Content note: this episode includes an honest conversation about suicide and mental health. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text 988 in the U.S. You can also watch on YouTube, where the chapters show where that conversation starts.

Jay lived with my family in Arizona in 2023. He was my wife's student first, and then he was part of our daily life, playing guitar and singing with our kids on the couch. Marley was tiny back then and still remembers him. When he reached out about being on the show, I was honored.

Jay is 21 and coaches wrestling in Flagstaff, right next to the Navajo Nation. He opens with something he's seen up close: Native athletes are rarely recruited. A study he found counted only 2,364 Native athletes out of more than 550,000 in the NCAA in 2024-25. He tells me about teams that drive two and a half hours to a tournament and sleep in his gym because they can't afford a hotel, and about a wrestler who became the first from Flagstaff to sign in three to five years.

Then we go deeper. Jay came through the foster and adoption system, and he found a safe place in school, in a teacher who asked if he had somewhere to go that night, and in a wrestling team that knelt in prayer for his adoptive mom when she was in the hospital. He explains why he says he's not religious but is still a person of faith, what heaven on earth versus hell on earth means to him, and how church was once used as a punishment.

We talk about mental health honestly, including the loss of his father to suicide, the people he's lost, what helped him keep going, and why there should be no stigma around any of it. We also get into NIL, the transfer portal, accountability, and learning how to be happy with nothing.

His closing advice: your mind is your greatest tool and also your sharpest sword. People are always more capable than they believe. And there are always going to be better days.

Thank you to our sponsors, Steadfast and Good Candy. Want to be a guest? The interest form is linked on our Instagram page.

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I knew Brock from his Instagram, Brock's Kit Closet, long before I knew his story. Then he reached out about being on the show, we connected the same day, and our Wi-Fi went out at home right before we recorded. So this one came together at the golf simulator where I work. Short notice, no prep, and it turned into one of my favorite conversations so far.

Brock grew up in Syracuse, Utah, the youngest of six in a family where missions were simply what you did. He played one year of soccer in first grade, hated every minute of it, and quit. The cleats were uncomfortable, the shin guards hurt, and as a defender he felt like he was doing nothing. Funny how life turns out.

What changed it was his mission in Switzerland and Germany. An investigator's eight-year-old son was unbelievably good at futsal, and Brock watched him score game after game without understanding anything about the sport. Then came a sport night in Basel playing soccer with young single adults and nonmembers, and the 2010 World Cup watched with members and investigators under his mission president's rules. That little boy now plays professionally in Europe.

We also talk about the prompting he felt at a family friend's house in Switzerland ("you're going to serve here") and the mission call that came a year later. We talk about building his testimony line upon line, and what it was like to go from the Utah bubble to branches where members drive two hours to church and give a talk every other week because only ten people show up.

Then the career part. A 4.0 at Weber State to get into BYU, a German degree, an advisor who asked why he only ever talked about sports, and a semester in Vienna that turned into an internship with the Austrian national baseball team. That same study abroad led him to the ward where he met his wife. Now he works game days at Real Salt Lake and the Royals, and he spent three and a half years as a club admin for high-level academy teams. He's also a friend of Luukas from our earlier episode, which is how Saints in Soccer came up.

Plus: roughly 300 soccer kits, a surprising amount of Utah soccer history, and a simple piece of advice to close.

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September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and one part of this conversation with Luukas Ojala felt worth centering because of it.

Luukas served part of his mission in Colorado, split between a small town he loved and a stretch in Denver that was genuinely hard on him — real depression, tied to circumstances he doesn't go into detail about, that got serious enough he sat down with his mission president and his mission's mental health professional. Together they made the decision to transition him into service missionary work for the remainder of his time, rather than have him push through in a way that wasn't sustainable.

He's honest that the transition itself wasn't easy. He came home to take care of some medical appointments and felt, in that stretch, like he'd failed himself and let down the people he was serving for — even though that wasn't true at all. But what followed became some of the most meaningful work of his life: the Bishop's storehouse, the Portland Temple, a Catholic food bank, the Salvation Army, and coaching a group of twelve-year-olds in a stake soccer league with an aggressive tactical philosophy that produced 33 goals in four games.

The rest of the episode covers a lot of ground beyond that — his family's remarkable multi-generational conversion story in Finland, a formative loss on his high school swim team, his career in professional soccer administration, which he describes as his personal ministry, and Saints and Soccer, the global community he co-founded with Addison Walters connecting Latter-day Saints across professional soccer.

But the through-line worth sitting with this month is simple: asking for real help, from people actually equipped to give it, didn't derail his mission. It's what allowed the rest of it to happen.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text.

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