FORTVILLE — There was hesitation. Fear. Uncertainty.
Sydney Shelton didn’t know if she was ready to share. How would people react? Would they criticize? Would they understand?
Those questions and more burned within before the former Indiana All-Star decided to fully commit and let her voice and perspective shine.
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A girls basketball state champion at Mt. Vernon before graduating and heading off to Butler in 2016, Shelton portrayed an image. An illusion of self resulting from her own pursuit of perfection, she recalls.
For an extensive period in her life, existence was equated with hoops and clinging to falsehood. Everything she could control had to be in order to function, to fit in, to be accepted, to meet her own overwhelming expectations.
After a roller coaster two-years at Butler, a transfer to Lipscomb in 2018, a nearly career-ending hip and leg injury she discovered last year, and her personal battle with anorexia and orthorexia, Shelton had an unquenchable desire to get her message out.
She just wasn’t sure, if she was brave enough.
“I was so nervous to post about anything in the beginning. I was the type that was always anxious to post because I was afraid of how people were going to perceive something or what they would think,” Shelton said.
“My mom (DeAnne) told me, if you’re going to put something on social media, you have to understand there’s always going to be someone who says something. People are going to like it or they aren’t going to like it. But, if you do post, be confident about it and make it something you really feel strongly about. Something that’s you.”
Two years ago, Shelton launched her first post at 6 minutes, 16 seconds. The next installment didn’t materialize until a year later, but as she gained more perspective on her own journey so increased the frequency of her deliverables.
“Drinking Coffee, Spilling Tea,” is now Shelton’s primary hobby, a YouTube channel she updates every Thursday, named by her friend and Lipscomb teammate Dorie Harrison.
A devout Christian, Shelton focuses on spirituality, cultural topics, facing life’s individualized challenges and opens up about her own struggles from body image shaming to her on-going recovery from hip surgery late last year.
In the past, Shelton’s life was purely basketball. Today, she’s more reliant on who she knows she can be without labels.
“I didn’t think I had a lot of other stuff to offer, honestly, besides basketball,” Shelton said. “I think with a lot of athletes, we might feel the same way. Our sports are what we do, and we can’t do a whole lot besides that.”
While the game is still her passion, it doesn’t define her as a person. That fallacy required a deep inner reflection to extract when nothing seemed pre-determined anymore and the future unknown.
Yet, the first sign didn’t surface until the summer following her freshman year at Butler when Shelton’s mind and body both screamed out there was a problem, though her ego muted the internal pain.
“I remember one time my parents made something to eat over a summer when I was home. When I found out what was in it, I literally cried. Looking back, no one should cry over an ingredient that’s in your food,” Shelton said.
“That’s a problem. I shouldn’t have been that obsessed with food. I think my problem was I had to be loved for who I am. I had to control my body. I had to control what I ate. I wanted to be in the best shape possible, so I could perform my best on the court. It was all about how I was being perceived by other people and trying to earn my worth and value through success and through basketball.”
Facing the truth
At 5-foot-7, Shelton’s weight reached its lowest point at 115 pounds. Her frame carried five percent body fat. Her heart would beat irregularly or would strain to keep up with her physical activity.
Climbing stairs wasn’t routine, it was a grueling effort that echoed her self-induced weakness.
Shelton had just finished up her first season at Butler, being named to the Big East All-Freshman Team. She averaged 8.8 points and 2.6 rebounds per game and was the top 3-pointer shooter in the conference at 49 percent. She started 24 of 27 games and was building towards a strong collegiate career.
The years prior, she was an all-state high school player and a state champion in 2013, but she rarely, if at all, stopped and listened to her inner voice. If she was hurt, she buried the pain and pressed on. If she felt burnt out, she worried about how others would judged her lack of effort and seriousness.
After 11 games into her sophomore season at Butler, Shelton finally said enough was enough. She left.
“It just wasn’t a good fit for me, so I decided to transfer, and I decided to go to Lipscomb because I knew people who went there,” Shelton said.
Speaking to her friends Lauren Rau and Emily Kmec, who both played at Lipscomb, Shelton believed she found her new home. She felt at ease in Nashville, Tenn.
Despite having to sit out a year due to NCAA transfer rules, she was positive and terrified simultaneously.
“It was scary because I know the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. There are no such things as perfect conditions,” Shelton said. “When you’re in high school it’s really hard to make a good college decision because you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. You have all these expectations and have all these people telling you what you want to hear.
“For me, the second time around I was so much more educated and I knew what I wanted. It was about finding the best fit for me.”
Lipscomb proved just that. Under coach Laurn Sumski, Shelton felt a profound cultural shift that was inviting and inline with her own.
“I got so lucky with Lipscomb because it’s so rare to have coaches that really practice what they preach. I’ve become so much more confident as a person and as a player being at Lipscomb and the family culture they are in the process of building,” Shelton said. “They’ve helped me grow so much. It’s really made me enjoy basketball.”
It was also where she finally asked for help.
Controlling Everything
If Shelton was hungry, she didn’t always eat. And when she did, everything had to be within her acceptable range.
No sweets were allowed. Sugars and other unhealthy foods weren’t just avoided, they would make her fearful of gaining weight or becoming less than perfect.
Once daily activities became taxing, she knew it time to look in the mirror. She had an eating disorder.
“Basically, I didn’t eat when I was hungry, or if I had to eat, I couldn’t go past a certain amount of calories in a day or I didn’t want to eat certain foods,” Shelton said. “That’s when I started reaching out to people for help. That’s when that switch flipped.”
Shelton jumped on YouTube to learn about her disorder and seek support, asking questions and gaining the courage she desperately needed to make a change.
She turned to the training staff at Lipscomb and with the help of her parents, teammates and friends, she went “all-in” to get back to being healthy.
In January of 2019, she freed herself. She allowed herself to eat what she wanted, when she wanted and how ever much she wanted to put on healthy weight while retraining her body to absorb and process food.
“I had to gain 60 pounds to get back to where I should be, and that was hard. It was a long year-long journey, and it could have been longer, but I basically decided I was going to listen to my body,” Shelton said.
“For me, it was hard to relearn to listen to my body. It was hard to first love my body at the weight it was supposed to be. It’s been a journey.”
A primary topic on her YouTube channel, Shelton continues to share her story and receives consistent feedback from those who have gone down a similar path and are still battling today.
“I can honestly say, I love helping other people get to their healthy weight and listen to their body,” Shelton said. “I’ve talked about it so much because it’s so prevalent in society today, and me personally, when I was underweight, I wasn’t happy. I was very depressed and very anxious. Struggling mentally and I think now I am so much better of a person. So much more confident. I have so much more energy. For me, that’s so much more worth it, then to be at a smaller size.”
Healthy again, Momentarily
With her eating disorder behind her, Shelton was eager to get back on the court. After regaining her strength and eligibility in 2019, Shelton began preseason workouts, but she noticed a growing pain in her hip.
The aches started in August, but it wasn’t until October that it started to slow her down.
“My hip has always ached and throbbed. It hurt when I exercised and when I would run,” Shelton said. “As season began to approach at the end of October, especially, it started to get so much worse. All the aching and throbbing and pain just in general kind of turned into this really sharp pain.
“It was almost unbearable. I could hardly walk. It hurt to sleep on. It started to get so bad, and that’s when I finally decided to go to the doctor and got an MRI.”
Doctors examined her hip and found she had a substantial fracture in her femur and a torn labrum on her left side, which could end her basketball career.
“My doctor said if I would have gone any longer, there was a chance that my femur could have completely snapped. She brought up Kevin Ware,” Shelton said. “She said the biggest bone in your body could have snapped, if I kept playing on it, and then I would have had to have a complete hip replacement at the age of 22.”
Her injury required surgery this past January in Nashville, but before Shelton went in to have it examined, she played three games and averaged 7.3 points on one leg.
“I’m really stubborn, so I probably went way longer than I should have,” Shelton said. “It literally started hurting in August, so I waited way too long. But, luckily I stopped before it was too late.”
The recovery has been difficult as she slowly regained her range of motion, leg strength and mobility. Doctors initially told her, she might not play again
“I thought, this is probably it for me. It was a really tough thing to swallow,” Shelton said. “Luckily, I have some really good people around me that reminded me that my worth wasn’t just in basketball. I was able to keep as much perspective as I could and found what really makes me, me. That was a big discovering myself moment.”
The surgery required three screws to be inserted into her femur and massive corrective procedures on her labrum.
“My doctor said, in her words, it was ‘the bloodiest, angriest, reddest labrum she has ever seen. I’ve never seen a labrum that irritated.’ I’ve always struggled with kind of finding balance. I’ve always errored on the side of pushing myself way too hard,” Shelton said.
“They put four anchors in my labrum. Three screws in my femur. I also tore another ligament. She shaved the whole head of my femur because I had a lot of bone spurs. So, I got a lot done to my hip,” Shelton added. “They basically told me that they weren’t sure if I would even be able to run again with all of that.”
Though her recovery is still a work in progress, the redshirt senior ran for the first time in eight months last week. With two years of eligibility left, she hopes to take advantage of both with a newfound outlook on her life and sports.
“It helped me step back and ask what does my life look like, what do I look like if I’m not playing basketball?,” Shelton said.
More Than a Basketball Player
“One of the main reasons I started my YouTube channel was because I wanted to help other people. I wanted to share what I learned,” Shelton said. “If it helps one person, then that’s great. I’ve gotten a lot of purpose and fulfillment out of that.”
When her career was in doubt, Shelton sought out to redefine herself. As a kid, and even early through her collegiate career, basketball was her identity.
Now, she’s more in tune with her own purpose, which includes basketball, but isn’t dominated by it.
YouTube and the book she is attempting to write, based on her journal through her eating disorder and injury, are big components in her transformation.
“I think there’s a lot of power when you can talk about things, especially on social media because whatever the topic or issue might be, if we don’t talk about it, nothing is going to change,” Shelton said. “The more we talk about it, the more unified we become and the more we can be the change as this generation.”
From social justice, racial inequality, faith and eating disorders, Shelton takes elements from her daily meditations and applies them in video posts.
She’s discussed relationships, nutrition, the pandemic and addictions.
“The more you talk about something the more it diffuses the power around that. For me, I did struggle with an eating disorder. I did struggle with body image. I struggled with performance anxiety, and I’m a perfectionist, type A. I want to do everything perfectly, and whatever is in my power, I want to control it,” Shelton said.
“Food was one of those things. I thought, if I could control my food, I could control my life essentially. I could control how I looked, how I performed.”
Shelton is trying to break the silence on those topics in videos ranging from a few minutes to 34 at a time.
“Basically, I was so absorbed, especially with myself that it made me naturally selfish in the way that I would think about things. Now, that I can talk about this stuff, I’m literally so free,” she said.
“It was a long journey, but I can honestly say, I’m free from that. I love to talk about it, and I love to help other people, so that’s something I am really passionate about. Anything you keep in the dark. It will always keep you captive.”
