In the blur of another peculiar pandemic year, two Hawaii athletes reached remarkable heights in 2021.
They did it quietly and with humility, pleased, proud and grateful to achieve remarkable feats over wide swaths of their sports in relative obscurity.
Shelby Baron and Maj Forsberg both reached their Olympic pinnacle, again, this year. They guided others to collegiate national championships, again. They also performed at the highest levels internationally and professionally all over the world.
In the spring Baron, a 2012 Punahou graduate, helped coach Alabama to its fifth straight title at the 20th Collegiate Wheelchair Tennis Championships. She graduated from UA in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in communicative disorders and followed up with a master’s in speech language pathology in 2019 … after capturing four national team wheelchair tennis championships and three in doubles.
She is also on the collegiate subcommittee chair within the U.S. Tennis Association’s national wheelchair tennis committee.
From there, she went to Tokyo for her second Paralympics. It was a dramatically different feel from her experience in Rio five years ago, when she got in at the last minute.
“I felt more pressure to perform (this year), but also I was more relaxed because I knew what to expect,” Baron said. “And, I felt so proud to represent since I had dedicated the past five years towards training for that one tournament.”
Soon after, she helped the U.S. capture bronze at her sixth World Team Cup. It all left her counting her incredible blessings after “one of the most difficult times of my tennis career.”
“There were a lot of unknown factors and a lot of stressors in a short period of time,” said Baron, who has been ranked in the Top 2 in singles and doubles nationally and Top 24 internationally. “However, I kept working hard during the pandemic and focused on controlling the things I could control. In the end, the reward was much greater than I ever imagined.”
When Forsberg came to the University of Hawaii 25 years ago, she spoke Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese and English — the language her Japanese mother and Danish father spoke to each other while she was growing up in Denmark.
The 5-foot-4 point guard played on Denmark’s national and junior national teams, catching the eye of former UH Hilo coach Jimmy Yagi at one of his European clinics. When she got to Hawaii, Forsberg already loved to travel, play the saxophone and in the stock markets and was into IT early on.
Yagi helped get her to Manoa, where she mostly watched all-conference guard BJ Itoman and created her own all-conference academic career with a 3.71 GPA. Forsberg graduated with a degree in finance and management information systems and a minor in speech.
Now she uses all that knowledge — as a wise and analytical point guard and gifted student of things other than the game — playing all 40 minutes of every basketball game as one of the world’s most wanted referees.
Soon after working her fourth NCAA Women’s Final Four — serving as crew chief in the championship game — this year she also headed to Tokyo to work the Olympics.
Her refereeing career started in 2004 and she was already working WNBA games four years later. Last season she was the league’s only female crew chief and regularly works the playoffs. Forsberg has also refereed women’s and men’s FIBA (International Basketball Federation) games in Europe for the past decade.
Along with her day job in financial and foreign currency markets, Forsberg averages five to seven basketball games a week much of the year. She travels 200,000 air miles annually … because she is very good at what she does.
“I’m certain her knowledge of the game and its fundamentals carried over to her officiating camps and greatly influenced her mentors and colleagues,” says Vince Goo, her UH coach. “Also, I noticed her intense focus on coach-official interactions during our games and I was careful in what was said, although not always successful.
“This has helped in her ability to relate with coaches during competition and definitely resulted in their positive ratings. She respects both coaches and players and commands the same in return.”
Forsberg and Baron have both leapt somewhere beyond role models, particularly after this past year. They are far from the small, smiling renaissance woman from Denmark who seemingly learned something every moment she was in Manoa — and anywhere else in the world, and the amiable junior who first competed against able-bodied tennis players and initially took to coaching because of the enthusiastic example of the USTA Hawaii Pacific Section’s Mimi Kennell.
Now, Baron says her coaching has made her a better athlete and the athletes she coaches have become “one of my best support systems.”
It doesn’t stop there. Alabama coach Even Enquist encouraged Baron to apply for the national committee and now she is intent on making a difference “in our sport.” Forsberg is familiar with that, even with a whistle in her mouth.
“Besides playing professionally, being a committee member allowed me to make a difference in our sport,” Baron says. “I am most involved in developing junior and collegiate wheelchair tennis. I plan to continue my work after I stop competing because there is still a lot that I feel I can contribute.”
Hard to imagine after all she and Forsberg have already contributed, even before this crazy year.
