On Nov. 11 and 12, ARIEL Chabad Jewish Center played host to a promising young football star turned drug addict turned six-year federal prison inmate turned Orthodox Jew.
“Growth doesn’t come through comfort,” Shawn Balva said. “I went to prison, I was forced to be in a very uncomfortable situation. … Through that struggle, I was able to become disciplined, I was able to stop doing drugs and alcohol, become religious, take college courses, read, and become a whole different person … from a boy to a man.”
Now a motivational speaker, Balva shared his gripping story with the Chabad in Pikesville and separately, in an interview with Baltimore Jewish Times.
Balva grew up a secular Jew in Las Vegas attending Christian private school and playing football with the hopes of going to the NFL.
“All I cared about was football,” Balva explained. “I was getting looked at by ex-professional athletes. They were telling me, when I was a 13-year-old kid, that ‘You have an opportunity, if you train hard enough, to make it to the NFL.’”
But after one of his football games at age 16, Balva went to a party and drank his first beer and smoked his first cigarette. “I was hooked,” he said.
“I would play my football game Friday night, and then we would go out and party and drink and drink a lot,” Balva said. “Then, the weeks following that, the drinking turned into smoking marijuana. And then weeks after that it turned into smoking marijuana every single day, and then drinking every day, and then dabbling with all different types of pills and this and that, and to the point where, going into my senior year — a year into this behavior — I’m a full-blown drug addict.”
Balva said that the substance abuse didn’t affect his performance on the field: “I was playing well. So why can’t I keep doing drugs?”
Into his senior year as quarterback, he said he felt the urge to pray. “I had really good stats as a quarterback, and for the first time ever in my life, I had a feeling in my heart to pray to Hashem. I don’t know where this came from, because … we didn’t know anything about God. So, I had a feeling to pray, and just one day before the season started, I got on my one knee … And I said, ‘God, please give me a good football season, and I’ll stay away from the drugs completely.’”
Balva said he had two amazing games that season, both on drugs. After those games, he said, he thought about his prayer and decided to quit cold turkey. However, the Thursday night before his third game of the season, a friend came up to him and offered to get high.
“I thought about the prayer that I said asking God to give me a good season, but I didn’t realize how bad my addiction was,” he said. “I went out [and] I smoked with my friend that night.”
The next morning, he was called into the office at his high school for a random drug test. After failing the test, Balva was kicked off the football team entirely.
“They called me into the office and said, ‘Shawn, you failed the drug test. Your career here as a football player is over,’” said Balva. “I was completely devastated, completely. So, what did I do? I dropped out of school. I got deeper into drugs. I started doing five different drugs every single day for the next two years of my life.”
At age 20, Balva was arrested for armed robbery. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. “This is when everything changes for me,” he added.
“I was a big football star, now I’m criminal doing time in prison,” Balva explained. “So sitting there; 21 years old, in prison, and I say to myself, ‘I’m surrounded by all these gang members and criminals. I’m not these people.’”
Balva added, “I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to be a criminal when I get out.’ I know I’m doing all these years, and I want to live healthy and happy and positive when I get out. But what is that? I don’t even know what that looks like anymore. So, a thought came to me that it would be through my roots, through Judaism.”
Balva explained that while in prison one day, he read a magazine provided to the prison by the Aleph Institute, an organization that provides Jews in prison with religious, educational and spiritual resources.
“I’m reading this magazine, and in the magazine, it’s talking about ‘A Jew is supposed to say Shema in the morning, Shema at night.’ I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t know what the Shema is,” he said. “But it said in there that you could fast on Yom Kippur. So, I was like, ‘Okay, this is something that I can understand.’”
Balva shared his story with attendees of ARIEL Chabad Jewish Center’s Shabbat dinner and Shabbat lunch.
“I think [Balva] has a remarkable life story. He’s a person who, as he said himself, hit rock bottom in his life, and that’s what catapulted him to much greater heights,” explained ARIEL’s Rabbi Velvel Belinsky.
“When I started sharing my story to you about the drugs and the crime and drug dealing and robberies … when I talk about that person, I don’t even know who that is,” Balva said.
