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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.

by Shawn Jones on Jan 28, 2025

If you coach for longer than two weeks, you will encounter a kid who is “difficult.” He might not be difficult to others; he saves it all for you. Other times, every teacher in the school struggles with a student all day, and you get to enjoy her zest for life during evening practice.

How do coaches deal effectively with difficult kids? (Disclaimer: If they don’t have talent, it’s a whole lot easier to deal with them.)
Since we’re assuming we’re talking about talented athletes who are difficult, we must find a way to work with them without ending up on the evening news or having a flag on our teaching certificate.

After 30 years of coaching, I can promise you I’ve dealt with many, many difficult kids. And, believe it or not, most of the time the kids really weren’t trying to be difficult. Most often, it’s a situation where the kid has been told his whole life that he is great and the best one on the team. That belief system creates a difficult situation for any coach and any team.

I learned after many years of frustration and failed approaches that the best way to deal with difficult kids is: Communicate, Administrate, and Affection-ate. (OK, that was poetic license, but it really is true.) Kids want you to be real and honest. Tell them the truth. Kids want to be held to a standard and pushed. Every kid does, deep down. Kids also want love. Whether they get a ton of it at home or not, kids want you to love them.

So many times, the difficult kid I could not reach, motivate, or discipline enough simply needed me to communicate clearly what the standards were, why they needed to reach those standards, and love them through failure and success to turn things around. Let’s be honest—we might not end up with our names in the yearbook as the person who catapulted them to a great life, but we can reach a workable, successful relationship where they do their job for the team, they reach personal success, and we all enjoy winning.

I would challenge you this year: Identify the kid you think is going to be difficult. Communicate clearly and often what your values and standards are, so they can understand your vision. Then, hold them to that standard every day. Be consistent, and love them through the whole process—when they fail, when they succeed, when they are difficult, and when they are locked in. You will never be sorry for investing effort and love in your most difficult athlete. It will never make the situation worse; it can only make it better. And, if you’re fortunate, it can result in that difficult kid buying in and making you look like a genius.