I Was Made for Family

By Dalon Parker

Head Coach, Men’s Soccer 

In soccer, eleven athletes with a ball have to learn to come together as a team in order to play the game with any hope of success. I would say the same is true for life off the field as well. When boys and girls are figuring out how to fight the battle of becoming young men and women in the world, they need people to come alongside them to give direction, encouragement, and a sense of belonging. They need a team. They need a family. My purpose as a coach is to instruct my players to come together to play a sport. My purpose as Dalon Parker, however, is deeper than that.

I was raised as an only child in a single-parent household on the south side of Dallas, and my days consisted mainly of trying to stay out of trouble, playing basketball and soccer, and cooking meals for my mom and me when she couldn’t get home from work in time. It was challenging at times, but, from my point of view, it was awesome. The way I was raised taught me everything that I know about working hard and the importance of community.

My mom was incredible. While I was growing up, she worked so hard to give me what I needed and even what I wanted, and we did it together. From washing clothes to cooking meals to getting me through school, we were mom and son—Team Parker—all the way. But we didn’t do it alone; my mom traveled a lot for work when I was younger, so, in order to raise me, we leaned on our family. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother who taught me the “old way of doing things,” as she would say. I learned how to farm, raise pigs, and work hard. My aunt would pick me up from school, and I knew that if I got in trouble at school, I was going to get in trouble with my aunt and my mom. I also had a close-knit group of friends who would take me into their families, and their dads became mentors to me. I was raised by a community: my mom, my grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and no dad, but I had other “dads” that I could call my own. As the saying goes, “It takes a village.”

Aside from my mom, my biggest role model was Troy Williams my high school sports coach. I transferred to Trinity Christian High School on a scholarship to play soccer, basketball, and football, which is how I met Coach Williams; he was one of the first guys in the building that I met, and we just hit it off. Coach Williams was not only the football coach and the basketball coach, but he was also the principal of the school. He obviously knew his stuff and was a great coach, but he was also an incredibly supportive person. He became a huge mentor for me, and I still talk to him to this day.

Coach Williams and his wife didn’t have any kids of their own, so we were their kids. If we needed something, he was only a phone call away. Coming from a single-parent household with no father, that was huge for me. He was someone I could look up to, and he supported me through any struggle I was having; when I went through a slump or had girlfriend problems or school was getting hard in my junior year and I was just trying to stay afloat, he was always there. He sacrificed for me and my teammates the way any father would. It felt like he would do anything for us. He called us his family, and he established a family environment for us. My teammates, managers, and water boys became my brothers and sisters. They were always there to ask if I needed a ride or if I ate that day, they would ask me about my mom—"Is she out of town this week?”, “Is she feeling low?”, “Do you guys need any help?”, etc.

My relationship with my coach and my team was more than just an interest in whether or not I could put a basketball in the hoop or a soccer ball in the goal. They cared for me. When I would stray from the straight and narrow, Coach Williams was always there to pull me back and say, "Nope. We're going to stay on this path and get ready for what's next after high school." He watched out for me when I couldn’t watch out for myself. He was a father figure and a mentor when I didn’t have one, and he showed me what kind of man I wanted to be—the kind of coach that I strive to be today.

When the time came, I attended Dallas Christian College on a scholarship to play both soccer and basketball. I was one of those lucky guys who not only played two sports, but I also was a pre-med major. It was tough. I had a busy schedule with practice, games, and studying, and it was hard in other ways as well. One of the most difficult things about being a college athlete was working against people’s assumptions and perceptions about who I was. It always seemed to surprise people to learn that I wasn’t just a jock, but that I was actually pretty smart as well with hopes for a future that didn’t necessarily entail sports.

My college ball experience was pretty different from my high school experience. For the most part, my coaches just wanted me to come and play, and when the season was over our relationship was over, too. Coming from such a family-oriented team in high school, it was weird to be four or five hours away from home and not really having anyone to talk to. It left me feeling used; like my only value was in my sport, so I learned how to bring people together. With a glaring lack of family values on my teams, I chose to step up to the plate and create them.

I had always been a natural-born leader, and by my XX year, I was serving as the captain of the soccer team. Learning how to lead twenty-five men was hard, especially when they were all watching me learn. It came back to the issue of perception; everyone was always paying attention to the person I was versus who I claimed to be both on and off the field. My life had to be a sacrifice because others were looking to me for direction. I wasn’t just a part of the family anymore; I was the one creating it. I had to learn that it wasn’t about me anymore, it was about everyone else and I had to set aside my ego and come last. It was a difficult lesson to learn as a young man, but God put me in that place to teach me just what it looks like to create a family.

Throughout my college career, I was on bad teams that struggled through seasons because we just couldn’t get along. I was also on great teams where we weren't as talented, but we got along well and, as a result, we experienced a lot of success and accomplished our goals. The most important factor was never talent; it was unity. It was in college that I coined my life motto: God first, others second, me third. If unity was the goal, I had to live that out.

“I work hard to structure family belonging into my teams. Creating a community off the field fosters a better community on the field.”

- Dalon Parker

After college, I did a variety of things. I graduated in 2010 and I played for the Texas Legends in the NBA Developmental League. I got married to my wife, Sarah, in 2009 and we had our son, Elijah in 2015. I owned and ran the North Texas Hoopstars youth basketball program; I coached the varsity program at The Highlands School in Irving, Texas; I coached boys’ and girls’ youth soccer clubs; I directed a winter training program for area youth, and served as the Durango Youth Soccer Association Board Vice President. By 2013, I was serving as the coach of the boys' and girls' soccer programs at Durango High School. My whole career up to that point felt like a really long internship of just learning what kind of man, coach, husband, and father I was going to be.

 In 2017, an old friend named Tim Bieri came to Durango to talk to me about taking over the soccer program at the small Christian university where he worked called Multnomah University. He was offering me an opportunity to do something with youth that was next level for me. I had been working with high school, middle school, and even elementary kids for a while, but this presented the opportunity to move up and have an impact on people’s lives at a different stage of development: college.

Tim planted a seed that day, and after he left, Sarah and I began to water it with prayer and conversations with mentors and pastors, just trying to figure out what was the next step in my life. I began to ask myself hard questions. What did I want to do? Did I want to make the jump to college kids? Was the door closing on my time at Durango? I had been at Durango for three years, and I was very successful there. I felt like God had taken me there to be a light and to grow as a man, but the more I prayed about it, it felt like maybe I was done growing and it was time to move on. The internship was ending.

I’m not going to lie, there was some uneasiness about that idea. It seemed a little crazy, but then I thought back on how I got the job at Durango in the first place: three years prior, my wife, son, and I had packed up, sold everything, drove seventeen hours, and arrived in Durango with no job and no place to stay. At the time, we thought it was crazy, but God was like, "You’ve got to go," so we went. Now, it looked like it might be time to do that again, so, out of faith, we took the leap. I accepted Tim’s offer, we packed up, sold everything we could, and this time we didn't drive; we flew out to Portland and we began to build our team.

Today, I have been working at Multnomah for almost three years and I have been coaching for almost a decade. I bring everything that I learned from my mom, my family, my community, Coach Williams, my college teams, and all of my coaching experience to my work here at Multnomah. My mom and my extended family taught me to work hard and that, in order to raise a man, it takes a village. Coach Williams taught me to be a man and a coach worth looking up to; one who can build a family support system and can make a group of athletes more than just a group of athletes. After watching my college coaches, I learned about the kind of coach I never wanted to be; I would never be the coach that brings kids in and makes them feel used. Instead, I would make them feel like they belonged. And being the captain of college teams showed me the importance of unity. God first, others second, me third. All these things come together and make the coach that I am today.

The pillar of our program here is family. We bring college athletes in from all over the country, some of them from other continents, and we try to make them feel as comfortable, as at home, and as family-oriented as we possibly can. My wife, the assistant coaches, and I work to create a culture of belonging. We emphasize belonging because we believe that if a young man on my team feels comfortable and safe, then he will play that way on the field and will act that way off the field and in the classroom. We want each guy to be able to say, "This is my group. This is my place. This is where I belong."

For us, family starts with having just regular meals every Thursday at my house. My wife and I cook dinner and we invite the guys over and we watch soccer or football games; we talk about tennis matches; we have conversations about psychology, theology, or math. We spend a lot of time together off the field. We create an environment that allows them to grow together. Once they feel like they've grown together, then they feel like they belong. Once they feel like they belong, it's pretty hard to get them to be quiet after that point. Now, this group of guys who didn’t know each other and weren’t very vocal initially, they just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk all the time. That’s a sign that they're comfortable and they found someone that they have something in common with.

These kinds of relationships come with all the positives and negatives of family. We fight sometimes, but we teach the team how to continue to strive through those arguments and work together. They learn to overcome differences and see commonalities. They learn to appreciate where another teammate might be coming from. They learn about helping the next man up. I ask them, “Are you going to point one finger down the guy that makes a mistake, or are you going to put five out so you can help him up?”

Part of belonging is understanding that they're not alone. They may have grown up in different countries or just different parts of the same country, but through spending time together, they learn that they’re all going through the same problems and can experience the same joys. Anytime one of them asks me, "Am I the only one going through this?" I encourage them to ask that question out loud because I know that there are likely four or five other guys going through the same thing. We try to help them see that. We try to help them understand that, no matter what they're going through, we're always here. Once they get that sense, they get very comfortable and then they feel like they have permission to be very happy or very sad; they can go through ups and downs, peaks and valleys, but they realize we're here for them no matter what.

I work hard to structure family belonging into my teams. Creating a community off the field fosters a better community on the field. A young man who feels safe, supported, and like he belongs is far more likely to succeed than someone who doesn’t have that. I consider it my job as their coach to look out for my players when they can't look out for themselves; to point them in the right direction when they stray from the path; to encourage them to lean on each other. I know how much I needed that when I was their age, and I was fortunate to have people in my life like that. I get to pay that forward every day with the young men on my team.

On the road to discovering what I was made to do, I've battled with God about why I'm here and whether or not this is the right place for me. “Am I doing what You want me to do? Why did You bring me all the way out to Portland to do this? I was doing just fine where I was.” When I look to the Bible, I find that seems to be the ongoing tale for pretty much all of the disciples: they were comfortable doing what they were doing and then God uprooted everything. Then they had to go in a certain direction, and they didn’t know much about that way at all. I’ve felt the same. I wrestled with God when I had to sell all my belongings, move, and start over from scratch. I struggled when I had to adjust my coaching knowledge, that I worked so hard to develop—I wasn’t working with high schoolers, middle schoolers, and elementary kids anymore. I had to come here and learn a whole new way of doing things. And it tested me. But one message that God has given me over and over again is to have faith. I need to be faithful, patient, kind, and understanding, because if I’m not, then I know I would never be able to get these young men to follow my lead and, ultimately, I wouldn’t be able to prepare them for what God wants for them.

I was made for more than just coaching. I was made to create a safe space for young people to discover who they are and tap into their own potential. I have the opportunity to shape young minds into great minds. Hopefully, we win some soccer games along the way, but over time, I’ve realized that I was made to use coaching as a bridge to accomplish what matters most. I use coaching to plant seeds in everybody that I meet to help them understand that they belong, that they have a family, and that they're greater than what they see in themselves. That's what I was made for.