I coach baseball, and for years the honest answer I gave players who asked for a devotional was a book. Books have a problem. A fourteen year old will carry one in his bag for a season and read four pages of it.
Phones are where they actually read. So the question became which app, and that turned out to be harder to answer than I expected, because most of what comes up is written for a general Christian audience and then labelled for athletes.
If you are not looking for an app at all and just want verses to carry into a game, the ones I get asked for most are verses for a hitter in a slump and verses for coming back from an injury.
Below is every app I could find that a Christian athlete might reasonably use, what each one actually does, and who it fits. Full disclosure before you read any further: number four is mine. I put it where I think it honestly belongs, and I have tried to describe the other nine the way their own makers would.
1. Bible, by Life.Church
The default, and with good reason. It is free, it has no paid tier, and it holds more reading plans than anyone could finish.
For athletes specifically, this matters more than it looks: the Fellowship of Christian Athletes publishes its reading plans here rather than only inside its own app. If your kid is in an FCA huddle at school, the plan the huddle is working through is probably on this app already.
What it does not do is explain a verse in terms of your sport. You get the text and a plan, and the work of connecting it to your Tuesday is left to you.
2. FCA Challenge
Made by FCA itself, which is the largest sports ministry in the country and has been since 1954. The app is built around a daily reading plan for coaches and athletes, with content that assumes you are one or the other.
It is the closest thing to an official option, and it is also fairly quiet, with around two dozen ratings on the App Store. FCA reaches people through huddles and coaches rather than through app downloads, so the number says little about the content.
It makes the most sense if somebody at your school is already using it.
FCA Challenge on the App Store
3. Ao1 Life
From Athletes in Action, the sports arm of Cru, and the name is short for Audience of One.
It is broader than a daily verse. Devotionals, Bible studies, articles and video, aimed at an athlete who wants to go deeper rather than get a two minute read before practice. If your athlete is in college or serious about their faith beyond the season, this is the one with the most substance behind it.
The same group also makes G2X, which is a discipleship curriculum for coaches and leaders rather than something an individual athlete would open on their own.
4. Play With Faith
This is the one I built, so weigh what follows accordingly.
It started as a book called Boost Your Play with Faith, thirty verses for youth athletes, and it sold about forty copies. The content worked fine when I read it to a team. It did nothing at all sitting in a kid's bag, and that is why it is an app now.
Every morning it gives an athlete a verse and then a breakdown of that verse written for the sport they play. Baseball gets an at-bat. Wrestling gets a weight cut. It covers seventeen sports, and the breakdown is deliberately written so any kid on the roster fits it, whether they start or sit. There is also a Pregame Mode, which is a sixty second read for the bus or the locker room.
The daily verse and Pregame Mode are free with no trial and no card. The Bible, journal and memory games are a subscription.
Play With Faith on the App Store
5. Playbook Devotional
Built specifically for kids eighteen and under. Each day is a verse, a short reflection tied to sport, and a question to carry through the day.
It is new and small. The age targeting is the reason to look at it: if you have a ten year old rather than a seventeen year old, the reading level here is closer to right than anything else on this list.
Playbook Devotional on the App Store
6. You Play I Pray
The only one here written for the adult rather than the athlete. It gives coaches and parents team devotionals and prayers to use with a group, which is a different job entirely.
If you coach a rec team and want something to read in the huddle after practice, this is the one built for that. An athlete would not open it on their own.
You Play I Pray on the App Store
The General Ones Athletes Actually Use
The four below are not sports apps. They are big, well made, and plenty of athletes use them, so leaving them off would be dishonest.
Hallow. Catholic, and the largest prayer app by a distance. Guided prayer, sleep content, seasonal challenges that hundreds of thousands of people join at once. Nothing athlete specific, but the production quality is above anything else in this list.
Bible Chat. A daily devotional built around asking questions and getting answers back. Useful if your athlete is the kind who has questions and nobody to ask.
Glorify. Daily devotional and prayer, with professional narrators doing the reading. Good for the drive to a game if your athlete would rather listen than read.
Abide. From Guideposts, built around guided meditation and sleep. It is the only app here that treats the night before a big game as a thing worth building for.
How To Pick One
The honest answer is that it depends on the age of the athlete and what is already happening around them.
- If they are in an FCA huddle at school, start with the Bible app or FCA Challenge, because they will be reading the same plan as their friends.
- If they are under twelve, Playbook Devotional is written at their level.
- If they are in college or want depth, Ao1 Life has the most behind it.
- If you are the coach or the parent, You Play I Pray is the only one built for you.
- If the problem is that a verse never connects to the actual game, that is the gap I built mine for.
One Thing None Of Them Fix
An app does not make a kid read, and neither did the book.
What has worked in the teams I have coached is somebody else reading it too, whether that is a teammate, a parent, or a coach who brings it up on the drive home. The athletes who stay with any of these for longer than a week are almost always the ones not doing it alone.
If you want something to hand a whole team rather than one kid, Sports Spectrum publishes a free daily devotional you can forward without anyone installing anything. That is sometimes the easier first step.
The other thing that costs nothing is praying before you play, which almost every athlete wants to do and most have never been told how. I wrote up four prayers you can actually use before a game for exactly that.