Trust Your Navigation
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.
I remember as a child in the 1970’s going on family vacations with a fold-up paper road map that my parents used to navigate through various states and cities. Anyone familiar with this time knows it was anything but turn-by-turn instructions. In fact, it was at best, merely a guideline, much like the pirate code in Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Sure, it got us from Colorado to California, but everything else was just a wood-grained station wagon rattling between cities at random, based upon which way my Mom was holding the map and which way seemed best to her to tell my Dad as he drove well under the speed limit. It’s a wonder we arrived anywhere accurately…and “on time” was simply “when we got there.”
Today we have turn-by-turn, satellite imagery that can park us within feet of what our phone told us 3,000 miles ago as our destination. It can tell us exactly when we will arrive, and where our favorite oat milk latte can be found along the route with ease. Don’t want to drive in a car on the freeway? It will give you walking or bicycling directions. Want to take public transportation? It directs you to the nearest train, plane, or ship terminal. We now have technology to plan out every inch of the way. We don’t have to get lost, guess, or worry. All we have to do is trust the navigation.
Sometimes I “out-think” my navigation system and end up off track. I look at the red, stalled line of traffic on my navigation screen and duplicated in my windshield and I think I can just jump off at the next exit and beat the delay. As the voice from my GPS notifies me she is recalculating, I whip down side streets and alleys, only to find that my genius plan dead-ended at a drainage canal. The “U-Turn of Shame” begins, and I follow her voice to get me back to a route that will have pavement all the way to the destination. I should have known the engineers with the satellites probably thought through all the scenarios.
It is no mystery that turn-by-turn directions have improved and made our traveling lives easier. We now can plan a trip to somewhere unknown and have the most efficient route laid out before us in real time. We know the turns before we ever pull out of the driveway.
What if we could have a navigation system for athletic skill development? A step-by-step, turn-by-turn instruction system that coaches and players could utilize to know exactly how and when they would reach certain ability level milestones? Actually, we now have it!
Ballogy is an app platform that is the navigation system for athletic development. It will give an athlete or team the turn-by-turn directions to reach the desired level of athletic skill and success.
With drill content accessible from experts across the country, to customizable assignments at the local level, Ballogy provides a roadmap to improve every skill the game entails. No more guessing what to do, or how to do it. No more wondering if your skills are good enough to make it to a certain level. Through Ballogy, athletes can now KNOW the step by step and turn by turn directions to get them where they want to go! Let one of us at Ballogy show you how today!