At the end of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the title character, now an elderly veteran, visits the American military cemetery in Normandy, France. He finds the grave of the Army Captain who led the mission to save his life and remembers his last, dying words to him: “Earn this.” Meaning, live a life worthy of the sacrifices made to save you. Remembering that harrowing scene decades later, Ryan, in tears, turns to his wife and says, “Tell me I’ve led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man.”

What does it mean to lead a good life, to be a good person? I thought of those questions reading a recent, powerful story in the New York Times: This Man Turned the Worst Job in College Basketball Into a Slam Dunk. “This man” is Matt Lynch, 33, head coach of the men’s basketball team at University of South Carolina Salkehatchie, a small regional school about an hour west of Charleston.

Salkehatchie is likely the opposite of your image of “elite university.” When Lynch arrived, its basketball program hardly existed. In the eight months before his appointment, four coaches had been hired and quit. The starting salary was $38,000, there were no other staff, no recruiting budget, and no players. But Lynch was undaunted.

With the help of his mother and siblings, Lynch renovated the dilapidated locker room. Connections led to new uniforms donated by Nike. To find prospective players, he traveled thousands of miles and watched hours of games online. The result was a roster literally from around the world. And after one season Salkehatchie basketball has a winning record and a chance to be in the playoffs.

The reason this story was in the Times, however, is not Lynch’s remarkable drive or accomplishments, but because he is gay.

According to Outsports, the website that chronicles L.G.B.T.Q. athletes, there had never been a publicly gay men’s head coach in any of the North American major professional leagues, nor in college football or men’s basketball until Lynch.

There was no way for Lynch to know if being gay would affect his job prospects, but it remained a question in the back of his mind — even for a job that was within his reach.

“If I was going to get a head coaching job, I knew it was going to be at a place that needed to be built,” said Lynch, who came out publicly nearly four years ago in an essay for Outsports…. “All I ever wanted was an opportunity. The way I looked at it was this may be a bad job, but it’s my bad job. You’ve got to make the big time where you are.”

Matt Lynch understands that being a good coach means being a good person. Not only does he guide his team in playing basketball, but he also guides his players in being human. As he told one family, “There’s nothing sexy about Salkehatchie. But if you come here, you’re going to be a better man, a better student and a better athlete.” And “being better” would extend to all areas of life.

Lynch made no assurances to parents about playing time or winning. But he made two promises: that they would know how to change a flat tire and properly knot a tie.

Thus far, being gay in a small town in the deep South has not been a problem. Nor has it been in coaching his team, where his humanness and openness have only been an asset.

Since players arrived in late August, Lynch has addressed his sexual orientation with the team once — when he hosted a September retreat at his house in Wilmington, N.C. On their last night, the team sat around a bonfire in the backyard….

He told the players he did not need their acceptance — that it had taken nearly 30 years to accept himself. “He’s not afraid to open himself up to us, which is a big positive,” said Darcy Pares, a guard from Port Macquarie, Australia. “We might not like him some days at practice, we might not like him when he wakes us up early to go to the weight room, but we know he’s doing it because he really cares about us.”

While the reaction in the comments to this “feel good” story was overwhelmingly positive, I wondered about how Matt Lynch would otherwise be evaluated in today’s culture. He has thrown himself into a job with no prestige and that, by most standards, pays a pittance. I recently watched a series of on-the-street interviews with undergrads at Harvard. Upon graduation, all expected jobs in major financial or technology companies, paying six-figure salaries. No doubt, their family and friends would be very proud of them. But what if they decided to follow a Matt Lynch type path?

From this story, there can be no doubt that Lynch could have found success in any number of more lucrative careers. But this has been his dream, and he’s followed it. In following that dream, just as in his coming out, he has decided to be true to himself. Doing so takes both encouragement and courage.

One of Jesus’ more perplexing and paradoxical teachings was that we must lose our life in order to find it. I think the life Jesus wants us to lose is the life we think we are supposed to live, the person we think we are supposed to be. We pick up those ideas and images in all sorts of places, especially family, school, religion, and the media. Yet deep within all of us is also an image of our self waiting to be discovered and allowed to flourish.

“Have I been a good person?” Often, we think the measure of that is whether we have made some Mother Theresa-like sacrifices. But I think the real measure is whether we have been the person we know we truly are. In making that choice, Matt Lynch has not only become the coach he felt called to be, but he is also showing the true meaning of being a good person, to his players and to everyone around him.