An hour or two after he finished up his player development work at Ball Arena on Wednesday, Spencer Jones was scribbling math equations on a whiteboard in Aurora.
Using NBA salaries as an example, he walked through the difference between mean and median to a handful of teenagers. Four players in a sample of five might make between $2 million and $4 million per year, he explained, but if the fifth is Nikola Jokic, the mean is no longer an accurate portrayal of the real average.
Jones is likely not a player you’ll hear about much this NBA season. He’s on a two-way contract, meaning he splits his time between the Nuggets and their G League affiliate, the Grand Rapids Gold. (He’s on the low end of the salary scale if you’re trying to calculate the average earnings of a pro basketball player.) Even so, he’s trying to find spare time whenever he can to help teach young people at a local nonprofit called Generation Schools Network.
“Obviously, with a tough NBA schedule and my lack of flexibility sometimes, I needed something where I could have an impact, rather than just show up and say hi,” Jones told The Denver Post.
“Usually, I have my schedule before the week starts, and I just pick when I can come in. I’m like, boom, let’s do this one-hour segment where we’re learning about the three branches of government. It’s all stuff I know, so I can prep up a lesson plan in like 30 minutes and come in and actually teach them. That’s been fun, the ability to actually teach rather than just come in and talk about the cool things about my job.”
The nonprofit provides high school education access to Colorado students who have been through the criminal justice system and aren’t welcomed back into traditional schools. Jones, who’s entering his second year with the Nuggets after playing college ball at Stanford, used to do community work with underprivileged children in Palo Alto. He wanted to find ways to give back in Denver, too.
He eventually met a former employee of GSN and attended a couple of isolated events. “Then we decided, let’s do something a little more ongoing, something more consistent so the kids would see me more often,” he said.
While getting to know the students, Jones asked who they look up to as a leader. He noticed that their answers to the ice-breaker were often people not directly in their lives — social media content creators, musicians, even fictional characters.
“They haven’t had anybody who pours into them. … Kids who don’t have a steady home life, they’re bored all the time; nobody’s really paying too much attention to them, so they just want to feel something,” Jones said. “So a lot of the crimes they commit, they’re not really thinking too much about the next day, the next year or whatever. It’s just, ‘No one really cares. … I’m hungry, let me go steal from this gas station,’ or, ‘Let me just get in a fight because it’s fun and I get to have an interaction with somebody.’ … A lot of it’s just coming from (them) not having a lot of people pouring into them.”
Jones hopes he can be that mentor, focusing on empathy and attentiveness to the students rather than authority over them. His partnership with the organization is called “Spencer’s Kids.” He’s taken a couple of them to Ball Arena to show them around his office. The course taught by him is about leadership, government and society.
Class can go in all sorts of directions. Like on Wednesday, when he laid out the importance of saving money and planning long-term with finances — even for the median NBA player.
“I love it because the education piece is huge to me,” Jones said. “They can come here and have the education be built around their circumstances instead of trying to get them to conform to the traditional classroom. … It’s a lot easier for me to teach them than for some of the other people to, just because naturally, you know, (people) love to gravitate to an NBA player.
“So that’s really why I like doing it. Look, you’ve got their attention. You might as well use it to get them where they need to be. … That’s the benefit of being an athlete.”
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