When Nate Scheelhaase was promoted to offensive coordinator of the Los Angeles Rams last winter, he stepped into one of the NFL’s most auspicious jobs, and for a Super Bowl contender, no less.
Not bad for a former youth pastor.
Fresh out of college, Scheelhaase moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 2014 to work with teenagers at Southeast Christian Church, one of the largest megachurches in the U.S. During that time, he regularly stopped by a few dozen high schools to visit with students. For two high schools’ football teams, he volunteered as a chaplain. The role entailed building trust, finding common ground and helping those he spoke with work for something bigger than themselves.
“An impactful year,” said Scheelhaase, 35.
It wasn’t the typical starting point for a career in coaching — because even though Scheelhaase had been a four-year starting quarterback at Illinois, he wasn’t initially interested in that career path at all.
Without intending to, though, Scheelhaase honed skills while he was a youth pastor that he says helped him rise quickly within the coaching industry.
“I would say that there’s a lot of carryover,” Scheelhaase said in an interview. “From a ministry standpoint, just being around people from all different walks of life, different journeys, being able to meet them where they’re at — that’s also a football locker room. That’s a staff locker room.”
The growth of sports in the U.S. is often a story of their crossover with faith. James Naismith, basketball’s inventor, is said to have believed he could better embody what it meant to be a Christian using sports than the pulpit. Many of football’s conventions, including the huddle, numbered jerseys and padded goalposts, came from Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had gone to Yale to study divinity and began coaching to fulfill a vision of “muscular Christianity.”
Careers in sports have often led to careers in religious roles. Rocky Seto won national championships at the University of Southern California and a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks during 16 years on Pete Carroll’s coaching staffs. In Seattle, Seto’s role eventually evolved to include a weekly address delivered in front of the entire roster and staff. He obsessively prepared his material.
“How am I going to capture the whole room?” Seto said. “It’s basically convincing them that if you learn this, this is going to help us win, help us be better.”
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That experience made him feel prepared to give his first sermon. It was 2017, and Seto had just left the Seahawks to become the pastor-in-waiting at Evergreen Baptist Church, in suburban Los Angeles. Standing in front of another packed room of congregants, Seto felt his new job’s mission mirrored that of his last one — to deliver hope.
“You come to church in some ways to take a peek into heaven for a moment, and then we break. It’s like a huddle, and then we break out to basically fulfill the Great Commission outside this building, right?” he said. “And so coaching is no different. The information has to be almost like, ‘This is the greatest thing you need to know.’”
As Scheelhaase’s career was ending in late 2013, all he knew was that he didn’t envision a future in coaching.
He had gotten married a few months earlier, and he had seen enough coaches get fired and hired to question raising a family in an industry with fleeting job security and a nomadic career path. Meetings with Illini alumni in corporate jobs in Chicago also failed to inspire him. Unsure what to do, Scheelhaase called Jason Epperson, a local pastor who served as Illinois football’s team chaplain.
Epperson had just taken a job at Southeast in Louisville, where there was a youth pastor role open. The idea intrigued Scheelhaase, who had grown up outside Kansas City, Missouri, as a devout Christian. When he arrived at Southeast in early 2014, he was trying “to figure out different ways to just connect with people in the area and show them that I was interested in just who they were more than just what they were doing,” Scheelhaase said. “Which I think is always a good spot to start.”
Chris Burke, an ESPN baseball analyst who lived in the area, first noticed Scheelhaase because of his athleticism during pickup games inside Southeast’s gym. Other things about Scheelhaase soon stood out, too.
“He looked perfectly suited for that job,” Burke said. “You can tell he got a kick out of being around young people. He communicated well with them. He had the patience.”
When a local mother told Scheelhaase that her eighth grade son’s father had recently died and that she needed others to be there for her son, Scheelhaase gave him rides and went to practices. The son was Nate Hobbs, the future San Francisco 49ers defensive back whom Scheelhaase still describes as one of his closest friends.
Scheelhaase stopped by Trinity High School, a local powerhouse, with a “confident humility,” said Andrew Coverdale, Trinity’s offensive coordinator at the time, who is now the passing game coordinator at Kentucky. Scheelhaase didn’t expect students to listen to him just because he had been a college quarterback.
“As somebody who taught in high school for a long, long time, I can’t really emphasize enough that kids need every form of mentorship and positive adult presence they can have, because it is brutal to be a teenage kid right now,” Coverdale said. High schoolers are “just dealing with so much and carrying so much. And so I just think having a guy like that around that you can talk to, who has life experience that he’s willing to share in a really winsome way, it was just great.”
Scheelhaase spent a relatively brief year and a half in Louisville, but he said that time shaped him immeasurably. Scheelhaase, who now has three children, said spending time around church leaders and attendees gave him role models for how he wanted to act as a husband and a father. It also changed his career path.
While he was leading a chapel service for football players at Eastern High School in 2014, he gave what he thought was a compelling, relatable speech that pulled in his athletic background and life story. It was received, he said with a smile, by proverbial crickets.
Taking a seat, he was stunned to see the reaction when the school’s head coach stood up to deliver his own pregame speech.
“Everybody was on the edge of their seat,” Scheelhaase said. “And in that moment, I thought, man, there is a cool ability to impact as a coach. And it was probably the thing that triggered the thought of, man, what would it look like to be able to impact in that way and influence in that way.”
By the start of the 2015 football season, Scheelhaase was at Illinois coaching running backs. Technically, he was new to the profession. Yet recruiting players to campus and developing them once they were on the roster didn’t feel any different, at its core, from how he’d worked to build trust in Louisville.
“You are going to ask people to do really hard things as a coach, things that are counterintuitive to what you want to do,” he said. “Stand in a pocket where you know somebody’s going to hit you in the side of your helmet. To be somebody who loves to catch the football, but you got to go and block. To be somebody that’s willing to do the dirty work, and you’re going to ask them to do it, and the only way I know how to do that is to connect with them on a deep level. They know I not only understand what we’re asking them to do, but I care and I see them in that. And so connection, fortunately for me, it’s how I’m wired. That’s the part I enjoy the most about my job. ...
“And there probably is an element of that’s what I enjoyed even about the job as a high school pastor in Louisville, too, is just connecting with people and seeing there’s oftentimes more common ground than you think.”
In 2023, he became a coordinator at Iowa State. A year later, he left to become an offensive assistant for Sean McVay and the Rams, which to some may have seemed like a backward step; his job revolved around using software to manually draw the plays McVay wanted called each week. In the NFL, however, just being around McVay is a career springboard: The last four Rams offensive coordinators are now head coaches, and Zac Taylor was drawing McVay’s plays before Cincinnati hired him as its head coach. In 2025, a full year before Scheelhaase’s promotion to Rams offensive coordinator, McVay had called him “a special coach” and “a rising star, without a doubt.”
Last winter, as Scheelhaase was interviewing for NFL head coaching jobs, he called interim Stanford coach Frank Reich to ask about the school’s opening. The two had more in common than football. After he retired from a long career as a backup NFL quarterback, Reich attended seminary and worked as a pastor before he became an NFL head coach.
He saw carryover between the two industries, too.
“In coaching or seminary or pastoring, there are a lot of hours,” Reich said in 2019.
The hours Scheelhaase put in in Louisville have paid off in ways he didn’t expect, he said. There, his life revolved around Sundays. In ways he could never have predicted, it still does.
