Grace and Mercy!

"Ashley gets a second and third chance"

I’d like to applaud Louisville Head Coach Charlie Strong for being a man of integrity and keeping his word to his players and their families. People tend to forget that when a coach recruit’s a kid to come play for him they make a lot of promises. The most important of those is when he tells the kid’s family that he’ll take care of their child while they‘re under his care.

Well…this week Strong did just that when he suspended junior cornerback Darius Ashley because of his second DUI in six months. Now you might say that the kid is responsible for himself and that Coach Strong had every right to just kick him off of the team and keep it moving. In many regards you may be right.

However, the key word here is kid! Therefore, because he is a child and because Strong promised his family that he would take care of him, he has an obligation to the family to do just that. A head coach is like a father on campus and more often than not he’s the only father that many of these guys will ever have.
You wouldn’t just throw your own kid out on the street would you? So why would you expect him to just dismiss the kid without trying to get him help.


“He may not ever run down that field and make another tackle; he may not make another interception on this football field,” Strong said at a Friday news conference. “But our major concern right now is to help him tackle what he is fighting right now, and that's the issue of alcoholism.”

“Any time you talk about do you dismiss a young man,” Strong said, “when you see what has happened, two within seven months, you dismiss him from the team — What does he become? Just another statistic in society? So what did we accomplish and how did we help him? You have to help people. Here’s a young man who has never been an issue on our team until those two issues that he had, which are two serious issues, but he’s a young man, he went to class, never had a class issue with him, did all the right things. … We have to help young people.”

Thank God for coaches like Charlie Strong because most people wouldn’t have thought twice about getting rid of the kid after the first incident. By suspending Ashley, he still keeps his scholarship and can therefore go to class and they can keep him active in the program whether he plays or not.

We serve a God of second chances. What would many of us have become if he’d thrown us to the wolves every time we made a mistake? To be quite honest with you many of us are still making mistakes and he hasn’t given up on us yet. Thank God for Grace and Mercy!

I look forward to seeing this kid redeem himself and going on to become a productive man with a degree helping some young knuckle head that has found himself in the same situation!

Holla At Ya Boy!
Jay Graves
Twitter:@jaygravesreport