What inspired Brian Shannon to be the basketball player he is today?

Brian Shannon is an amazing basketball player and goes to school at O’Dea located in SEATTLE. BJ has worked extremely hard to get to where he is now. He currently plays varsity basketball for O’Dea.

When BJ grew up, he looked up to his older brother heavily. His older brother would later go on to play basketball for University of Washington, but when they were younger BJ would go to his basketball games and watch the way he could control the ball and shoot.

“He was just too nice” says BJ. But this had a huge impact on BJ because he says if it wasn’t for his brother things would’ve been a lot harder. BJ would always play basketball with his brother trying to be just like him if not better. Later, BJs parents would sign him up for different basketball programs which he was very thankful for.

BJ was always ready to go to practice and was consistently trying to improve his skills in which his coaches and teammates noticed. But a huge way BJ was getting better wasn’t just physically playing basketball but watching it on tv. BJs favorite NBA player growing up was LeBron James. He and his brother would watch LeBron’s highlights but, nothing came close to watching the 2017 championship game with Cleveland and the Warriors.

“Watching Lebron play in that game motivated me to play the same in mine”, says BJ. But with having lots of motivation to get better some things demotivated him as well. He would hate it when coaches were too controlling of him. Telling him to pass the ball when he knew he could shoot or the coaches always saying to pass it to the post.

But BJ new that sometimes it was going to be like that he just needed to keep excelling which is what he did. And now BJ Shannon plays point guard on one of the top ranked schools in the state for basketball, O’Dea Fighting Irish.