After years of serving at FCA Weekend of Champions and hearing the FCA Summer Intern Program promoted afterwards during huddle leader debrief meetings, Kennedy decided to apply for the internship for the summer after her junior year of college. She wanted to spend her summer doing something to deepen her faith. She also knew she wanted to coach someday, so the internship was the perfect opportunity to learn how to put coaching and her faith together.

This pairing ended up being one of the most impactful things from the internship for Kennedy. She was able to build a coaching philosophy unique to her and her core values. It was helpful for her to process through what she believes and why she wants to coach, and got that established in her philosophy before she even took a coaching position.

Now, as she has begun to coach basketball and track at Milford, she has used her coaching philosophy and fallen back on it to reflect for herself as a coach. She is able to look back at her core values, be reminded of why she is coaching, and realign herself so that she continues to coach in a manner that reflects what she believes, as well as making sure she is caring for her athletes beyond just the physical aspect of training and conditioning them.

One unique way Kennedy tried to implement this into her connections with athletes after the internship and into her career was in starting a Good News Running Group with the FCA huddle at Milford. The idea was to talk about the Gospel while going on runs. Kennedy would give athletes a prompt and then send everyone out on a run to think about it. Then they would walk and talk about the prompt and learn from each other. As Kennedy reflected on this attempt for during the summer and numbers were few (the athletes didn't want to run long distances), Kennedy is back to brainstorming for other ways to build relationships and have spiritual conversations with athletes, which is okay. It shows that building programs, teams, and huddles all take time and it's a process to figure out what will work best for each group.

While the impact of learning to be a coach for Christ was huge for Kennedy, the thing she really enjoyed most in the internship was the relationships that came from it. Kennedy enjoyed the relationships with staff, other interns, and getting to know coaches. Kennedy says that relationships you make through FCA are some of the most incredible relationships because they last and will help strengthen you because you have connected with like-minded people who love well.

Overall, Kennedy recommends the internship because it is going to help you grow as a person spiritually, mentally, and socially. If you want to coach, then it sets you up for a solid foundation to be a coach for Christ, so you can not only impact athlete's lives now, but impact them for eternity.