FOCUS in the DR

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Ben Loughman, a baseball player at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, said he didn't want to let another amazing opportunity pass him by.

So when he was recently invited to travel to the Dominican Republic with a team of Catholic athletes and help lead a baseball camp for impoverished kids, he jumped at the opportunity.

“You only get so many chances to enjoy the culture of a foreign country and also make a difference by helping those living there that are less fortunate than yourself,” said Loughman, an outfielder for Benedictine's Ravens.

From Dec. 27 to Jan. 5, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) led a group of 10 men through the organization's Varsity Catholic division to Banica – a small town on the border of Dominican Republic and Haiti.

The team, many of them collegiate and minor league baseball players, set up a sports-based mission camp in conjunction with a mission parish run by the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia.

Loughman participated in the project run by FOCUS geared toward helping college athletes – who live in a world often beset by status and materialism – to use their talents in humble works of service.

“It can be very easy for college athletes to fall to the temptation that they have it all,” Thomas Wurtz, director of Varsity Catholic, explained to EWTN News.

He added that the mission experiences help students who strive to be rooted in Christ to “step out of their world and into a completely foreign environment.”

Although FOCUS has been running foreign mission trips for a number of years, Varsity Catholic launched a branch of FOCUS Missions called “Varsity Catholic Mission Camps” within this last year. 

“The thought here is to harness the great influence of sports all over the world,” Wurtz said. “We want to provide college athletes with an opportunity to use a sport they love to proclaim a faith they believe. Our goal is the serve Christ and His poor through the language and influence of sports.”

The mission experience for college athletes, he continued, “can be uncomfortable, overwhelming, purifying, and extremely grace-filled.”

And grace-filled it was.

Loughman said he was struck by the people of Banica, who “had so little in regard to possessions and wealth,”  but were “so much happier than people in the United States.” 

“You could see God in everything they did and all their actions,” Loughman said, adding that the locals invited the team “into their homes like we were family.”

Jeff Runyan, director of FOCUS Missions who helped lead the team, said in a Jan. 26 phone interview that the trip was a “phenomenal” and “notably transformational experience for the student athletes who were involved.”

“Exposing them to the realities of a third world country just helped them to really have a great encounter with the person of Christ.”

Wurtz agreed that the experience was invaluable for all involved, especially the college athletes.

“Seeing the joy and the excitement, as well as the struggles these young men go through on these trips is a great blessing and part of the growth. They were all touched by how people down there just seek to live, and worry so little about the fickle things of life that can often exhaust our energies here in the States.”

“The men all set up various goals once they got back to continue to allow God's grace to work in their lives. I am excited to see the fruit continue to develop in them.”

Wurtz cited the billions of dollars raked in annually by the sports industry in America, noting that the nation's love for sports is a “large piece of our culture.” He added that college athletes can be hugely influential and said that and reaching them “with the fullness of the Gospel message is a task we need to take seriously, for the sake of the athletes as well as the millions of young people they influence.”

He described the love the Dominican Republic children have for sports as “powerful.”

“We had a total of 50-70 boys come each day,” Wurtz continued. “The amazing thing is that many of these boys wouldn't have shown up if it wasn't for baseball.”

He said that every day, the team would challenge the boys to respect God, each other, baseball and to work hard.

“During the last day of camp, we prayed with the boys for the grace to make Jesus Christ number one in their lives and to always seek to glorify Him above all things.”

Wurtz said that the Dominican Republic has a “great love” for the Catholic faith and for the game of baseball, “America's sport.”

“They truly embrace living in the moment with a joy and inner peace that is inspiring. They put a great emphasis on relationships rather than efficiency, which can be challenging for us Americans,” Wurtz added. 

“In a lot of ways, they live more fully the human experience, even if they don' have much. They treated us like kings, which is a very humbling experience since they have so little yet give so much.”

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