Team Building

It’s early on a Monday morning during spring semester, and 601 Centennial Drive is thrumming. Inside the doors of Chrouser Sports Complex, the women’s volleyball team spreads across two lanes of the upstairs track, running drills: lateral jumps, squat jumps, and more. The women’s soccer team blasts pop music as they scrimmage in the small, wooden gym, while a few students run laps around the upstairs track. Swimmers over in the Lederhouse Natatorium cut through the pool waters with easy, confident strokes. Over in the weight room, the men’s football team swarms the benches and squat racks.

With average low temperatures in the teens and average highs in the 30s, there are rare opportunities during the spring semester for even the outdoor sports to train outside. That means each one of the athletes on the 21 intercollegiate sports teams at Wheaton, who make up approximately 25 percent of the student body, along with the rest of the College’s students, the families of faculty and staff members, and others with paid memberships are all vying for the space and equipment in Chrouser. And the space feels increasingly tight.

“All of our athletes, around 500, have to be able to get in lifts and so does the student population, and the general campus population, and the community membership needs to be able to use it, too, so there tends to be conflict because there’s just not enough space for everyone to be in there at the same time,” said Tricia Deter, the Assistant Athletics Director for Sports Medicine.

One of those athletes is football player Chandler Bryant ’29, a freshman who hails from a Texas town just north of Dallas.

Bryant can’t remember a time he didn’t play football. Starting out, it was backyard games under the big Texas sky with his dad and uncle. He joined a peewee flag football team at the age of four, later playing on the defensive line for Allen High School, a program that has brought home five state championships since 2008 and sent players to Division I institutions and even the NFL.

“It was really impactful for me playing at a program like Allen High School,” Bryant said. “It’s really second to none.”

In the summer before his junior year, his thoughts turned toward college. His aunt and uncle, whose good friends had graduated from Wheaton, encouraged him to check out the small Christian school west of Chicago.

After attending a summer camp at the College, he said he fell in love with the school. “I felt like God was calling me to Wheaton,” he said, even though just about everything about the school was a departure from what he was familiar with back at home.

The weather was different. So was the landscape. The College was much smaller than his high school, where his graduating class was 1,743.

At Allen, it felt like the community orbited around football—and everything from the state-of-the-art workout facilities to the games, which would pack out the 18,000-capacity stadium, were a testament to that.

In his first semester, Bryant really had to do some soul searching. “I’d allowed Allen High School Football to be who I’d become, so when I got here to Wheaton, I struggled a lot.”

But he said the emphasis on faith at Wheaton has been a gift. Faith came before football not just in word, but also in deed. That looks like: Prayer after practice. Weekly meetings of football small groups. Friday football chapels in addition to the all-school chapels. Football mission trips in the spring.

All this is paired with a lot of hardcore training. Spring semester, for instance, is technically the off-season for the football team, but that doesn’t mean they stop practicing.

“The first thing of the day is get up, get ready, and head over to Chrouser for lifts or runs,” Bryant said.

The football team is so large—at 120 strong—that the coaches split them into two groups to get their lifts in.

After these weekday workouts, Bryant, who’s in the 7:15 a.m. lift group, hits the shower and then meets his football small group at Anderson Commons, known to students as Saga, for breakfast and some time in Scripture.

Then it’s classes—he’s taking Strategic Communication, New Testament, and Understanding People, among other classes. He’s found the small Chrouser classrooms a good place to “do some reading or chip away at some essays.”

In between classes and football practice and activities, he makes time to pop into the athletic training room daily.

Bryant, who has some back issues, said, “I’m in the training room a ton. The head football trainer, Mr. Prasi, and I—we’ve become best friends.”

Of all the updates that are slated for the Chrouser Sports Complex, the changes to the training rooms are what he gets most animated about.

In its current state, Bryant said, “It gets the job done, but it’s not always efficient.”

The space is too small to serve all the athletes that need support. Deter said that they have athletes getting treatment in the hallways because there isn’t enough room to accommodate them all in the existing facility. “The football players have to go to a satellite space, located above the pool, to get taped for practice because we can’t fit all of our fall sports in our athletic training room.”

The new space will be about three times the size of the current space and will include more tables for taping and treatments, and more and larger hot and cold tubs, which will be able to serve more athletes.

“We’ll be able to better serve and care for the athletes,” Deter said. “All of us athletic trainers got into this work because we love to serve and care for athletes, but more stress is added because we don’t have the facilities we need to do that appropriately, so I just can’t say enough how excited we are about the updates.”

Kate Creighton ’28, a women’s soccer player and communication major, is looking forward to what the changes to the facilities might mean for the women’s soccer program, too.

Although she admitted, “I don’t think people come to Wheaton for the facilities; people come to Wheaton for the people.”

Creighton didn’t plan to play soccer at Wheaton. Initially, the Michigan-raised daughter of a football coach was looking to play college volleyball—not college soccer. After all, volleyball was her main sport, despite her being a three-time all-state soccer player in high school.

But when college decision time rolled around, the doors to college volleyball kept closing. “I really had to surrender that to God,” she said.

While touring Wheaton with her mom, Creighton said a chance conversation with the track and field coach put her in touch with Head Women’s Soccer Coach Patrick Gilliam, who was looking to build up his roster.

“We had a phone call and I was very interested right off the bat just because of Wheaton’s culture and his vision for having a Christ-centered program,” she said, which was similar to how her dad ran his football programs.

“My high school experience wouldn’t have been the same without volleyball, but now my college experience is so amazing with getting to play Wheaton soccer,” said Creighton, who is a forward and midfielder on the team.

The main reason is more to do with the team culture than anything else. That’s something that Coach Gilliam, who came to Wheaton in 2021 after more than 20 years of coaching at Trinity International University, is passionate about.

“My whole life was changed and enhanced by soccer,” said Gilliam, who played soccer for Judson College and accepted Christ there. “It’s a huge privilege to get to play a part in the lives of these athletes as they grow and develop in maturity as players and people. It’s a lot of fun.”

One of the guiding principles that Coach Gilliam seeks to instill in the women’s soccer team is this idea of college soccer as a “four-year experience with a 50-year impact.”

Creighton described it like this: “You’re here for four years grinding, developing as an athlete, learning to work hard and not give up when things get hard. This commitment and discipline over these four years is going to have a 50-year impact because you’re going to be a better wife, mom, employee learning how to work well with people, learning how to get up at 6 a.m. when you don’t want to. All of those lessons will impact you the rest of your life.”

Working hard on the soccer team looks like practice nearly every day in the afternoons, and lifting three times a week. They’ll typically have games on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Off-season, they play futsal in the small wooden gym and lift a few times a week.

“In January and February, especially, there are a lot of athletes using Chrouser,” Creighton said. “It can get very crowded.”

The mornings are often the best times to get in lifts since classes, chapels, and soccer practice fill the rest of the day, but the early mornings are often when the weight room is at its most crowded.

The locker room isn’t the most suitable for the women’s soccer team either.

“For soccer practice, we honestly don’t use the locker room right now,” Creighton said. “Girls just go straight to the field. And no one on the soccer team really showers in the locker room. There are so many people in there and it’s just inconvenient.”

Since the locker room is pretty old (and some have even described it as smelly), it’s not a place anyone wants to hang out anyway. But it’s a missed opportunity for building community. Considering that many soccer players are juggling a grueling load of 16–18 hours, eliminating some natural touchpoints for the team—times when they get ready for practice or games together or get cleaned up afterward—is a miss.

“The locker room is totally where you build community, so I’m excited to see how that will change with the new facilities,” Creighton said.

“You can’t really quantify the culture. But for people who don’t know about Wheaton and don’t know about the culture and the relationships, new facilities can be a draw for people who didn’t have family who went there. If they see the current facilities and are turned off by them, they might never get to have that great experience here,” Creighton said.

From Football to Fundraising, Jeff Peltz ’82 Has Supported Wheaton for Decades 

For more than four decades, Jeff Peltz’s job description included football coach, mission trip leader, and postmaster for the College Post Office (CPO). After 44 years of working for Wheaton College, in June 2025, Peltz was ready to relinquish one of his roles. He had decided to retire from CPO when the College’s development office approached him with an offer: Would he consider coming aboard as
Associate Director of Development for Athletics to raise funds for improvements to the College’s athletics facilities?

After thinking about it for a couple days, he agreed with just three stipulations. Along with taking on the new job, he wanted to keep football, he wanted to keep mission trips, and he wanted to keep his hair.

Peltz, who’d played on the defensive line at Wheaton, was known for his devotion to the sport. He was on a first-name basis with the nursing staff in his College days, probably played a game or two with a concussion, and was named cocaptain his senior year.

When he graduated, he got a job at Servicemaster—but turned down a raise to come back to Wheaton and serve as an assistant coach on a stipend. To supplement his pay, he took on a dual role directing CPO and coaching.

And there started a decades-long career of pouring into the lives of football players at Wheaton College.

“My ultimate goal is to push the man in front of you to be his very best, to be relentless.”

By God’s grace, Peltz has made good on this aim through relationships on the field at practice, chatting with fans after games, organizing and leading football chapel services on Fridays during the season, and starting the tradition of football mission trips to 28 places around the world, including Ecuador, Venezuela, and Senegal.

In a way, this new role in Development is the most natural fit for Peltz, as it brings together his love for the College, athletics, and his devotion to Christ.