Develop Your Talent
Shawn Jones
DIRECTOR, ATHLETICS
Shawn has 30 years of head basketball coaching experience combined with 11 years as an athletic director. He has coached in Colorado and Texas, and has taken teams to three Final Four tournaments and a state championship. He has seen numerous players of his continue on to compete at the college and professional level of the sport. He is also proud to have seen many of his athletes become high school and collegiate coaches themselves. As director of athletics, Shawn is a key member of Ballogy’s team, driving the company’s athletic strategy, partnerships, coach engagement, and product vision. He has been married to his high school sweetheart for 32 years and they have raised three wonderful children together. Shawn has a passion for player development and the desire to assist coaches with effective, time-saving tools of administering and assessing skill development drills.
There is a unique lesson from the book of Matthew in the Bible where the Master of the house gave three of his servant’s specific amounts of money or gold coins, referred to as “talents”, for them to invest while he was away on a journey. As the parable goes, one servant received 5 talents, one received 2, and the other received 1 talent. The servant with 5 invested and doubled his talents, as did the servant who received 2. However, the servant who received 1 talent hid it away and did nothing with it, fearing the risk of losing it.
When the Master returned from his journey he was pleased to find the two servants who had doubled their talents and praised them for being good and faithful servants. The other, however, received harsh words and banishment for not developing or investing his gift. What can we learn from this parable as coaches and athletes?
With my teams over the years, I have used an example of using the escalators in a shopping mall or airport. I’m sure most of us have tried, at one point or another, to climb up the escalator that is going down. It can be done. One can successfully work his way up the down escalator and reach the top, but only with much effort. The kicker is that at any moment you stop moving, you don’t stay where you are— you move down with the escalator and have to work that much harder and exert all that energy just to get back where you were. The escalator doesn’t stop when you do.
My lesson to my teams is that athletic skill development is much like going up that down escalator. If you aren’t actively working to get better, you don’t stay where you are and get to rest on credit earned. You move down. Your skills get rusty. You now have to work twice as hard to get back just to where you were, let alone gain any more ground up the escalator of skills and success.
We were each given certain talents and abilities in life to use for good. I believe that athletic skill is included in that. I believe it is our duty as coaches and athletes to actively work on developing those skills to be our very best. We have to push ourselves and each other to be better every day. We should not be like the servant who was punished for not working to increase his talent. We should not be like the person stopping on the down escalator and still thinking he will make it to the top. Those people are not good servants of their gifts.
Develop your talent! Ballogy is here as a time-saving, motivating, and measurable tool to help you be a good servant of your talents. Go reach the top of the escalator!!!