Basketball Coach Lorenzo Romar: Jesus Christ 'Scored All the Points for Me'

(Gospel Light Minute #148)

He is the current head men's basketball coach at the University of Washington. He also played basketball for the University of Washington from 1978 to 1980. After college, he was drafted by the Golden State Warriors and spent five years in the NBA. He was the assistant coach at UCLA from 1992–1996, head coach at Pepperdine University from 1996–1999, and then head coach at St. Louis from 1999–2002. He is often credited for turning around the faltering state of the University of Washington basketball program. He is known by his fellow coaches as one of the top basketball recruiters in the country. In March 2006, he was given the prestigious Coach Wooden "Keys to Life" award for outstanding character. In March 2009, he was named coach of the year by the Pac 10 conference for leading the Huskies to their first outright conference title since 1953. He and his wife, Leona, founded the Lorenzo Romar Foundation to provide educational assistance for disadvantaged youth as well as support other charitable causes.

In an interview with CBN, he said of his faith and salvation experience, "Getting closer to God was like a sporting event. The one with the most points wins. The more good deeds I could do, the more they could add up and I could score points with God. And that’s just kind of how I saw it. I believed the Bible was the Word of God so I read through it. It was great until I realized that, as I kept reading, points don’t get you to heaven. The points don’t give you a relationship with God, that there weren’t enough points that you could score, as a human down here, because God’s standard was above, it was out of reach. He made a way for it to work..."

His name is Lorenzo Romar.