At one point in the conversation regarding Casey Prince’s selection to the Barton College Athletic Hall of Fame, his former Barton coach, Gary Hall, paused to issue an apology to the interviewer.
He had spent the previous several minutes sharing a number of observations about Prince – his leadership role in starting Barton’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes; his fortitude in speaking at his mother’s funeral as a high school senior just weeks after signing with Barton; his work with the Ubuntu Football Academy in South Africa, providing educational, spiritual and soccer experiences that transform the lives of at-risk youth; his commitment to his faith in taking his family halfway around the world.
But then Hall realized he had said nothing about Prince’s actual soccer career.
So he recalled a game at Belmont Abbey in which Prince made a diving stop on a shot late in the match, getting a fingertip on the ball to redirect it around the post and preserve a scoreless tie. That effort kept Barton in the running for a regular-season title, which it won two weeks later.
Although the story certainly captured the impact Prince could have on the playing field, in reality, Hall had already said everything he needed to about his former player in his very first sentence on the subject.
“In my personal judgement, Casey Prince was one of the most impactful students on this college that has ever attended Barton,” Hall said.
Although Hall didn’t know it at the time, Prince had displayed an equal level of respect for his former coach in his own comments.
Prince said there were numerous reasons he chose to come to Barton, but “the short and really simple answer is definitely Coach Hall.”
“Now that I’m on the other side of it and I’m trying to help kids get recruited, I’m able to reflect back on just how strong I felt my connection was with Coach Hall,” Prince says. “I believed in him. I trusted him. My family trusted him. I just wanted to be coached by him. I wanted to be around him. He was a significant part of that.
“I really prayed intensely about where I was supposed to go and wanted to be obedient to God. There were a lot of reasons, like getting to major in religion was a factor. The fact that they were starting FCA, which I had been heavily involved with as a high school student, was a factor. So there were a lot of things that sort of lined up to really convince me that Barton was the right place, but I think starting off and always the biggest factor was Coach Hall.”
The connecting thread between Prince and Hall had been another Barton Hall of Famer, Danny Wilkins, who was Prince’s coach at Millbrook High School.
“His having been to Atlantic Christian/Barton as a student and player meant that I had some connection to the school already,” Prince said. “It made for at least a natural introduction I think to me considering Barton as my destination. I think I was fortunate to have great opportunities and coaches along the way and people who kind of molded and shaped my character as a player, not just my ability as a player.”
Prince was a three-year starter for Wilkins at Millbrook, where he helped the team win one 4-A state championship and play for another.
He started all four years at Barton, helping the Bulldogs to a 44-26-3 record over that span and a regular-season conference title in 1998. Following that 15-4-1 campaign in 1998, Prince was named both all-conference and all-region.
During his career, he logged 5,416 minutes in net to rank second on the school’s career list for the NCAA Division II era. Prince is tied for first in career shutouts with 15, and ranks among the school’s top five in saves, save percentage and goals against average.
“I think my strengths as a player were leadership and communication,” he said. “I wasn’t very gifted athletically. My technique was probably average. So I really relied on getting people in the right places so I didn’t have to do as much.”
Prince was talented enough to play make the professional roster for the Charlotte Eagles, but after one season as a reserve, he felt God calling him in a different direction.
He spent seven years as a youth minister in Raleigh while also serving as an assistant coach at Millbrook, where he was enshrined as a Hall of Fame member in 2013.
“I was helping Danny at Millbrook as he finished coaching and then some other guys,” he said. “It was a great experience, but again, I didn’t think soccer would continue to be a big part of my life, just something I helped do. But then we moved to South Africa in 2009 to start Ubuntu Football, and now soccer is what I eat, sleep, breathe and obsess about.”
The organization he co-founded has as its goal “to develop the next great leaders, men and footballers in South Africa. We do it in a very elite soccer context. Our goal is to be the leading football development program on the continent. We want to be producing the very best players in all of Africa.”
He works with 80 boys “who are from some of the most broken, messed up communities around,” including the danger-filled, low-income township in which Prince and his family live.
“It’s very faith-stretching,” Prince said. “I often tell people I feel like I live on the edge of my faith every day. Can we really do this? Can we really take this on? But at the end of the day, God’s been so faithful that at the end of every one of those questions, I say ‘Well of course we can do this,’ because He’s been faithful before.”
As Prince prepares for a trip back to the U.S. for his induction ceremony, he can’t help but be happy about the fact that he will be enshrined along with Whit Coolbaugh, his teammate at both Millbrook and Barton, and his coach.
“I would be really excited to be enshrined, period, to have the honor,” he said. “But it makes it massively more significant to do so with Coach Hall. He was such a big part of my experience. … And then also with Whit. I was part of successful teams because he was scoring lots of goals. I am thankful for all those goals he scored. It’s really neat that it worked out for me to be inducted at this time with an old teammate and my coach. It’s going to make it so much sweeter.”
