Extra Effort: Where Are They Now? Josh Owens
Posted July 30, 2020 10:57 p.m. EDT
Updated July 30, 2020 11:24 p.m. EDT
Salemburg, N.C. — When Tom Suiter presented Josh Owens with the Extra Effort Award, the Lakewood High School standout thought he may be involved with college sports or minor league baseball by now. It turns out, he had a higher calling.
"There's a lot to like about three-sport star Josh Owens from Lakewood High School," Tom Suiter said back in 2007.
"That feels like forever ago, and also just yesterday in so many ways," said Josh Owens, former winner of the Tom Suiter Extra Effort Award.
"Josh Owens loves to compete and he won't be outworked," Suiter said in the 2007 video.
"I don't want to be denied just because I didn't work hard enough or because I didn't put in that extra hour in the gym," Owens said back on that day. "I want to be the best that I can because that makes everyone else around me succeed."
"It's also interesting to watch that back and hear myself talk about certain things that I still value today: respecting other people, the value of hard work," Owens said.
That powerful ethic carried Owens from college to college. From an undergrad at Campbell, to an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religion at Wingate. He saves his most important work on that subject for Sundays, preaching the good word as Associate Minister at the First Baptist Church of Monroe.
"Part of this job entails that we walk alongside people in the best times and the worst times of their lives, and to try to speak the word of hope and assurance in that," Owens said. "That's a great honor to me, to be invited into the sacred places of someone's life. It is humbling and it is rewarding in so many ways. It's not something I take for granted."
Owens fills that athletic void by officiating youth sports. Through every avenue, every walk of his life, serving the community that helped make him the man he is today.
"That's the beautiful thing about life, we know what we're passionate about, we know what we want to do, but part of the joy is finding new ways to live out all of those things," Owens said.
That's why from that day in 2007 until the present, we're proud to call Josh Owens a winner of the Tom Suiter Extra Effort Award.
