Overview of Men's Soccer

The Taylor University Men’s Soccer Program has one mission:

To develop tough-minded Christ-like individuals intent on furthering God's Kingdom.

We have two strategies for achieving this end.  The first is to be excellent in all we do.  The second is to assist our athletes in the assimilation of available lessons from the pursuit to be excellent into their lives.  We believe that achieving these two aims will result in a team that demonstrates character and wins consistently.   

Excellence

We believe excellence is selfless.  We believe excellence is consistently performing at the optimal level.  We believe excellence is always being prepared.  We believe excellence is the ability to submissively carry out what is asked of you even if, and especially when, it is self-sacrificing.  We believe excellence is the deliberate and effective execution of small but necessary tasks in the pursuit of a common goal.  We believe excellence is training hard and intelligently in order to achieve maximum potential, even if and especially when it is uncomfortable.  We believe excellence is hard work completed when no one is watching and when no glory is forthcoming.  We believe excellence to be the consistent overcoming of obstacles.  We believe excellence can be achieved in a unique way by having another obstruct your route to success (i.e. competition).  We believe excellence means our souls control our flesh, not the other way around.  We believe being excellent glorifies God.

Character

As a program, we do a disservice to our athletes by only evaluating their spiritual growth based upon the implementation of the traditional spiritual disciplines.  While the implementation of these is crucial to spiritual growth, we must also push them to the brink of their physical, emotional, and intellectual limits in the pursuit of excellence.  In doing so, we flesh out the lessons taught in Scripture.  As a result, our athletes assimilate virtues such as discipline, commitment, selflessness, teamwork, dedication, perseverance, sacrifice, determination, mental toughness, and submission…..all the virtues Jesus demonstrated on the way to His victory over death.

Through doing what it takes to be excellent, our athletes have available to them valuable lessons that they can assimilate into their lives.  In this context, our program’s aim is to make relevant the lessons learned through the struggle to be excellent and to connect them to Biblical truth.  We do this in order to produce college graduates who are able to overcome adversity and who will be faithful employees, tireless workers, strong leaders, good husbands, and dedicated fathers.  In other words, by learning and applying these lessons, our athletes become tough-minded Christ-like individuals.  We measure the effectiveness of this goal by the quality of our graduates’ lives and the impact they have on the world around them. 

Winning

The natural result of a team that is successful in it’s pursuit of excellence and of a team that successfully assimilates the lessons this pursuit affords them is a team that wins consistently.  We believe winning to be an objective measurement of excellence in the game of soccer.   It is possible to lose while achieving excellence as we have described it, but more often than not, excellence will produce victories. In that light, the Taylor University Men’s Soccer Program believes winning to be of extreme importance because in measuring our victories, we measure our excellence.