Our Story
Pray First Sports Apparel didn't start with a business plan. It started on a flight deck in 1989.
In August of that year I was aboard the USS Carl Vinson with squadron VA-52, out of Whidbey Island, Washington. We were running workups for a six-month WestPac deployment. Night operations. The kind of work where you sleep by day and spend your nights on the most dangerous few acres in the world.
My wife was eight months pregnant back home. At her checkup, the doctors found our son weighed two pounds, eight ounces. Too small. Not ready. She was admitted to Madigan Army Hospital, two hours away, with our two-year-old daughter at home and every one of our family members a thousand miles from her.
I was asleep in my rack when a chief woke me up. That never happens. When they wake you up in the middle of the day, something is wrong.
Two hours later I was launched off the deck of an aircraft carrier and pointed at San Diego with sixty dollars in my pocket and a handful of quarters for pay phones. This was 1989. No cell phones. From San Diego to San Francisco to Seattle, I had no way to reach my wife, my daughter, the doctors, anybody. Just a long flight and a lot of time to think about everything I couldn't control.
It was somewhere around my tenth prayer that day that God told me not to worry.
What I didn't know was that while I was in the air, my mother-in-law was finishing a pilgrimage near El Paso, Texas. At the end of it she made a promesa, a promise, to the saint of that church: if God let our baby be healthy, we would name him after that saint.
Saint Lorenzo.
My son was born a month later at five pounds, eight ounces. Healthy. Loud. Ready to go. We named him Lorenzo Philip.
Today he's grown, healthy, and a college football coach. Still rarely out-worked. We raised children who became coaches and veterans themselves, and watching them compete, lead, and serve only confirmed what I learned out on that deck.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I had my flight deck cranial redone. On the back, I put Phil 4:13.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
A little paint, but mostly reflective tape, so it could be seen out there in the dark. It wasn't decoration. It was what I was holding onto. And out on that deck, shipmates would stop and ask me what it meant.
So I'd tell them.
That's it. That's the whole thing. A verse on a helmet started conversations about God with young men in the middle of the ocean, and I've never forgotten what that felt like.
So when people ask how long I've been doing this, the honest answer is since 1989.
Pray First Sports Apparel isn't a company I started on a whim. It's the same thing I was doing on that flight deck, just with better equipment. Every shirt, every hoodie, every design we put our name on is built to do what that helmet did.
Start a conversation. Plant a seed. Remind somebody, including the person wearing it, what they stand for before the day even begins.
If one person sees your hoodie and asks what it means, we did our job.
We make this for the athlete who writes a verse on their wrist tape. For the mom in the bleachers who prayed the whole drive over. For the coach who gathers the team in a circle before kickoff. For the kid who points at the sky after they cross the line.
Pray First. Then Give Your All.
That's not a slogan. It's how I've lived since the 11th grade, long before that helmet ever had a verse on it.
Welcome to Pray First Sports Apparel. A veteran-owned, family-run brand.
— Izzy, Founder & Dad