Shawn Swords has plenty of reason to smile this summer.

A little over a month ago, the Long Island Nets officially introduced the Ottawa native who starred with the Laurentian Voyageurs men’s basketball team and later returned to his alma mater to coach the OUA lads for some 16 years as the eighth head coach in their G-League franchise history.

The move comes almost four years to the day when Swords was offered a job as an assistant coach with the affiliates of the Brooklyn Nets (NBA), ascending to the role of associate head coach the past three years.

Come September, both of his daughters will be suiting up with top end NCAA basketball programs, Syla entering her third year with the Michigan Wolverines while Savvy begins her college journey as a freshman with the University of Kentucky Wildcats. Both girls are also fresh off a summer that has seen them become more entrenched as mainstays with the Canadian national team program.

Yet for all of this heady stuff, the primary reason for the smile on the face of Shawn Swords lies with a far more simple pleasure. “I just love to coach,” said the 52 year-old, in town recently given the local family ties through his spouse, Shelley Dewar. “I think people look and wonder: why is he so happy in the gym?”

“It’s the best, just a great environment.”

Shawn Swords is the exception to the rule in the pool of G-League coaches, not focused in the least on leveraging his current position in search of an opportunity the next level up. For the bulk of his time at L.U., that sentiment also rang true. As long as the family was happy and comfortable in the city where they were located, Swords would find joy in what can only be described as his truly, happy place.

“I never really had a bucket list (of coaching opportunities),” said Swords. “I am still working on being a better coach; how can I help players in different environments. Maybe that’s the bucket list item: can I keep improving, can I keep pushing myself as a coach.”

For as much as one can envision the jump from Laurentian to Long Island to be a fairly significant one, and certainly that would hold true for some of the level of talent on hand, Swords suggested that in many ways, there wasn’t as much of a difference as one might expect.

“In my first year in Long Island, my last team at Laurentian might have been almost as old,” he said. “With NIL (Name, Image & Likeness), kids are staying in college longer (in the States) – but for those kids who are one and done or two and done, they’re really young coming into the pros.”

And from a stylistic standpoint, Shawn Swords was already more than halfway there.

“I think I was a bit of a pro coach at Laurentian anyways in the sense that I liked to get the ball in the best players’ hands and let them make decisions,” he said. “I think the NBA was like that a lot more but now has trended away from that.”

If there is one thing that jumped out at Swords, it lie in the daily routine in moving from a setting where four straight days of practices give me to a pair of weekend games, in most weeks, to a 50-game regular season schedule filled with 10 games a month. “In the pros, you can barely ever practice hard,” he said, referencing the in-season schedule of his team.

“You’ve got to be smarter about when you’re doing live play in practice.”

Ironically, it could be argued that once again, the Long Island template actually suited coach Swords better. “I still think, like in a lot of sports, coaches complicate things when your job is to make it simple for the players.”

“It’s like anything – you just try and find a connection with the guys, regardless of their age or where they are from.”

When Shawn Swords is not talking basketball with his players, his coaching brethren become his sounding board. “I had a great coaching staff at Laurentian – but it was small. I liked going to the G- League where we have five assistant coaches.”

As with any minor league system, the balancing act can be challenging. From a coaching standpoint, there is no escaping the fact that it was always be a results-based industry. But from the standpoint of the big club (aka Brooklyn Nets), there are bigger picture goals in play.

“The G League is there to prepare younger NBA players, get them reps they would not get in the NBA,” said Swords. “But they (development and winning) can go hand in hand because developing a winning culture is a big part of what it’s all about.”

From top to bottom, he is happy the Nets are aligned in their philosophy.

“It’s something we try and preach every day: be where your feet are,” said Swords. “If you’re in Long Island, you’re working with our coaches, doing the best you can to get to Brooklyn. But don’t be in Long Island thinking every day about when you are going to be in Brooklyn.”

“Just focus on getting better; try and improve every day.”

That is exactly the same messaging that Syla and Savannah have received, pretty much from their start in the sport as they look to form part of the nucleus of the Canadian senior women’s team for the next decade or more. Multi-sport athletes through much of their time at R.L. Beattie Public School, the Swords sisters really exploded on to the basketball spotlight once they connected with the Lu-Hi Crusaders program in Brookville, New York.

“We didn’t really think about it until we got to the U.S., and even then, it was probably a year in,” said Shawn. “It’s not really something we think about. Not that you don’t dream about it – but you’re just focused in getting better.”

Because that, more than anything, would make their dad smile.