3/14/2023 0 Comments Clear day rehab greensburg![]() “But I lost focus on what was happening around me.” Skillings talks openly and candidly about his sordid past in the hopes it might help someone else who is caught under the boot of decadence and excess. Young minds go through issues, and they need guidance.” I teach my players to love and respect each other. “I am supposed to point people in the right direction. “I was meant to be a preacher since the seventh grade,” he said. He might not have a degree in counseling, but he has experience from living that life and shares it. He has been preaching for about 20 years at schools and prisons, to youth groups and teams. He also works as a security guard at Torrance State Hospital. Now Skillings, 62, is an ordained elder at New Creation Family Worship Center in Greensburg. ![]() “God spoke to me and said this is what I want for you.” ![]() “I had contentment and joy come over me,” he said. He had exorcised the demons of drug addiction and earned a new set of downs. If I continued to be an addict and live in sin, I knew what I faced.”įrom that point on, he vowed to stay clean, preach the word of God and do his part to make the world a better place. Skillings, then 42, went to the church that night and prayed because, “God gave me an ultimatum. But then it became clear: God was calling me back to church.” It was like I was floating through the universe. Just then he stumbled onto a moment of clarity. The final domino had fallen - for the final time. They usually weren’t on that late at night, but some people had stayed over for choir practice.” When I opened my eyes, all I saw was the lights from my church across the street from my window. I was playing dominoes on the computer, and I kept falling off my chair. “I was filthy and hadn’t showered for days. It was June 9, 2001, he remembers specifically. He checked into rehab.īut he hadn’t learned his lesson - not quite yet.Ī year later, he was sitting at his computer in his Derry apartment, again in a blurred state of disconnect from the world. The former Ohio State defensive back who played in the Canadian Football League for the Montreal Alouettes after he was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys in the sixth round in 1981 was treated and came home. When I came to, paramedics were working on me, and I was arguing with my brother. “I hooked a hose up to my car window,” the second-year coach said. I was feeling like the biggest loser of all time.Ībout two decades before he would become the head football coach at Derry and lead his alma mater into the 2021 season, Skillings’ wild ride of a football career - and destructive brush with fame - nearly came to a tragic conclusion. “I was smoked out on crack and drunk for a week. On a summer night in 1997, he was close to ending it all. He didn’t plan it, but Vince Skillings literally saw the light in the darkest of dark times.
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