“I think my whole life I had everybody …

“I think my whole life I had everybody encouraging me to do everything around me to give myself as many chances to be whatever I wanted to be,” Shumpert said. “Once basketball sort of took the lead with recruiting and everything, it was amazing to hear everybody then sort of switch to hey just focus on school and ball. And then it’s like you get to the pros and everybody’s like just focus on ball. Everything extra is like a bad thing and a lot of my early career was me suppressing other sides of myself to say nah I wanna play ball, I’m committed to this. And now all those others things that I knew I liked to do it was like nah, I’m making my commitment to ball and right now I don’t have a contract so its right that I don’t lie to myself like I don’t enjoy doing other things. and I’m just taking the challenges and saying yes to everything.”