LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Playing on a team means taking the losses with the wins, but as Coach Tyrone "Ty" Anderson will tell you, it’s about much more than that.

He's spent more than three decades training young athletes to think beyond the field. 

At a practice one evening in June, he wore a shirt that makes clear what he expects from his players. 

The words "attitude" and "effort" were printed on each sleeve.

“That will be sustainable in football, in sports, in life, at home, whether you’re doing your chores or whatever," Anderson told Spectrum News 1. "Good attitude, maximum effort.” 

It’s just one of the life lessons he hopes will stick with the children of the St. Stephen Youth Football and Cheer program. 

Every spring, kids ages 5 to 13 come from all over Louisville.

Their first games are next month. 

On the field located in the California neighborhood, the “attitude and effort” motto goes both ways. 

"You won’t hear any curse words on my field," said Anderson. "You won’t see a coach showing disrespect to your child ... In many cases, we are the father, we are the older brother. I have coaches that go to their birthday parties, that show up at their schools on certain days, will call them to see how things are going.”

In the 33 seasons Anderson has been running the program, this is one of the stats he’s most proud to share:

“Because of the parents, because of the coaches, because of the church members, we have never ever turned a child away because they couldn’t pay their fees or couldn’t buy their own equipment.” 

He has hosted countless spaghetti dinners and pre-game sleepovers for the kids in his home.

"From day one, it’s been about more than just football," said Demetrius Gray, a former football player in the program. 

“A lot of the conversations he’s going to have with them, they’re not going to be about Xs and Os," he said. "Everything with him is going to be about what can you do today to make your life better later, at least for me, that’s what the conversations were always about.”

For Gray, those conversations began when he was growing up in his old neighborhood, Louisville’s Park Hill public housing community.

That’s where he said Anderson recruited him and shaped his life.

“Man ... My personal hero," Gray said. "My mentor. Everything I’ve ever known about a man and what it was going to take to be a man, my first example of that was him."

Gray met his wife in the program, a cheerleader, and they’ve been married 20 years. 

Coach Tyrone "Ty" Anderson with Demetrius Gray, a former participant in a Louisville youth football and cheer program, who calls Anderson his "personal hero." (Spectrum News 1/Erin Kelly)

And today, Gray is a sales manager at a Chevy dealership.

"All through his influence," said Gray. 

There is nothing he wouldn’t do for Anderson, he said. 

"He just really went out of his way to show me, show all of us, really, what it took to survive," said Gray. "He understood where we were and where we came from.”

But it is where the young athletes are going and the choices they have ahead of them that the coach wants them to think about. 

“I want them to know that if you work hard, if you do it with a good attitude, the wins will come, and that win may not be in a ballgame," said Anderson. 

The program runs off registration fees and donations and the team is always looking for donations, Anderson said.