STEENS — LeAnn Shelton faced her new team for the first time, her left sleeve — as always — hanging empty.
Columbus Christian Academy’s assembled softball players burst into applause.
So the coach who lost her arm in a traumatic accident more than three decades ago decided to open with a joke.
“I told them one thing they wouldn’t have to worry about was clapping — me making them clap,” Shelton said.
She was met with silence as the Rams weighed their new head coach’s words.
“They didn’t laugh or anything,” she said. “I was like, ‘Y’all are going to have to laugh.’”
For the better part of 36 years, LeAnn Shelton hasn’t had a problem doing that.
‘That was a tough time’
On June 19, 1986, Shelton was 4 when she lost her left arm in a lawnmower accident, toddling around a corner of her grandmother’s house to find her cousin riding the machine into her path. She tripped — nearly losing a toe to the mower — and threw her left arm over her face, losing her arm to the whirling blade but perhaps saving her life.
It took a long time for the trauma to wear off. Shelton had seizures brought on by the accident; other things triggered her recall, too.
“If I would hear somebody say ‘lawnmower,’ I would just scream,” she said.
That was one of the details she had managed to block out before the publication of her book, ‘Red Stitches,’ in 2019. Shelton said the name pays homage to how “the red stitches in a softball held my life together” after the accident.
The book details Shelton’s life from her early days — she said her mother Deborah wrote the first few chapters — to her days working with other one-armed softball players
Not that Shelton has actually read it.
“I wouldn’t read it,” she said. “To this day, I haven’t read it. I know that’s strange, but I don’t know. I couldn’t pull myself to do it. I don’t know why.”
She acknowledged it’s likely because the incident — though distant — remains traumatic. And even long after the pain was gone, there were still consequences.
After graduating from Shelton State Community College, she sought a job — to little success. Potential employers doubted that a woman with one arm was capable of much.
“Nobody would hire me,” Shelton said. “That was a tough time.”
Eventually, she found a job at a physical therapist’s office, finding it easy to relate with patients who had suffered strokes and were unable to use one side of their body. Shelton also worked as a technician at an optometrist’s office.
But in April, when CCA athletic director Billy Thomas asked Shelton to contact him about the Rams’ coaching vacancy, she was surprised.
“Him calling and asking me to do this, it was like, ‘Really?’” Shelton said.
‘No other questions’
To be sure, Shelton has plenty of softball experience.
She started playing the sport when she was 5, actually joining a boys’ baseball team with no local softball team available.
For hours in her backyard, her brother Bobby helped Shelton perfect her unusual fielding motion: She had to catch the ball, flip it into the air, toss away her glove, catch the ball again and hurl it away. Shelton has used that motion to throw out runners from second field, and it still comes naturally. She said her players’ jaws dropped upon seeing their coach demonstrate it at the Rams’ first practice Thursday.
By the time she was 11 or 12 — by then, Shelton was playing in the Dixie Softball league in her home state — Shelton felt truly confident in her abilities. She played at Pickens County High School and later took part in a church league in Columbus for four years.
And Shelton wasn’t just along for the ride. She was good enough to silence any doubters along the way.
“After they see me play, there’s no other questions,” Shelton said.
Shelton’s ability and knowledge of the sport led to more than playing. She coached young girls over the summer in Dixie Softball, getting her first taste of softball leadership.
And she helped those who had gone through similar experiences. Shelton was there when teenage surfer Bethany Hamilton lost her arm to a shark in Hawai’i; she was there when an ATV accident cost promising Dixie Softball pitcher Heaven Harris her pitching arm.
Shelton said she’s had plenty of speaking arrangements about her accident and living with one arm, including a trip to Iowa in March for the Tate’s Army foundation, which promotes lawnmower safety and accident awareness. She noted lawnmowers are the leading cause of amputation in children — 18,000 kids each year are involved in accidents with the machines.
In a short video she filmed for Tate’s Army — named after a 3-year-old who nearly died when he was run over by a lawnmower — Shelton explained what happened to her, in hopes it will prevent future accidents.
“There’s a lot of things that I had to go through, and I really don’t want to see another child or family go through what I had to,” she said.
Getting the sign
After every meeting between Thomas and Shelton discussing the Rams’ job opening, the CCA athletic director told Shelton to “pray about it.”
Shelton was always happy to oblige.
“I’m all about God’s signs,” she said.
Her husband Jeremy and son Gunner Lake were present at what turned out to be the final meeting between Shelton and Thomas.
The family stopped by Walmart on their way home, and as they were leaving, Shelton spotted something lying in the parking lot: a forlorn softball, scuffed but otherwise intact. She told Jeremy to turn around so she could pick it up.
Along with support from both Jeremy and Gunner, who wanted Shelton to take the job, it was the sign she needed.
But there were still nerves as Thursday’s inaugural practice drew nearer.
“You’ve got these girls that don’t really know me, and I don’t know them,” Shelton said. “They think, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve got a coach here with one arm trying to tell me the way to do something.’”
That turned out not to be the case. Shelton soon realized her players were just as nervous to meet her as she was to introduce herself to them.
It makes sense at a school where softball has been what Thomas called an “on-again, off-again sport.” CCA fielded a softball team in 2021 but not the year before.
“This year we made the commitment to the girls and the sport and went out and hired someone that we are excited about bringing softball up to the level of excellence,” Thomas said.
That’s Shelton, who is by her own admission still getting the lay of the land but who said she’s impressed by a small yet “talented” roster.
It might take a while. But eventually, the Rams will know their coach well enough to laugh — even to make jokes about her missing arm, like Shelton herself does.
She hopes so, anyway.
“See, that’s what I want,” she said. “That’s what I’m looking for. I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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