From staff writer Emily Belz: Coming fresh off the Super Bowl, it may not feel like a time to talk about baseball, but the college baseball season starts this week. Today we have a piece I reported from Dallas about a college team that has found surprising success. It wasn’t such a tough assignment; I love baseball. 

Dallas Baptist University baseball coach Dan Heefner told me about how baseball parallels real life: The high number of games makes it an everyday sport, where most players experience regular failure (even the best players only get a hit about a third of the time). Knowing that, he sees an opportunity for his players to learn deeper life lessons as they play.

Heefner regularly shares with his team one idea sparked by a Tim Keller sermon: that there are two forms of pride, superior (I’m better than you) and inferior. Inferior pride—thinking, I’m the worst—is also self-consumed. One of Heefner’s player might hit a slump and feel that he won’t ever get another hit, and become obsessed with his failure. Heefner said that is inferior pride. The big lesson, then, is developing a habit of thinking about others. We can think about others “when we’re going good and when we’re going bad,” Heefner told me.