Bryan Veatch, once an All-American pole vaulter and an All-State punter at Bellevue High School in northern Kentucky, was in the seventh grade when he knelt by the couch in his track coach’s house “and just received the Lord.”

It was then that “my life changed,” he said.

Veatch no longer felt that it was OK to look at pornographic magazines with his friends. Many other things didn’t seem right, even though he was just a kid.

“My wants, my desires, changed immediately,” he said. “My behaviors didn’t. It takes a while to get behaviors out of the way.”

Now, Veatch can share such experiences with those he works with as the first Barren River area director of Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

“They can be great coaches and great athletes,” he said of those he works with, “but that will not be determined by their win-loss record. Their significance will be determined by what God says about them in their character and integrity as people.”

Veatch was adopted when he was a baby in 1968 by Norman and Monika Veatch. His mother was German. His father met her while serving in the Air Force in Germany. Veatch grew up with adopted siblings. His family attended a Lutheran church.

“It was always real important to my dad and mom that we know (about being adopted), and from a Christian perspective that God loved us as sons and daughters,” Veatch said. “And my parents did that for us and dedicated their lives to our success. It was kind of a neat way to grow up.”

Veatch said he never knew what happened to his biological parents. He never even tried to find out.

“I just appreciated the fact that we had a loving family and the biological part of it is really insignificant.”

Veatch came to Western Kentucky University after he graduated from high school, where he was voted in the Northern Kentucky Athletic Region as the Famous Star of the Year behind Scott Draud, who went on to play basketball at Vanderbilt University.

He said he liked Western right away. He walked onto the football team as a punter and joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity. For a while, he attended Campus Crusade for Christ. But he drifted away from it.

“I was looking for an identity,” he said.

It was an identity that was faced with a “really hard” discovery that made him decide to leave the football team after just a couple years.

“I discovered how really average an athlete that I was,” Veatch said. “I think I became a small fish in a small pond. ... That was really a blow to my ego. Having so much success in high school, I wasn’t prepared for the talent level at Western.”

But Veatch was prepared to marry Shelly Bucklew, whom he’d met his freshman year. The couple married while still in college. Veatch’s seventh-grade track coach, Marty Mayer, and his wife, Bobbie, gave the couple tickets to a Christian marriage conference as a wedding gift.

With Shelly, Veatch grew in his faith.

“I think Shelly and I are very similar people – both seekers and really genuinely in our hearts out to know God,” Veatch said.

After Veatch graduated from Western with a with a bachelor’s degree in public relations and a minor in business in 1990, he and Shelly moved to Bellevue with their first child, Chelsey. While there, Veatch and a friend from his high school days opened a restaurant in nearby Cincinnati.

Veatch said he enjoyed running the restaurant, but after a while the long hours he was working began to take him away from his family, which by then had grown to include another daughter, Rachel.

So he took a job working for his sister and brother-in-law, who had a truck crane operation in the Cincinnati area.

“That provided me with a day job.”

Then, Veatch’s father-in-law, Eddie Bucklew, asked him to buy Murray’s Restaurant in Bowling Green with him. Veatch did and said “that’s where God really started to deal with me.

“About six months into it I really could not find a grill cook who would be consistent and handle the day-in-day-out grind. So I did it for a solid year.”

As he cooked, he listened to a Christian radio station and realized that “none of the road I’d been on took me anywhere I wanted to be.

“It was becoming clear in my mind that ministry is where I was headed.”

In 1997, he became associate pastor at Cave Mill Baptist Church. Two years later, he got out of the restaurant business. In all, he pastored at Cave Mill for four years. Then, he helped start Grace Community Church here. Also, for a year, he pastored at Fairview Baptist Church in Franklin.

In 2003, Veatch left the church in Franklin to pursue a master’s degree in theology from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. To support his family, including a son, Simon, he began working part-time for a friend’s concrete construction company in Louisville. He was also serving on the local FCA board, which was raising support to hire a part-time director.

Last year, Veatch got the FCA job.

Now, he travels in the 10-county Barren River area mainly to talk to coaches about how they can reach their athletes through FCA. He still works part-time for his friend’s construction company and is taking off this semester from seminary.

He feels working through FCA is his calling.

“I want athletes and coaches and everyone else to know that who they are will be found in God,” Veatch said.

Brandon Porter, pastor of Smiths Grove Baptist Church and former president of the FCA at Greenwood High School, met Veatch recently while helping to publicize an upcoming FCA banquet and said he’s come to know him as “very concerned and compassionate.”

Warren County Jailer Jackie Stroke is on the FCA board and said Veatch is well-suited for his job.

“I think his life is an example of how to serve the Lord and how to be a good family person and how to give back to the community,” Strode said.

Veatch now hopes the public will come out to support the FCA through the 2005 Area Wide Banquet, which will be April 12.

Tickets are still available for the event, where Florida State University Head Football Coach Bobby Bowden – the winningest coach in NCAA I-A college football – will speak at the Sloan Convention Center.

— Individual tickets cost $35 and $50. Tables cost $350, $500 and $1,000, for a corporate sponsor. Tickets must be reserved by Friday. Doors to the event open at 5:45 p.m. The dinner begins at 6:30 p.m. For more information, call Veatch at 392-1291.