precedent set for him. It was possible to come back from a mission and succeed athletically, but it was going to be hard. Really hard.
“I came back in August, and those first couple months were terrible. [I felt like] I almost died … All along, from the time I left, I knew that those three months were going to come, and those were going to be three months that I was going to hate. I worried, ‘Am I really cut out for this anymore?’”

Like Dustin before him, Kevin has worked relentlessly to get back in shape for his team. As the starting heavyweight, there’s a lot of pressure on him to perform at the same level he did in 2008. “In his first tournament this season he wrestled well, the second one not so well,” Buckley said. “He’s got to get used to it.”

At some point, after everyone else has communicated to you their expectations of your life, you have to choose who you want to be. Lester’s story shows that it’s not easy, but dedication and putting in the hours are what enable anybody to be, as Spike Lee might say, “doin’ work.”