Shawn Healey

- 2023 -

Athlete - Coach - Gymnastics

For the past 40 years, Shawn has been a fixture at TAISO Gymnastics Training Centre. As an athlete in the mid-seventies, the Dartmouth native won several National and University-level medals while competing for Dalhousie University. As a result, Shawn was named 1976 Dalhousie University Athlete of the Year. Once university was completed, Shawn came out to Sackville to help a friend who had started a gymnastics club operating out of Sackville High School. The club, which became TAISO Gymnastics, was given 2700 sq/ft in the Sackville Town Centre in the early 1980’s and in 1988 moved into it’s present 12000 sq/ft facility on First Lake Drive. Shawn was instrumental in the acquisition, planning and development of the club.

Shawn has coached several National, Canada Winter Games, and International Medalists from 1987 to present day. He was on the Gymnastics Nova Scotia Board of Directors from 1996-2016. He received a Gymnastics Nova Scotia and Sport Nova Scotia Service Award in 2000, was Gymnastics Nova Scotia’s Coach of the Year several times and Gymnastics Canada’s Coach of the Year in 1991. Shawn was also Co-Chair of the first Eastern Canadian Gymnastics Championships held in Halifax in 2003 and was Gymnastics Canada’s Sport Liaison for the 2011 Canada Winter Games held in Halifax. In November 2022, Shawn was inducted into the first ever Gymnastics Nova Scotia Hall of Fame.

On the International side, Shawn coached an athlete to the 2000 World Trampoline and Tumbling Championships in South Africa. He also was a coach for Canadian teams to international events in Belgium in 2014 and Portugal in 2016 where TAISO athletes took home several medals. He has been a presenter and clinician at many Gymnastics Nova Scotia Symposiums and clinics throughout Atlantic Canada and is well respected by his peers in the gymnastics and sport community at all levels in Nova Scotia and across the country.