By Mark Cochran
@markymarkbrand
In spring 2016, while in the kitchen cleaning up with her small children running around the house, Lisa Renfroe heard him mention it for the first time.
Her husband, Calvin Renfroe, walked in and said, “So what if I, at the end of this year, would leave Oracle and just go into coaching full-time?” This came as a complete shock to her.
Renfroe was a manager of technology sales at Oracle, the software giant, and had been with the company over five years making a high salary. He was proposing leaving all that behind and starting at the bottom of a low-paying industry as a quarterbacks coach at Olivet Nazarene University.
This was not a logical move. This was not a smart move to the average person. But Renfroe, who starts at ONU this fall, wasn’t following a normal person’s playbook. He was getting his signals from a higher authority.
“We had initially approached it by saying ‘Okay God, maybe I can do [coaching] too,’” said Renfroe. “’Maybe if I do this on the side this will fulfill that calling, that purpose that I feel You’ve put inside of me.’ And what it actually did was maybe even confirm more that I needed to go into [coaching] full-time.”
It might be a surprising move based on his former position but it’s not really that surprising when one looks at his background.
“He was actually born a coach,” said Anita Renfroe, his mother. “It just took him this long to actually get to it vocationally.
He actually began his coaching career as a player at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill.. Before the start of his senior season he was set to be the starting quarterback, but he broke his thumb and missed a large chunk of the season. Although devastated, he said he made the best of it by staying on the sidelines and helping coach his team.
Afterwards he thought about going into coaching, but he was given the opportunity to work for a software company in his hometown of Atlanta, and that was the path his career started on. But coaching was always in the back of his mind.
“I felt if there was ever a time when something wasn’t right, I probably would’ve made the move to coaching,” said Renfroe. “But that time never came.”
That is until 2013. He found out, from his wife, about Johnson Ferry Christian Academy Saints starting up a high school football team and looking for volunteer coaches. Renfroe met with head coach Jeff Paulk and from there he became the quarterback coach.
That first season the Saints made it to the state championship where they lost in double overtime. The offense was explosive and put up a lot of points. Within three years Renfroe was given the offensive coordinator position.
While he was doing this he was still working full-time at Oracle and was in charge of several high profile accounts, but last year he started to feel a pull on his heart towards coaching full-time. The passing of his grandparents was what really pushed him over the edge.
A month after their passing he talked to his uncle, Mark Hoover a pastor, who told him about how his grandparents were always living for what they felt God calling them to. They knew where God wanted them and they were on it.
“That kinda struck me,” said Renfroe. “Because I had always thought you know, ‘maybe when I retire I’ll get into it’ you know. So the simple way to say it is, life’s too short, we are not promised tomorrow, so why would you not do what you are called to do?”
Going into coaching football full-time was what he felt he was being called to do. He started the process of looking for coaching positions. This provided a challenge not only him but to his wife and three small children.
“You go from making a ton of money and having an expense account,” said Renfroe. “You know living a certain life as a field executive, you know there’s a big setback when you’re trying to go and be a first year college football coach.
But he believes this is what they are being called to do and the people around him expect him to be successful.
“I am fully confident, said his wife Lisa Renfroe. “And [I] know that God’s got us going in this direction for a greater purpose than what I even realize.”
“I see him being one hundred percent successful,” said Jeff Paulk former head coach of Johnson Ferry Christian Academy. “Because his priorities are right.”
He has now found a home at Olivet Nazarene University (ONU), a small NAIA school in Bourbonnais. He used to play for the head coach Eric Hehman in college and last year ran into him at a coaching conference where he expressed his desire to get into coaching.
A few months later a position opened up at ONU and Hehman was more than happy to give Renfroe a call.
“He’s got a good football mind and he’s a good teacher,” said Hehman. “I think he’s going to be good coach one-on-one with the quarterbacks and it’s really needed with our program.”
Renfroe’s ultimate goal is to be a collegiate head coach in control of his own program. He wants to have that platform in order to affect the most people.
These priorities revolve around winning on the field and off. His goal is to create a winning team but also to create men that are ready to go out into the world and live productive lives. A motto his old team went by was “Big team, little me.” For him, it’s not about the success of himself as an individual but about creating an environment where his players can grow into better men in the long run.
“If every day I’m making a positive impact on them [players] as a football player and them as a man, then I’m doing what God has called me to do.”
It might not make sense to some but that makes him all the more confident that he is in the right place where he is supposed to be.
The Grady Sports Media program is part of the undergraduate sports media certificate curriculum at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.