After some tests, she got the stunning news.
She said she was told there was nothing wrong with her back.
She was four months pregnant!
The revelation left her reeling and at first, she told no one but teammate Requette Lindsay, who had played alongside her at Mansfield High School, as well.
“I kept it a secret and played a few of the early games that season,” she said.
A slightly built guard who had a penchant for crashing the boards, she was banging around inside against the opposing team’s bigger players one night when she got knocked down hard to the floor.
“I remember Requette running down and picking me up and saying, “This is it! You’ve got to tell them!” she said.
She broke the news to CSU head coach Theresa Check and assistant Pat Tramble, and they were supportive, but at the same time, her season — and with the demands of motherhood, many privately thought her college career — was done.
She got a medical redshirt that season and, she said, some advice from Check:
“She was like, you can get the year back, but you don’t have to play again. But I do want you to graduate.”
Chantel gave birth to Shadayah in April of 1998.
Her mom, Karen, offered to take care of Shadayah back in Mansfield to ease her return to CSU, but Chantel — who everyone in the family calls Chandee — said no, she was going to make it work.
Four months later she married David Lawrence — her high school sweetheart and Shadayah’s dad who had just graduated from the University of Dayton — and they got an apartment on Grafton Avenue.
David would walk across the bridge to downtown and his job at the Juvenile Detention Center while Chantel — packing baby bottles and diapers along with her books and basketball gear — drove herself and their baby to CSU in their lone car.
“It was important for me to come back,” she said. “My basketball hadn’t ended the way I wanted it to. I wanted to make sure I left everything out on the court.
“I wanted to write a better ending.”
And she did exactly that ... and so much more.
With her teammates and coaches providing it-takes-a-village support — they looked after Shadayah when she was in class or on the court and they cuddled with her when they all took bus trips to road games — Chantel excelled like never before.
She was named the MVP of the team that final season and CSU’s Female Athlete of the Year. She won NAIA All American third-team honors and led the Marauders to another NAIA National Tournament.
Following graduation, she fully embraced motherhood — “it’s the biggest blessing of my life,” — and she and David had four more children in seven years.
After that she coached freshman basketball at Alter High School and embarked in a career as a certified community health advocate, helping expectant mothers — especially black women, she said because “we have a higher infant mortality rate” — through their pregnancies.
Meanwhile, her five children became success stories of their own:
After graduating from Ponitz, Shadayah was a McIntosh Scholar at UD, graduated with an environmental science degree and a minor in African studies, and today is a bio tech teacher at Ponitz.
Daughter Darajah — whose grades, like those of her siblings, kept her in the Wright Step program that provides debt-free education — graduated from Wright State and is a disease intervention specialist.
Miannah graduated from Stivers in urban affairs and now is an accomplished artist and teaches art at a Trotwood elementary school
Son Devin, a WSU grad, is teaching math in Alaska and youngest son Dorian, a recent Stivers grad, is close to getting his associates degree and is entering the firefighters’ academy.
Two months ago, Chantel and David — " he’s my rock,” she said — celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.
Chantel just authored her first book – “Love is a ... MF (million feelings)” – is a public speaker, conducts “Love Speaks’ workshops and continues to mentor expectant mothers.
And this weekend comes another crowning achievement.
She’s being inducted into the CSU Athletics Hall of Fame along with former teammate — and Shadayah babysitter — Aja Lewis; track and field star Bridgette Edwards; and football standout Jerry Parker.
They’ll be honored at a luncheon on campus Friday and again at halftime of Saturday’s Homecoming game when the 1-4 Marauders host 4-1-1 Clark Atlanta.
“To be truthful, I always thought the Hall of Fame would be unobtainable for me because I had a kid,” Chantel said quietly as her eyes began to glisten. “That’s why this means so much. It’s made me circle back just to relive those moments that got me here.”
‘Be like Mike’
Chantel said she developed a fascination with basketball as an elementary school girl:
“I’d watch TV and see Michael Jordan and I wanted to be like Mike.”
She said all she did was dribble…and dream. She did not practice.
She tried out for the sixth-grade team and promptly was cut.
“I got back in the car and my dad was like ‘Why you cryin’?” she said. “I still remember his eyes looking in that (rearview) mirror. He was like, ‘OK Chandee, what you gonna do?? Are you gonna work at it?’
“Once he saw I was serious, he got me a hoop and put it on the driveway.”
After that, W.C. White began to work with his daughter.
“He’d back me down — it was no holds barred ― and I was like ‘Dad, you’re cheatin!’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, what you gonna do?’
“It taught me to play defense and not be afraid to play in the post.”
There was one thing her dad told her that she balked at.
“I wanted a pair of Jordans, but he kept telling me I didn’t need them to play. He said, ‘Will they make you jump higher? Run faster?’
“Then, one game I had 27 points, and I was still wearing my old-school, high-top Pumas.
“He said, ‘See, you don’t need Jordans.’
“I said, ‘Yeah’… but I still wanted them.”
After starring at Mansfield Senior High, she got offers from various Division II programs and some HBCUs, including Central State.
“I took the bus to Central, and I remember getting off and meeting the players and coaches and thinking, “I like this.’
" It felt like family.”
Passing down valuable lessons
The other day, as I sat with Chantel at the dining room table in her Harrison Township home, she shared her compelling story that, on this day, came with colorful accessories.
She wore bright lavender lipstick, orange fingernails and showy hoop earrings, one from which dangled a large key and the other which was affixed with a lock.
But what really caught my eye was when she took out a photo of a smiling Shadayah in her cap and gown and the colorful graduation stole she wore to her UD commencement.
The last time I’d seen her daughter when she was 10 months old and we were on a bus together, making the six-hour trip through the night from Columbia, Kentucky, back to CSU after a game at Lindsey Wilson College.
Credit: Lisa Powell
Credit: Lisa Powell
I had ridden with the team to observe how Chantel handled the daily double team: motherhood and Marauders’ hoops.
Chantel led CSU that game —17 points and 10 rebounds — but the real star of the show was Shadayah, who the team called DayDay.
She wore a “Baby Marauders #1″ sweatshirt and a Big Bird “I feel loved” bib as she snuggled in Coach Pat’s arms for much of the trip.
Lewis, the 6-foot-4 center, had bundled her in a colorful quilt and carried her off the bus.
During practice the night before the game, senior Fatou Cisse came to the sideline and gave her a high five. Check doted on her. Another player stole a kiss and Kelli Jackson, sidelined with an ACL injury, changed her diaper.
“I truly believe the baby is what holds this team together,” said the Marauders’ cowboy-booted bus driver Dennis Day, who tickled little Shadayah as she was carried back on board for the ride home.
A few years earlier, Chantel’s first impression of CSU basketball had been spot on when she said it felt like home.
From that start, she said she and David built a strong foundation for their family because “we were both raised right.”
“We had parents who loved us, but they held us accountable and there were expectations.”
They passed those lessons on to their own kids.
“We’d all sit right here at this table,” she said. “It’s where we broke bread and had family meetings, and everybody shared what was going on in their lives.”
She said her kids didn’t fathom how much of a basketball player she had been, and her youngest son added the dismissive qualifier, ‘Well, you played back in the 1900s.’”
That’s when her mom sent her high school scrapbook to prove the past.
It lay on the table the other day. Inside were clippings with headlines like “White Dominates as Tygers Rout McKinley by 50″ and “White Proves Speed Kills.”
Next to that book were a few copies of “Love is a ... MF.”
Some of the same thoughts it contains are espoused in her self-care workshops and one exercise requires people to actually look at themselves in a mirror.
“Most prepone look and focus on the flaws they find,” she said. “I want them to look and see their beauty. I want them to see the good things in their lives.”
She knows that works.
When she sees here reflection, she sees a wife, a mother and now a Hall of Famer.
She did rewrite her ending.
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