Dallas Cowboys Player Barry Church: Thank you for having me here. It’s amazing, this is my first time doing a conference call so it’s pretty awesome. Thank you to everyone for being great leaders out there and great examples for other students, across the country. You guys are not just leaders for the groups around you, but definitely leading kids from all over the country.
Part of being a great motivational leader is taking advantage of the time you have, if it’s on the practice field with whatever you’re doing, or off the fields. Some of you guys are on spring break, or coming back from spring break and getting ready for your testing and all that good stuff. Even though the NFL season for me is over and it ended pretty quickly, we didn’t even make the playoffs and that kind of stunk, but I still have lots left to do as far as being healthy is concerned. We have to work out with our teammates every single day and see our nutritionist every day. She’s cooking healthy meals for us. But there are also fun ways to do things you don’t have to do too much to be crazy to be healthy. I like playing pickup basketball games with my teammates or playing in celebrity softball games. Those are probably my two favorite things to do. Or basically just jogging around the park with my dog and going swimming with my dog. I have a nice little Chocolate Lab called Cocoa and she’s pretty awesome. We like staying healthy together; my wife cooks me healthy meals. I don’t go out and eat unhealthy food, everything I do is just in preparation to get ready for the season and making sure that my body can perform at its highest, highest level. Being healthy keeps you strong and pretty much ready for anything. But enough about me, what do you guys want to ask?
Kelton, FL: What was your major in college and what college did you attend?
B. Church: My major was Broadcast Journalism. I was able to graduate in about 3 1/2 years. The college I went to is a smaller university called the University of Toledo. If I didn’t play football, I would probably work for FOX right now, just being an anchor or something like that. It was a pretty cool major.
Mitchell, NH: What do you do over summer vacation to stay healthy and active?
B. Church: If I’m not working out with my teammates, I hang out with my dog a lot. And go walking around the park or jogging with her a lot or we’ll jump in the pool and swim around. Also, as a team, we all get together as the Dallas Cowboys and separate our team into 12 different groups and we go to The Preston Church League. Our 12 groups get into a tournament style and we play basketball pickup games. Last year, we won the championship, but our team’s not that good this year, so we probably won’t win.
Derrick, NY: What is your favorite part of being a Fuel Up to Play 60 NFL Player Ambassador?
B. Church: Hoping that my message can reach even 2-3 kids at a time, I know that I’m doing my job out there. I don’t want them to have to learn the hard lesson that I did which was eating terribly and thinking that all I had to do was work out and I would be a successful person. But I ate terrible and ended up gaining a lot of weight and because of that weight I ended up getting hurt really bad and I wasn’t able to make the team almost and I just don’t want people to learn the way I did. I just want to hopefully reach them at an early age so that they can grow up to be very healthy adults.
Cat, VT: What’s your favorite way to exercise and do you also ask your family to exercise with you?
B. Church: Yes, I actually do. My favorite way to exercise would have to be running around with my dog because she can out-run me forever, so it gives me a chance to compete with her and try to catch up with her, but I never do – she’s super-fast. And as far as my family goes, I definitely ask my family to come with me every time, even if I know they can’t keep up with me or the dog, but I definitely ask them to come with me and exercise with me because I know that a part of being healthy is exercising, so they are definitely doing a better job of it now and I hope they continue to.
Sydney, NH: How do you stay motivated and keep others motivated during your time away from the field?
B. Church: I stay motivated just because I love the game of football and I love the competitiveness. I love being part of a brotherhood of men going out there to try and reach one goal and that’s winning the Super Bowl. I have yet to do that, and I’ve won one playoff game in my career, so that keeps me motivated just knowing that I have to get better each and every year to obtain that goal. The way to keep everyone around me motivated is that I am the defensive captain, with Sean Lee, and what other people do in their off season reflects on us, so I have to make sure that they are doing the right thing and come to camp in shape and very healthy or there will be consequences. Hopefully that will motivate them enough, but for me, it’s just making sure that I can get to that next level and win it.
Joyce, OR: Have you been in football your whole life?
B. Church: Pretty much, I started playing when I was about 13 years old and I wasn’t very good at all and I didn’t even start my first 3 years. The only time I started was my last year in high school, my senior year. I have been playing football my whole life but I didn’t get really good until after I left high school. So hopefully, whoever’s on this call should know you don’t have to be the best early, just keep grinding you’ll end up being as good as you prepared yourself.
Steve, WI: Of all the teammates you played with, who was the most influential and how?
B. Church: Out of everyone I played with, I would have to say Sean Lee. He’s our linebacker and I’ve known him since high school; he’s from the Pittsburgh area as well, so we’ve known each other for a long time. What makes him such a motivational person is that he’s come back from so much. He’s one of the hardest working guy I’ve ever been around and each year, he gets hurt. His rookie year, he tore his ACL. The year after that, he had a concussion. He’s never made it through a whole season, but he just kept grinding and kept getting at it, and now he’s one of the best linebackers in the NFL. He’s just a great dude and he motivates me everyday to be the best that I can be.
Brody, VA: What really inspires you to volunteer for things like Fuel Up to Play 60 and the Salvation Army and so forth?
B. Church: What motivated me to do that was basically to make sure that my message can get across to people and I feel that this is the best avenue, the best way for my message to get to kids and to young adults, so that when they get to my age, they can be as healthy as possible. Because like I said, you don’t want to take the bad route that I did and wait until it’s too late and know that your body can really only respond to what you put into it. That is definitely what motivated me. I just wanted to make sure that people that are younger than me can grow up as healthy as they can be and have their bodies perform to the highest level.
Abby, NH: Teamwork wise, what is the biggest challenge that your team has had to overcome?
B. Church: The biggest problem we had to overcome – there’s two of them. Injuries are big, and it’s hard to stop injuries because they can happen at any split second. But the thing we can stop the most that we’ve had trouble with is communication, especially on the defensive side of the ball. We haven’t been able to communicate if this guy is going to do this, or is this person going to do that. We just kind of go out and play on our own. Hopefully this year we will be able to go out and communicate as one and know what everyone is going to be doing and that will make our defense a lot better.
Courtney, WI: What was your favorite NFL team growing up?
B. Church: The Pittsburgh Steelers. I’m from Pittsburgh, so everybody in my whole family was Pittsburgh fans and they were pretty good back in the early 90s, so that was a big team to follow, but now I’m with the Dallas Cowboys and that’s the best team on earth right now.
Elise, CO: What advice to you have for kids trying to spread the word about why it’s important to be healthy?
B. Church: My advice would be to lead by example. For me, that’s what I would do. I’m not a big –“You gotta do this or you got to do that”. For me, I would just go out there and if people were asking, what should I do? I would tell them this is what I do to stay healthy and say this is what I do for exercises and then they look at you and see the results and see that you’re a healthy person and that you carry yourself well, hopefully they will follow in your footsteps. For me, I never want to make someone do something, but just tell them: this is the right thing to do and this is what I do and that’s just part of being a great leader.
Dylan, ID: If you had to pick another position, what would it be?
B. Church: I can’t play it very well, but I would love to be a quarterback. You are basically the leader of the team, the state of the whole team is in your hands and I would just love that pressure to go out there every day and be able to command the whole team and just have that on my shoulders – and however good I am is how good the team could be. To me, I love pressure and pressure makes diamonds and so the quarterback positions is one I would love to play, but there’s no way – I’m not that good.
Ani, NJ: What’s your favorite breakfast option?
B. Church: Oatmeal with a little bit of cinnamon and a side of bananas and sometimes oranges. And a humungous glass of chocolate milk – that’s my favorite by far, breakfast meal. Sometimes I’ll switch it up and I might have pancakes or waffles, but that’s once in a blue moon – like a cheat meal. But my favorite meal has to be oatmeal with cinnamon, bananas and chocolate milk for sure.
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