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Kelly Cooke

cookek_web.jpg“My life was a mess,” says Kelly Cooke about her freshman year at Malone College. “My brother died a few months before I graduated from high school. When I got to college, I fell in with the athlete crowd. My coach and I did not get along, and I had a bad attitude. I got kicked off the basketball team. It seemed like everything that was important to me was being taken away. I grew up going to church and I would have said I was a Christian, but I also believed I was in control of my own life.”

Even though Kelly had enrolled at a Christian college, she didn’t feel like she fit in. Kelly’s residence hall director, CCO staff member Celia King, lived across the hall from Kelly and took an interest in her.

“Celia continued to just show up and chat with me about what was going on,” Kelly remembers. “She accepted me for who I was. There was a large population at Malone I just didn’t fit in with. I wasn’t your typical Christian college student. I was a little bit rough around the edges.”

Through Celia, Kelly met other CCO staff members at Malone. “I started getting my life in order and started to take my faith seriously, and I started spending more time around CCO people—Jeff and Linda Leon, Marcia Everett and Steph Veltman (now Santarosa).” At the beginning of her sophomore year, Kelly went on a retreat led by Steph, which she identifies as a turning point for her.

Even so, she insists that it wasn’t through programs that her life was changed. It was the friendships she formed with these Christian mentors that made the biggest difference.

“They spent time with me, they let me be who I was and work through the things I was struggling with, and they gave me the space the work through things.” And that is what Kelly has done for other college students since she graduated from Malone in 2001.

Kelly has worked for the CCO as a campus minister since her own graduation, first at Waynesburg University, then Grove City College, and now the University of Pittsburgh, where she reaches out to student-athletes. Her own experience as a college basketball player gives her an insider’s perspective.

“The reason I’m in athlete ministry now is that I don’t think a lot people understand what athletes go through,” she says. “Most people in their lives are more interested in what they can produce than who they are. I want to get to know the person behind the athletic ability.”

Kelly and her husband, Chris, live in Pittsburgh and worship at Shadyside Presbyterian Church, where both of them are in leadership roles. They currently teach Sunday school to first- through fifth-graders, which is a departure from their usual involvement with college students.

“The CCO’s ministry shaped who I am today,” Kelly says. “The way I do ministry is shaped by my experience as a student. Not only were CCO staff people talking about the idea of transformation, but I watched them live it out in their lives. That was much more powerful and intriguing than just going to a program where they’re teaching about these things. I learned what it means to really love people and continue to show up in their lives and earn the right to challenge their worldview and faith and share Christ in a way that meets them where they are.”