Southern Kentucky FCA hosts Impact Dinner featuring former University of Florida basketball player

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The Southern Kentucky chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes held its annual Impact Dinner at Hillvue Heights Church in Bowling Green, featuring a former University of Florida basketball player as a guest speaker.

“It’s the primary fundraiser that we do every year to support the ministry here in southern Kentucky. FCA has got such an amazing brand in Southern Kentucky, really throughout the country. We’re in the elementary schools, we’re in the middle schools, and we’re certainly at the high school level… and again working through coaches and athletes. But you don’t have to be an athlete to be involved with FCA. So we certainly allow or certainly invite and want anyone to participate who can,” chairman Todd Mason says.

That speaker is Patric Young, who played for the Gators between 2010 and 2014. He went undrafted and signed with the New Orleans Pelicans; however, he never played a game for the team. He came back to the NBA in the summer of 2015, signing with the Phoenix Suns before having stints in Europe.

In September 2021, he was hired by ESPN and is an analyst for the SEC Network. However, in the summer of 2022, he got into a serious car accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

Since then, he’s founded the PY4 foundation, and events like these give him a chance to spread his message of hope to those who may need it.

“My experience in my life of being at a high level, top level athlete, growing up in the church, striving to be the best I can, being humble through my career not going as long as I would have liked it to and then being faced with some really hard challenges in life has completely changed my view of everything… of how fragile life is. I must be here for a reason, and that reason can’t just be about me accumulating things and achieving status. There’s got to be more. This has got to be pointing to something bigger,” Young says.

He also says having something like FCA, a positive presence in students’ lives, is a great thing.

“No longer do I have to go out there and perform because I need a result, I get the opportunity to go out there with gratitude and give my best… and that is just so much freeing because, goodness, we’re in a place where mental health is more prevalent in terms of us caring for it, but I think not getting addressed in the way that it should… and FCA’s providing a way, a safe space for kids to have a refuge and figure it out,” Young says.

Mason agrees, especially since he’s hands-on with the students at home in their schools.

“To get this positive influence in their lives through their coaches and through their teachers and certainly from one another as they’re on teams and working together, it’s just truly amazing… and one of the things that’s really great is we do have huddles within the elementary schools. So they see that FCA brand, they hear it, they move to the middle school, it’s still there. They move to the high school, there it is again… and then when they go to college, so they know they have that community. They know they have that common faith and belief that Jesus is Lord,” he says.