Tomas Bascon was born in La Paz, Bolivia — ten thousand feet up, the altitude the Bolivian national team weaponizes against visiting opponents. His grandfather played on that same national team, won Bolivia's only Copa América, became the first South American to play for Bayern Munich, and later built a youth academy named after himself specifically so Tomas would have somewhere to train without the club fees that price most kids out.

That part of the story sounds like a fairy tale. What comes next is the real one.

At sixteen, Tomas earned a scholarship to a Barcelona-area academy — dorms, tuition, everything covered, on the strength of a single standout tournament. A year later he was one signature away from a contract with a top-tier Spanish youth side, until his own age worked against him: too young to sign as an international, one month short of turning eighteen before the season locked. The door closed. He went home to Bolivia instead, tried out for Bolívar — the club his grandfather is an icon at — and waited weeks for a contract that never came. The rival club signed him within six days.

Then COVID hit. The league stopped paying players for months at a time. His mother, a college professor, was diagnosed with stage four cancer. His father had disappeared from his life years earlier. And Tomas — the family's only real income source — realized professional soccer outside Europe's top leagues isn't a career, it's a gamble with no floor.

His mother's answer was the same thing she'd said his whole life: go to school. So he did, at night, after full training days, just to make her happy. It changed the direction of his entire life.

That decision eventually routed him — through a mid-COVID recruiting scramble with almost no full-ride offers on the table — to Lincoln Trail College, a junior college surrounded by cornfields in Robinson, Illinois. That's where he met Joe, who was his RA. It's also where Tomas made a calculated decision that would define the next four years: soccer wasn't going to be his path to stability. His GPA was. He graduated a 4.0.

That GPA carried more financial weight than his soccer ever did — a fact he learned firsthand working in admissions and watching the dollar gap between a 3.8 and a 4.0. It landed him at MACU in Oklahoma City, where his first year fell apart almost immediately: a broken clavicle, a coach who didn't want him on the roster, a hamstring he tore twice. In the middle of that, with no family nearby and every decision resting on him alone, he built something he'd never actually had before — a real, direct relationship with God, not just the version he'd grown up with. And then a transfer crisis threatened to take it away: a $13,000 gap between what he could pay and what he had, one month before the season. He decided to stay anyway, without knowing how. The money came. So did an RA position. That year became the best of his life — Leadership and Legacy Award, Student Worker of the Year, more soccer minutes than he'd had in years.

Even after graduating, the story kept testing him — a masters program chosen for visa purposes, a GA position that vanished into a month of silence, a lower-paying job accepted out of necessity right before a better one finally surfaced.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Tomas landed on the line that became this episode's title: it's easy to believe in God. It's hard to walk with Him.

🎧 Full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube — link in bio.

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One of the most entertaining and honest conversations this podcast has had — and it ran over two hours for a reason. 🙏⚽🏃

In this episode we cover:

😤 Getting cut from his own JV soccer team as a freshman — and full on breaking down in front of his friends
🏃 The redemption arc that followed — earning a varsity cross country letter as a freshman, states, the Penn Relays, and eventually making JV soccer under the SAME coach who had cut him
✈️ A sudden move to Jacksonville, Florida right as he was primed to finally make varsity
⚓ A near-miss with the Naval Academy and a congressional nomination that didn't pan out
🙏 The phone call from Coach Logan Davis that changed everything — the first coach who ever told him to pray about a decision
🏫 EFY at SVU as a teenager, sleeping in the exact dorm room he'd later work in as staff
🩹 A stress fracture, hours on a bike machine, and seriously considering leaving SVU
🥍 Getting "hallway recruited" into lacrosse and playing all four years in one of the toughest D3 conferences in the country
⛪ Balancing faith and club soccer in a brutally competitive Maryland market
🔥 The full, unedited gasoline and campfire story
🏠 How Joe ended up in Utah, a ward with Danny Ainge and Taysom Hill, and reuniting with one of his closest SVU friends who moved to Utah just weeks later

This one has it all — heartbreak, redemption, faith, and some of the funniest stories we've had on this show.

📲 Drop a comment — what's your own athletic redemption arc? 👇
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music — link in bio
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Two of my closest friends from SVU finally sat down for a full episode — and this conversation went absolutely everywhere in the best way possible.

Austin and LaRee Wood grew up on opposite sides of the country with completely different relationships to their faith and their sport. LaRee grew up in Wilcox, Arizona, a tiny farming town where Sunday sports simply didn't happen — the community norm made balancing faith and athletics almost effortless until high school scheduling conflicts forced her to choose between dance and volleyball. She chose volleyball, discovered she loved it, and ended up being recruited by a first-year SVU coach she trusted from the very first conversation.

Austin's story looks completely different. Growing up in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, he and his sister were often the only members of the Church in their entire school. Basketball consumed his life from seventh grade — three teams at once, tournaments every weekend, showing up to Sunday church in his practice gear because there was no time to change. He was rejected from a Christian college literally overnight because of his LDS faith, and eventually found his way to SVU through his grandfather's suggestion and a persistent coach who wouldn't stop reaching out.

We cover their unlikely meet-cute — a Wendy's four-for-four IOU that turned into a friendship, a Walmart grocery run that became hours of parked-car conversation, and a teammate who called out their obvious chemistry in the middle of a school lunch before either of them had said a word about it.

And then the episode goes deep on entrepreneurship. Austin's path from door-to-door pest control sales to solar to founding Dazzl, a permanent lighting company, with his brother-in-law — including a year they profited zero dollars despite grinding around the clock, and the identity crisis that eventually led to a completely different way of building a business and a life.

This episode also gets genuinely personal — how they greet their kids, how they've learned to make small moments intentional, and their honest, differing takes on what balance actually means when you're building something big.

New episodes every week | Faith. Family. Sports.
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