March 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The players, coaches, and staff of the Kansas City Royals are learning about the harmful effects of pornography.
The Kansas City Royals are the first organization in professional baseball to take a public stand against the harms of porn. The team’s general manager Dayton Moore invited anti-porn group Fight the New Drug (FTND) to talk to the team about the devastation porn causes in men’s hearts and relationships.
More than 200 players, coaches, trainers, and staff voluntarily attended FTND’s presentation at the beginning of their spring training this year.
“It says a lot about the organization, that they care so much,” FTND Co-Founder and President Clay Olsen said. “Not only do they care about how the players perform on the field, but they also care about the overall well-being of the players and how they’re doing off the field.”
Professional athletes are prime targets for porn’s poison. The high-pressure environment, the adulation of fans, and the constant traveling far from home combine to create fertile ground for vice.
Moore spoke out about pornography’s role in domestic violence at a press conference last year, and he called FTND to set up a consultation about how to best help his team in this area.
At the spring training session, Moore explained how important this issue is for men and their families. Blaine Boyer, a pitcher in the majors for sixteen years who now works for the anti-human trafficking organization Exodus Road, spoke as well. And minor league baseball coach Austin Womack shared about his own struggle with compulsively viewing porn, which began when he was 12.
“Words really can’t express how much fighting the battle against pornography addiction means to me,” Womack wrote on Instagram. “It says a ton about the kind of men we have in leadership roles [on the team] and it makes me even more eager to serve under them.”
“All my friends watched [porn],” he said. “It wasn’t until I actively started to fight this addiction…that I began to realize that there were areas of my life that were negatively affected by my porn addiction.”
The past few years have been a “roller coaster,” he said, but FTND’s Fortify Program has helped him break the up and down cycle.
Since starting that program five months ago, “I have refrained from viewing porn,” he said. “I still face temptation all the time. It’s tough. It’s a daily battle. But it’s a battle that is winnable and the positive repercussions from beating this addiction are more than worth the fight. My life is proof.”