May 17th, 2025, 5am MDT
Brigham Young University announced this week the hiring of a new athletics director on Tuesday, May 13th. Brian Santiago took over Tom Holmeau, who announced his retirement on February 11th three months ago.
Shortly after Holmo announced he was moving on from BYU, I met him and talked about his experiences in college and the growth of his testimony, which he was at the helm of athletics for the school. In the questions he answered in that interview, I asked what Holmoh had learned on his journey.
“I’m still here, so I found joy on my journey,” he said. “But now, like Kevin Young, I really believe he’s talking about ‘laminated victory’. …I’ve seen stacks and have seen them fall.
He’s far from being a college basketball coach or athletic director at a major university, so he doesn’t have the chance to accumulate your own victories, just as Holmoe and Young describe it.
But one of my 12-year-old daughters started playing basketball for the first time this spring. She wants to accumulate some wins. Her team has a way to go before it can. As a new team with many players who have never played organized basketball, they are struggling to accumulate points. Sometimes they struggle to stack passes. And sometimes they have a hard time stacking up dribbling.
The team’s coaches are patient, but they’re solid with his players. He lets them practice the same drills over and over. He expects them to practice at home. He remembers what they actually taught them and expects to act on it in the game. For players, repetitive drills are boring. Building up the lessons you have actually learned can go a long way in helping you get better as a team.
Sheri Dew, a former member of the Relief Society presidency and vice president and chief content officer at Deseret Management Corp., spoke with a graduate of Southern Virginia University on Friday, May 9th.
She spoke about Young’s principle of accumulating victory in life. When university graduates who have overcome personal challenges endured learning new things in class, those students became better people than before they entered university, she said.
“You’re already stacking victory, whether you know it or not.”
For my daughter and her friends, they endured a tough game that didn’t go into double digits as a team this season. Turnovers and fouls seemed to stack faster and easier than rebounds, assists and points.
And don’t think this is a miraculous comeback whereby the team wins the championship by the end of the season, everyone returns happily, that’s not.
The team scored nine points last week in their penultimate game. Their season was high.
However, the season is not a failure. When teammates make baskets or steal the ball from other teams, the team doesn’t cheer loudly.
From a spiritual angle, the young woman on that basketball team learned how to stack small victories together. They know each other’s progress, work and determination. So does their coach.
Holmou said looking back on his life as a young man and building up positive spiritual victory is as difficult as regular prayer and Bible study.
“Jesus Christ, my Savior, my Savior is my only hope. My only hope. As a young boy who grew up outside the church, I testified that God was alive. I knew. He answered my prayers.
In life as a basketball court or as a child of God, the stacked victory comes in a variety of sizes and sizes. However, any victory that comes in the course of the game or with the sound of the final buzzer of life is provided with the help of our beloved Heavenly Father. He helps us accumulate truly important victory.
“And I know that,” Holmo said. “And when he confesses that my only hope and all good things come from him, I am good. I am peace. And I am my Savior, I can do anything.”
– John Ryan Jensen is the editor of Church News.
