Outsports profiles a young volleyball coach:
Nick Clark vividly remembers the turning point. He was driving home to Michigan in mid-2007 after a sexual rendezvous with a guy in Toledo, Ohio. It was in the wee hours of the morning and he had been heavily drinking when he started to fall asleep at the wheel. It was all he could do to stay awake and make it home.
“I then had a God moment,” Clark said. “I had this incredible urge to go to church the next day.”
Clark had been raised a Catholic but was not very religious. The next day at church, though, “I really felt like someone was speaking to me. Everything was speaking to me – the songs, the priests. From that point, my life really started to change.”
Clark, 25, is the assistant men’s volleyball coach at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Mich. He is now openly and comfortably gay with a boyfriend whom he is crazy about. In the past month, he came out to his coach, Mike Watkins, who told him his sexual orientation doesn’t change anything.
Clark went from a closeted young man whose sole interactions with gay men were furtive sexual meetings on Manhunt, to an active member of the religious Athletes in Action, to someone who now wants to help other gay athletes and coaches come out. All this happened in the space of less than four years.
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Thursday, April 28, 2011
Outsports recounts volleyball coach's journey to acceptance
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