Nov. 21, 2025 SHARE: There’s something beautiful about watching college football players discover that sometimes the toughest opponent isn’t on the field—it’s invasive bamboo in an elderly woman’s backyard. Steve Moniaci, HCU’s Athletic Director, still lights up when he talks about that particular Saturday morning during Sharpstown Day, when 200-plus student-athletes showed up with work gloves and big hearts. “I can remember us digging for hours, digging out bamboo in her backyard,” Moniaci recalls with the kind of fondness usually reserved for championship victories. “And I thought at any point our kids were just going to give up. And they didn’t. They persevered through—it was mostly the football team—and we got that backyard cleaned up to where it could have been on Good Morning Houston.” These aren’t just student-athletes collecting community service hours like trading cards. They’re young people discovering what it means to show up when the work gets hard, when nobody’s keeping score except the person whose life you’re changing. The numbers tell part of the story: a department wide 3.41 GPA this past spring, the highest ever. Every team posted above a 3.0 for the first time in a decade. But Moniaci knows the real magic happens in moments that don’t show up in any stat sheet. “We require them to do public service as a team at least once every year, but many of them will do many more than that,” he explains. “I think that helps show the kids what they need to do to give back to the community.” The Student Athlete Advisory Committee meets twice monthly, voting on which community projects deserve their energy. When someone calls asking for help, the answer is almost always yes. From the Restoration Team partnership with KPRC2 Community to Fellowship of Christian Athletes programs, HCU Athletics is discovering that the best victories happen when nobody’s keeping score. As Moniaci puts it, “We are the hands and feet of Christ.” It’s a philosophy that transforms community service from obligation into calling, ensuring these athletes carry more than trophies—they carry the knowledge that sometimes the most important triumph is the one where winning means somebody else gets to smile.
