Former University of Alabama and NFL quarterback Brodie Croyle spent Thursday morning in Summerdale sharing a personal story that had little to do with football scoreboards and everything to do with the values he says shaped his life on and off the field.
Croyle served as the featured speaker at the Central Baldwin Chamber of Commerce’s 11th Annual Prayer Breakfast, held at the Baldwin EMC headquarters. The event drew local business leaders, chamber members and residents for a morning focused on faith and community rather than commerce alone.
Croyle now works as associate executive director of Big Oak Ranch, a ministry his father, John Croyle, founded in 1974 to provide a Christian home for children who have been abused, neglected or abandoned. John Croyle, an All-American defensive end who played for Alabama under legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, started the ranch a year after playing on the Crimson Tide’s 1973 national championship team, following encouragement from Bryant himself. Over four decades, the ranch’s two campuses, a boys’ facility near Gadsden and a girls’ facility near Springville, have taken in more than 1,800 children.
Speaking to the Summerdale crowd, Brodie Croyle traced his own path from childhood on the ranch’s grounds to his years playing quarterback for Alabama from 2002 to 2005 and his subsequent NFL career with the Kansas City Chiefs, who drafted him in the sixth round in 2006. He retired from professional football in 2012.
Croyle recounted facing future Hall of Fame safety Troy Polamalu in his first professional game and described how coaches, including former Kansas City head coach Herm Edwards and former Alabama offensive coordinator David Rader, pushed him to hold himself to a high standard both on the field and away from it.
He also returned to his childhood at Big Oak Ranch, recalling watching a 5-year-old boy cling to his own father as the man abandoned him and his two brothers at the ranch’s doorstep. Croyle said he grew up alongside that boy, using the story to illustrate the kind of transformation the ranch has tried to offer children with nowhere else to turn.
The Central Baldwin Chamber of Commerce has hosted the prayer breakfast annually for more than a decade, using the event to bring together the local business community around a shared moment of reflection each spring. This year’s gathering placed a national athlete’s personal story alongside a distinctly local institution’s long-running mission, tying Croyle’s football career to the broader themes of faith and service that Baldwin County organizers said they hoped attendees would carry into their own work and communities.