UToledo Baptism Night, Sept. 14, 2026. (Photos courtesy of Ben Sahakian)
A seed planted years ago in Ben Sahakian’s mind eventually materialized in an athlete-led worship and baptism event Monday night at the University of Toledo.
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After about seven weeks of planning, nearly 400 people showed up to the Fetterman Training Center, and they experienced a night of worship, heard a Gospel message from a local pastor, and also heard athletes like Sahakian and volleyball player Janelle Green share their testimonies. Then they extended an invitation for anyone to be baptized. Before the event started, they had about five people signed up to get in the water.
“Then we started worshiping, and I don’t really know what happened. It was truly God,” Sahakian told Sports Spectrum.
One by one, more and more people kept coming forward to get baptized until about 50 people had entered the water by the end of the night, including children and adults and others in the crowd who were neither students nor athletes. One was an 80-year-old man, said Sahakian, who got to baptize his cousin and several teammates.
After people were baptized, they were connected with a team that equipped them with a Bible, devotionals, a book and information on various local churches that they could get connected with.
Janelle Green (left) and Ben Sahakian share with the audience at the UToledo Baptism Night, Sept. 14, 2026. (Photos courtesy of Ben Sahakian)
How the night came to be, Sahakian said, was a mighty work of the Lord.
When he was playing football at Cornell, Sahakian had a vision of a campus-wide baptism night. He felt it on his heart to lead an event that would provide a space for his peers to come to Christ. Despite his efforts, such an event never materialized at Cornell.
“I tried and tried and tried, and it just did not come together,” Sahakian said. “It wasn’t where the Lord had me. So I hit the portal for this year, and I wrestled with God about where I wanted to go, but He wanted me to go to Toledo.”
A defensive end from Mount Prospect, Illinois, who appeared in all 10 games for Cornell last season, Sahakian admittedly fought the idea of transferring to Toledo at first. But his commitment helped Toledo land the top transfer portal class in the Mid-American Conference.
The first night he arrived at Toledo, he had dinner with the team’s starting quarterback, John Alan Richter. They hit it off as friends and found common ground through a shared faith in Jesus. They went golfing the next day and Sahakian told Richter about his vision of having a baptism night. Richter had that same vision two years prior, he shared.
“The Lord crossed our paths and it all made sense to me in that moment,” Sahakian said. “We were like, ‘This is a big thing, so let’s pray about it.'”
They spent all summer praying about it and he brought the idea back up with Richter about a week before school started. For whatever reason, Richter was having some slight reservations about it. The next day, though, a mutual friend connected Sahakian with Green, who had transferred to Toledo from Cincinnati, knowing they both were believers. They decided to meet up and discuss ideas on how to be Christian leaders on campus and how to best impact the campus for Christ.
Sahakian pitched his idea of the baptism night and she was immediately on board. He called Richter, who was also now in agreement. After discussing and planning the event for about seven weeks, the UToledo Baptism Night was going to happen.
“The Lord really worked it out,” Sahakian said.
UToledo Baptism Night, Sept. 14, 2026. (Photos courtesy of Ben Sahakian)
Sahakian’s idea was to host the event around their first home football game — Sept. 12 — before it got too cold in northern Ohio. Some people felt like that may be too quick of a turnaround.
“But I just had so much peace with the Lord on it,” he said. “Along the way, every single thing we needed was provided.”
T-shirts, parking, a stage, a tub, water and anything in between that they needed to make it happen all fell into place. A couple dozen athletes, around eight local churches and seven on-campus ministries also helped.
On Sunday, a day before the event, Sahakian and other event organizers walked around campus to pray over it and wrote some advertisements with chalk on sidewalks.
Then, they stood in awe as the Lord went to work Monday night.
“I’ve never been a part of anything like this,” Sahakian said. “Being able to lead it was just absolutely amazing.”
Since Sahakian is a fifth-year graduate-student football player, his plans in Toledo as of now don’t extend past the end of the calendar year. He knew when he transferred that his stay would be short, so his focus was on how much impact he could have in that window of time. Whether that leads to future events like this remains undetermined.
“Truly, the Lord has already exceeded my expectations in every way,” Sahakian said. “But the vision that we’re having as a group is this: We have an amazing platform as athletes. There’s clearly hunger here on campus. The reality is we want to do things like this led by athletes, not any individual organization. And there’s a strong desire here.”
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