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Shalee Lehning Part 1: Becoming a star began at a young age
Published 5/7/2009 in Sports
Editor's Note: This is the first of a three-part series on former Sublette and Kansas State phenom Shalee Lehning..
By BRETT MARSHALL
SUBLETTE — The signs were there early and some close to her were quick to recognize it.
At age three, with a basketball almost as big as her, Shalee Dawn Lehning dribbled without fumbling it away.
"My parents were pretty fascinated that I could keep the ball going at that age," Lehning said. "I guess I would just dribble it around and it was characteristic of who I became as a player."
Lehning was a child prodigy of sport. She grew up in Sublette, a town of 1,500 people, a typical southwest Kansas farming community. She was born Oct. 27, 1986, at the Southwest Medical Center in Liberal.
To the best of her parents knowledge, she was the first girl in the area with the name Shalee. Yet, her mother, Jane, takes no credit for the name.
"Most of our friends had two kids and we were the first ones to have a third," Jane recalled. "Nora Kite, one of our friends who now lives in Garden City, came up with the name. We also considered Cassandra and Amber, but we all agreed on Shalee."
Shalee's older sister, Andrea Middleton, now lives in Wichita with three children of her own, says that her younger sibling just took to sports naturally.
"I can remember when she first had a basketball and she was just so itty, bitty," Andrea said, who is older than Shalee by 11 years. "When she was young, she always went to our sports and watched us. She was just always doing something with sports."
Middleton credits their father, Steve, and brother, Matt, two years younger than her, for creating an atmosphere in which Shalee thrived.
"They were always working with her, she's trying to dribble the ball everywhere," Andrea said. "I think the thing that Dad did for all of us was to teach us how to work hard and give our very best. That is a characteristic we all have, but Shalee took it to another level."
And then there is Matt, a talented athlete himself who starred for the Larks football, basketball and track teams. He played football at Garden City Community College and the University of Wyoming. He is the older, protective brother, who never gave an inch in teaching her about competition.
"I'm sure there are a lot of people who think I was too hard on her and I'm sure I was," Matt said of Shalee. "I think her first basketball might have been one of those mini-sized one for kids, but she just always seemed to enjoy the dribbling. I always wanted her to know that to be really good, you had to work harder than anybody else. I think that is what has kept her grounded, even when she was really young."
Jane recalls the purchase of Barbie dolls when Shalee was still in elementary school. It didn't take.
"She never played with them," Jane laughed with the memory. "It was always about sports and the season. Whatever sport was in season, that's what she'd be playing."
There were the neighborhood pick-up football games in the fall, the back yard and Recreation Center basketball games in the winter, watching her older siblings in track and field in the spring, and playing t-ball and softball in the summer. There were plenty of neighborhood kids whom she could play, and most of them were older.
Shalee's dad had always told her that she needed to be tough when playing any sport. One of his memories is Shalee coming home from a pick-up football game with older brother Matt and his friends.
"She was crying when she walked into the house and said the boys were being unfair to her," Steve said. "I just told her to quit crying or quit playing. She went right back down there and they kept throwing the football to her, trying to get her to quit. I followed her down there, hid behind some bushes, and watched. She was catching everything they threw to her, falling to the ground with her arms outstretched but catching everything. It was serious stuff to her, but the boys were all just laughing about making her run just a little further and dive for each pass. It did make her toughen up."
Jane says there was never a lack of competition for Shalee and the other kids in the neighborhood.
"One of the t-ball teams, all girls, was named Based With an Attitude," Jane said. "That was when she was five years old. They were always in the street playing some sport, but always there was a basketball nearby."
By the time Shalee had become a fourth grader, Sublette's Recreation Commission had began competitive basketball teams for its boys and girls in the community. They would travel to nearby towns to compete against other teams.
Enter Michael Stevens who would be her recreation league coach through sixth grade, and teammates Whitney Stevens and Shelby Griffin, also lifelong friends of Shalee. This would be the formative years of organized basketball and the start of the Lehning legend.
"We had a lot of fun, but we were always serious, too," Shalee said of playing in the organized league. "We'd wear the sweat bands and everything and think we were so cool, but it was just neat to be playing."
Stevens, now a senior at Wichita State University, said those recreation ball days were some of the best.
"Nobody could believe it was just a bunch of girls all from Sublette," Stevens said. "We won most of our games, playing teams from Hugoton, Satanta, and Moscow."
Stevens' dad, Michael, remembers Shalee coming to him to discuss which should be her primary shooting hand.
"She could do almost everything the same with both the left and right," he said. "I think that has always been one of her strong attributes. You can't take one side away from her because she's equally good going the other direction."
Shalee explains the discussion she had with her recreation team coach.
"I write left-handed but in sports I do everything right-handed, so I was confused at that age as to what to do," Shalee recalls. "I eat left-handed, I brush my hair left-handed, but sports has always been with the right hand. But my left is the dominant hand."
For Whitney Stevens, Shalee's skills became evident early.
"I think by the time we were nearly done with rec ball and going into junior high, the rest of us knew how good Shalee was," Whitney says. "We knew there could only be one leader and we knew it had to be her. It made things so much easier, there was never any drama with us. We trusted her and it all just worked."
Griffin, the other part of the triumvirate nicknamed "The Three Musketeers," is Shalee's roommate at Kansas State University. She recalls those early basketball years in Sublette.
"I'd cherry-pick and she'd get the rebound and chuck it down to me for an easy basket," Griffin says. "Even then, in the fourth grade, her passing was so far ahead of the rest of us. Half the time I'd never catch the ball. She just got the game better than anyone else. My dad used to tell me to just always watch her eyes. She could dribble through just about anything a defense would try to do."
Her dad's love of hunting and fishing was passed along to Shalee. Her ambidextrous skills were reflected by the fact that she used her left hand for firing a shotgun, but was punting and kicking a football with her right foot.
By the time Lehning and her teammates arrived at junior high, the reputation of the talented group was well recognized. Paul Trigg, a teacher at Sublette who still assists with high school basketball, was the girls junior high coach.
"He's actually my neighbor and he still has sayings that have stuck with me," Shalee said. "He taught me about fundamentals and they've stuck with me to this day. One of his favorites was 'Be quick, but not in a hurry.' I didn't quite understand it then what he meant, but now I totally get it."
The point guard leadership skills were on display, even at the junior high level.
"She'd always be there for a pep talk before games, even back then," Griffin says of Shalee. "She was always serious about the games. The rest of us wanted to win, but I don't think we totally understood how things happened or developed, but Shalee did."
Stevens says that many Friday nights when most girls their age would do sleepovers, Shalee wouldn't go because she had to get up early for a game on Saturday.
"That never changed in high school either," Stevens said. "I can remember my dad telling me that if we kept working together, that we'd be really good. Every day, we'd go to the recreation center and play against the boys."
When she entered junior high, Shalee came in with a well-established reputation. And she didn't disappoint her new coach.
"She was by far the most polished athlete that I'd had," Trigg said. "I really think she could have started on the varsity when she was in seventh grade. But then, we couldn't even play her a full game because we were winning games by so many points that it would have looked like we were running up the score. Shalee wanted to play, but she also understood about the margin of our wins."
Even as a young teen, Lehning and her Sublette teammates had set the table for future success. While most junior high teams struggle to gain insight into the fundamentals of basketball, Lehning was already years ahead and it showed on and off the court.
"They were a talented group," Trigg said of the junior high team. "(Shalee's) leadership skills made everybody better. She just gave them that extra intangible. She saw the court so well and knew the game instinctively that she could give them passes that they couldn't handle, but it didn't affect her."
With Shalee at the point, and Griffin and Stevens playing key roles, the junior high team dominated the Hi-Plains for two seasons, producing back-to-back undefeated, 16-0, seasons. The high school sports scene was awaiting.
Part 2: The prep phenom, Tuesday.
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