Sevier County girls basketball coach Jonathan Shultz during the Winterfest Shootout championship game on Monday, Dec. 30, 2024, in Sevierville, Tennessee. (Photo by Danny Parker)
BY JESSE SMITHEY
Jonathan Shultz sees life through a different lens these days.
How could he not?
Just a year ago, the longtime girls’ basketball coach at Sevier County High School missed out on leading the Lady Smoky Bears in their 2024 Class 4A state tournament appearance, as he lay with unease in a hospital bed back in Knoxville — only to find out days later that doctors expected him to pass away before summer even arrived.
How does one even process that prognosis? How do his wife and daughters just accept that?
In Shultz’s case, he didn’t. And no one in his family agreed to that conclusion, either.
And it’s a good thing, because he’s still coaching now, hopeful to make up for the time and experiences missed during the 2024 postseason.
“I just take each day at a time,” he said, “and I know I feel much better than I did last year.”
THE DECLINE
Looking back now, Shultz can pinpoint the signs of his physical descent.
The weight loss in December 2023.
The moments of sickness or heavy fatigue.
He attributed it to just being in his mid-40s, putting in heaps of hours against the stresses of being a biology teacher and head girls basketball coach of a successful Class 4A program.
But by late February of 2024, his condition drastically worsened. On Friday, Feb. 23, 2024 — following a region quarterfinal win over Science Hill — Shultz finally relented from his battle-through-it approach and told his wife that he needed to go to the emergency room.
The blood-work report “wasn’t good,” Shultz said.
And the concern was his liver function.
He remained at the local hospital for five days before being released. Shultz coached the Region 1-4A championship win on Feb. 28, 2024, over Dobyns-Bennett and then the state sectional win March 2, 2024, over Bearden.
Shultz’s physicians, though, urged him upon release to get, with haste, additional blood work done at University of Tennessee Medical Center, where they have doctors who specialize in liver concerns.
Shultz went there for a 7 a.m. appointment.
Get it done early, Shultz thought, and get back to Sevierville and get on the bus that day with his team to set off for Murfreesboro. After all, they had an appointment the next day (Wednesday, March 6) in a Class 4A first-round game against state power Bartlett.
He never got on that bus.
His blood work from UT showed a dangerously low sodium level that sent him straight to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
“It was sort of a shock. I mean, I knew I was sick. But my plan was to get through the state tournament and then worry about it,” Shultz said. “I was flabbergasted. I was like ‘ICU?! I got to get on a bus in a couple hours.’
“I tried to bargain with them and told them I’d come straight back. They said, ‘If you don’t get to the ICU now, you won’t make it back.'”
Sevier County set off with assistant coach Beth Ownby running the show in Murfreesboro. Sevier County fought valiantly against a bigger and more athletic Bartlett squad that had routed them the year before in the state quarterfinals. This time, Barlett led by just four points with 2 minutes, 41 seconds to play, before ultimately logging a 54-42 win.
“(Shultz) texted us last night,” Sevier County star Cybil Penland told media after the loss. “He sent it to our team that just said he was proud of us. And that he knew we had it in us to win.”
Beth Ownby and the Sevier County Bearettes faced Bartlett in a TSSAA Class 4A state tournament quarterfinal at Murphy Center on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The Bartlett girls won 54-42. (Photo by Danny Parker)
Relegated to a bed in ICU at UT, Shultz watched the game unfold via his laptop.
And his ICU nurse hailed from near Bartlett, and he kept an interested eye on the game, too.
“They did an outstanding job,” Shultz said of his staff and players. “I watched the game. I don’t feel like I would have done anything different. I think the result was because we got in foul trouble and we weren’t a very deep team. I think that that’s what cost us, whether I was there or not. Coach Ownby filled in for me. And we’ve worked together for over a decade. She ran things exactly the way I would have.
“But it was really tough being away from the team. … to see those seniors who we had, who had worked so hard for so long, they made it back for a second time. To not be there and experience it with them, that was tough.”
Life got way tougher for Shultz, shortly thereafter.
After three days of testing at UT Medical and seeing four different doctors there, his team of physicals dealt him the worst call he had ever heard.
“They told me they didn’t think I’d make it another three months,” recalled Shultz.
“That’s when all you got left is your faith. Basketball was not all that important all of a sudden.”
Shultz had acute liver failure.
The only true fix was a transplant.
Jennifer Shultz, Jonathan’s wife, wouldn’t take the doctors’ estimate for an answer, though. She wouldn’t settle and “stayed on the doctors,” according to Jonathan, until one of the four made some calls on the Shultz’s behalf.
“It was God’s hand. We just happened to have one person out of the four doctors on my team at UT who had contacts with the liver team at Vanderbilt,” Jonathan Shultz said. “So she worked for hours to try and get me a room at Vanderbilt. Finally, it was 10 or 11 o’clock at night. She told us they had a room if we could get there before it filled. As soon as they released us from UT, we got in a car and drove straight to Nashville — and didn’t come home for a long time.”
All told, Shultz stayed at Vanderbilt Medical for 54 days.
“I got to Vanderbilt in March and within 10 weeks I was on the liver transplant list (by May 21), which they said is pretty uncommon,” he said. “Most of the time, it takes six months or more.
“Basically, you had to be sick enough to die but healthy enough to withstand surgery to get on the list.”
Livers can regenerate. But Shultz’s had gotten beyond that.
Liver specialists use a Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) Score to help assess the severity of each patient’s case.
“Forty is the worst,” Shultz said. “When I first went into the hospital, I was a 39.”
ON THE MEND
Sevier County girls coach Jonathan Shultz on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. A month later, Shultz was hospitalized and fighting for his life. (Photo by Danny Parker)
Because of his acute liver failure, Shultz developed ascites.
The way Shultz described ascites: the liver doesn’t properly function and filter out fluids. So he was going in every three days for a paracentesis — in other words, having a six-inch-long needle inserted to extract out accumulated fluids … oftentimes, some 5-6 liters per visit, according to Shultz.
“Some people have more than that. I’m not a big guy, naturally,” Shultz said. “I couldn’t carry around that much before I would have to have that procedure done.”
In June of 2024, Shultz underwent a Transjugular Intrahepatic Portosystemic Shunt (TIPS) procedure.
And TIPS altered the course of his life in a good way.
During this procedure, a surgeon inserted a stint that essentially bypassed the liver and reduced pressure on the portal vein, which is a blood vessel that carries blood from the digestive organs to the liver.
Doctors told Shultz that weeks and months might go by before he could actually see an improvement.
“That’s sort of what’s happened. I had the procedure done in June. I still felt pretty rough at the start of school (in August),” Shultz said. “By the time basketball season started, I was feeling a lot more like myself. Now, it means I have dietary restrictions and stuff.
“But they said this thing that I have could last five years, and there’s a possibility they could do it again and get another five years, if I don’t get a transplant before then,” Shultz added.
“From a health standpoint, it’s helped me get my life back. I can be a teacher, and a coach, and a dad again.”
The outpouring of support from the Sevier County community did a number on Shultz’s soul, as well. From teachers to administrators, from current and former players, and from fans and townsfolk — all played significant roles helping the Shultz family meet their needs.
“We had a ton of support,” Shultz said. “It was really special.”
Shultz’s faith renewed and strengthened, as well. Though he grew up in the church and kept God in his life as an adult, Shultz confessed that he sometimes would find himself not lifting the importance of it in his life. But after squaring off with death, Shultz saw God’s hand at work. “This was a way of God bringing me back and saying ultimately He’s in control.”
Shultz’s body is still on the mend but it’s in far better shape than this time a year ago.
And as far as medicines, Shultz takes quite a bit — the diuretics and things of that nature. He isn’t allowed to take pain medications other than Children’s Tylenol.
He was once fifth on the liver transplant list, a ranking order that can see a patient’s number fluctuate based on urgent need. Now, Shultz’s blood work has improved to the point where he no longer asks where he lands on the list.
“If I start getting sick again, then I stay on the list,” he said. “I make sure I meet all the requirements. I still go to Vanderbilt. Right now, I go about every other month to do blood work and meet with the liver team. I’ll continue to do that.
“I get a CT scan every six months to see if they see anything with the liver.”
But no transplant has been needed just yet.
Shultz did have one small procedure done last month that repaired two tears in his abdominal area that he sustained from when he was harboring superfluous fluids.
That surgery happened on Jan. 30, roughly a month ago.
“I was able to coach the next night,” Shultz said.
“I haven’t missed a game this year, so I feel blessed.”
LIFE THESE DAYS
Jonathan Shultz and the Sevier County Smoky Bears in the Winterfest Shootout championship game on Monday, Dec. 30, 2024, in Sevierville, Tennessee. (Photo by Danny Parker)
Shultz is in his 11th season at the helm of the Sevier County girls’ basketball program. It’s a team that is very much in playoff contention again, a program that could play its way into another state tournament appearance in Murfreesboro.
They have won 25 games and will play in Monday’s region semifinals against District 1-4A champion Daniel Boone (18-14).
Should Sevier County win that contest, it’d be guaranteed a spot in the state sectional round (March 8) — which is one step away from the state tournament.
They had a slight stumble in the postseason, though — dropping the District 2-4A Tournament championship to Morristown East.
And while that likely agitated Shultz’ competitive nature, he admittedly has a much easier time processing losses nowadays. The perspective gained through his troubles in 2024 manifested that.
But on the rare occurrence that he loses sight of it, those in Shultz’s corner offer a quick reminder to get him back on track.
“If I want to complain, my wife will send me a picture back of when I was in the hospital,” Shultz said. “She’ll be like, ‘you remember this?’ Remember that day at Vandy when you had an internal bleed and about bled out and died and spent five days in the ICU down there?
“I’m like ‘OK. I get your point. Let’s be happy.’ I try to approach everything that way now. I try not to get too upset.”