Love, Basketball and Leadership: Lessons from Coach Q
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 had the great pleasure of sitting down with Odessa College Head Coach Franqua Beddell–more affectionately known by those close to him as “Coach Q” to talk basketball, life, and most importantly, relationships.
Coach Q has enjoyed great success in coaching throughout his career, ranging from a high school State Championship as an assistant coach to a collegiate National Championship as a Head Coach, with a whole array of conference, tournament, and regional championships scattered throughout.
What stood out to me, however, was not the success…(which, ultimately speaks for itself in Coach Q’s career), but rather the passion and excitement for the relationships within those successes that seem to matter most to him.
One simply cannot have a conversation with Coach Q about his teams or career without hearing the deep respect and love he has for the individual members of those teams— from players to coaches, AD’s to colleagues. He truly values the individual relationships within each season campaign.
We visited about how to get kids to play hard. How to get kids to work hard. How to get kids to believe in themselves and each other to do something great. It always came back to LOVE. Coach Q believes and has modeled the philosophy that if you LOVE kids unconditionally, they will in turn give you all they have on the basketball court to be successful with you.
It has proven to be a winning philosophy. Taking over a struggling program in Tallahassee Community College, Coach Q began a 6 year journey loving his players into investing in their future. In fact, they wrote down the goal and belief that they could, and WOULD, win a national championship a few years earlier… and then it came to fruition in 2018, as Tallahassee Community College won the NJCAA Div 1 National Championship, just as they dreamed.
Coach Q joined a very small fraternity of coaching achievements— one of only a handful to take three different programs to the National Tournament, the first African-American male coach to win a Division 1 championship in Junior College basketball, and the first ever to win one on the women’s side. This accomplishment Coach Q values highly, as one of his role models, Nolan Richardson, was the first to do it on the men’s side.
As a Head Coach, Coach Q has won a National Championship, several Conference Championships, been to two Final Fours and two Elite Eights. He has seen several of his players move on to play in the WNBA and a few enter the coaching and athletic administration professions.
But out of all of that, he will quickly defer to the fact that the most important and valuable thing to him is the relationships with the individuals in each of those years. His locker room currently has a sign that simply says, “LOVE”. It all starts there. If they can learn to love each other, they can achieve great things.
Currently the Head Coach at Odessa College, Coach Q has begun to repeat the stair-step success he built in Tallahassee. He has watched his program improve each year from 8-17, 16-10, 30-5, and 20-10 most recently. Certainly he has Odessa headed in the right direction and knocking on championship doors.
From everyone here at Ballogy, we want to wish Coach Q and Odessa great success in the coming years! We know that the love and relationships he is building now will pay off great dividends in the future. Like Coach Q says, “Love wins!”, and he is winning at both the relationships and the game!