By Chris Faulkner
Beacon/DMC News
John Flaherty was a high school freshman football player in Wheaton, Ill., when he went to his first Fellowship of Christian Athletes Huddle.
Later, he and some college football teammates started a Huddle at Luther College in Decorah.
But it wasn’t until 2008, after he had been teaching and coaching at Burlington High School for 18 years, that Flaherty revived the school’s Huddle and became active as a volunteer with the international organization.
He first started with a pregame chapel at The Rock House.
For the next few years, “It was pretty slim pickings,” Flaherty said.
But in 2012, he moved the Huddles to the school and met before the day’s classes started.
The grandchildren of the late Tom Elmore, a longtime coach and athletic director at BHS, wanted to get involved.
Elmore’s wife, Geri, made cookies for the group. “If you’ve ever had a Grandma Geri cookie, you know what I’m talking about,” Flaherty said.
“We just have grown from there.”
Five years ago, he retired from teaching and coaching, and now he’s an area representative, helping guide adult volunteer leaders in Huddles throughout nine southeast Iowa counties.
FCA was founded in 1954 and serves high schools and colleges, usually meeting at the school to talk about faith and Christianity and how it relates to a student’s athletic endeavors. But you don’t have to be an athlete or even a Christian to take part, and there are no memberships. “You just show up,” Flaherty said.
How it Started
Flaherty wasn’t even a Christian when he went to his first Huddle at the home of a high school football coach.
He went because his older brother, David, had gone to an FCA camp in Colorado. “He loved it,” Flaherty said.
At the coach’s meeting, “He brought out the Bible, and asked, ‘What do you guys want to talk about?’”
“I had no clue,” he said.
“I grew up in an American Christian family,” Flaherty said. “We went to church, got involved in all the offices; we did all those things. But after church, we pretty much did whatever we wanted to.”
In junior high school, “I had a friend who started talking about a relationship with Jesus,” Flaherty said, “that God is who He says He is. He’s a real being, and He wants to have a real relationship with us.
“It took about three years, but in the middle of my freshman year, I just felt God calling me to say, ‘ This is the time.
“On Jan. 13, 1977, I surrendered my life to Christ.”
Flaherty helped start a Huddle at Luther College, and then it was back to the Chicago area to teach.
Burlington wins over Chicago.
There, Flaherty met his future wife, Kelly, who moved to Wheaton, where her parents were living at the time.
They both taught special education classes in the suburbs for the first three years of their marriage.
But Kelly was originally from Winfield.
“She hated Chicago,” Flaherty said. He wasn’t keen on moving to southeast Iowa, but in 1990, they packed up and moved to Burlington.
Flaherty started his teaching career with higher-functioning special needs students.
Mike Richart, the wrestling coach at the time, invited him to an FCA Huddle at The Rock House. But the Huddle folded a year later.
Children came along, and Flaherty got busy raising a family of five children.
Flaherty, who had been an assistant coach for many years, was chosen for the head coaching job in 2005.
The Grayhounds went 0-9 in their first season.
“I go, ‘What am I missing?’ I was missing the one component that had been a part of my life ever since (he became a Christian),” Flaherty said.
So he started a pre-game chapel, but only his sons, Jack and Joe, and Ben Cleveland showed up.
Soon, his daughter, Keegan, asked him, “What about the girls? Girls don’t get anything.”
That’s what prompted the official formation of an FCA Huddle.
When COVID restrictions on gatherings were lifted six years ago, “We filled up camp within two weeks of opening registration,” Flaherty said. “Kids were craving to make connections.”
They were also craving a spiritual connection, he said.
“Kids, as much as I like to say they’re not smart, they’re a lot smarter than you think,” Flaherty said. “They’re just craving so many answers.”
For the older generation, “We chased things earlier in life, because we didn’t have the technology,” he said. “They have the technology,so they get exposed to that earlier, and it seems like by the time they get to middle school, they’re like, ‘This is not what I thought it was going to be.’
“There’s a bigger desire earlier for spiritual knowledge and truth,” Flaherty said.
The Next Step
Longtime KWQC sportscaster Dan Pearson, from the Quad Cities, had left his TV career and got involved with FCA through his region.
“He came down to some pre-season stuff and interviews, and he goes, ‘You know what? You would be a natural,” Flaherty said of the idea of the leader of the Huddle becoming an area representative.
But Flaherty told Pearson that he loved teaching and coaching too much to get involved at a higher level.
In 2014, when Flaherty stepped down from high school coaching, “He kind of came at me a little harder. ‘This would be a great thing for you to do,” Flaherty said of the exchange.
But Flaherty had switched to coaching middle school football.
Finally, in 2021, Flaherty took the plunge. He retired from teaching and decided, “Let’s go for it.”
Flaherty said there are 800 students, and about 25 percent show up weekly. At the different schools around here, about 10-50 students show up each week.
There are FCA Huddles in every school in the area, except for New London and Holy Trinity Catholic. Flaherty said New London is trying to recruit adult volunteers, and he hasn’t connected with Holy Trinity yet.
Needs to Raise Funds
Because it’s a faith-based organization, “I have to raise my funds for the things we do and spend money on.
“God’s been really good to show me just to be faithful to share the story of what’s going on with FCA, and we’ll find financial partners.
“It just happened two weeks ago. A church called and said, ‘We want to go ahead and be a financial partner with you.”
From a personnel perspective, “We just need people who would be willing to take over their school and be a Huddle coach,” Flaherty said. “My job as a rep is to walk with them and to help them prepare. Then to cut them loose like Jesus did with his disciples.”