After one of her best performances of the inaugural Athletes Unlimited Lacrosse season, Mira Shane put on a different type of show last Saturday. Or rather, “DJ Miracle” did.

From a shaded booth overlooking Maureen Hendricks Field in Boyds, Md., Shane — clad in a “Love Is Unlimited” shirt and a jumper decked out in rainbow smiley faces — used her quick hands to mix beats on her Pioneer 2-channel DDJ-400 connected to her MacBook and entertain the crowd during stoppages in the second game on Pride Day.

“I was nervous, I’m not gonna lie,” Shane said not of facing shots from the world’s best, but controlling the music. “I was sweating from the game, but I was also profusely sweating from the heat and the nerves, but I think it worked out.”

That openness is at the heart of Shane’s infectious personality and one of the many reasons why the MVP from last Sunday’s games stands out for more than her play. It’s partly why Michelle Tumolo said she’s “probably been the brightest light here at the AU experience,” and “one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met.”

“She radiates positivity and energy and kindness and love to every single person she touches,” Tumolo added.

A force for positivity, Shane’s mere presence elicits smiles from almost everyone she encounters. Her seemingly endless array of talents on and off the field never ceases to amaze her teammates, too. Her multifaceted role in the start-up league extends beyond her signature split save, which was the Defensive Play of the Week, or the DJ booth.

Shane is a member of the five-person Athletes Unlimited Lacrosse Player Executive Committee, as well as the league’s Racial Equity Working Group, whose Becoming Unlimited program seeks to highlight the talents of BIPOC girls and young women in sports. She helped spearhead “In The Crease,” a series of weekly discussions on topics ranging from LGBTQ+ issues, to diversity and inclusion and Indigenous cultures.

Shane, who identifies as a proud member of the queer community, believes the forum has offered a big step in the right direction to building a true community within the sport.

“Mira has put a lot of energy and hard work into making this league what it is,” said Kayla Treanor, who like Tumolo is also on the Athletes Unlimited Lacrosse Player Executive Committee and considers Shane a role model despite the fact that she’s younger. “She’s had a hand in just about everything single thing we’ve done at Athletes Unlimited… There’s nothing she can’t do and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for somebody else. She’s really the epitome of the ultimate teammate.”

“She’s brought us all closer together in ways that we probably never would have thought,” Tumolo said. “She’s stepped into this role of being that voice for so many BIPOC players, but also for allies and everyone in the lacrosse community to feel like, ‘How do we make it a better place as a whole and everyone feel like they belong?’”

Shane grappled with that question publicly last summer in “My Milk Chocolate Message.” The Medium post was part essay, part poem and a reflection on her biracial identity. “For as long as I can remember, I have been confused in how I look,” Shane wrote. It was far from the first time she had contemplated the topic or put her thoughts about it into writing. “Milk Chocolate” was the title of her college essay. She changed her major at Michigan to African-American / Black Studies after the 2016 presidential election.

“It wasn’t a huge epiphany for me and my family because we’ve dealt with it on a day-to-day basis,” Shane told Tumolo during an Instagram live interview last summer about the racial awakening that gripped the sport. In a black-and-white photo Shane posted on Instagram Jan. 19, 2015, she stands in between her parents. To her right is her mother Wendy Wright, who is white. To her left is her father, Max Shane, who is Black. Each of the family members holds a piece of paper with a single word written in Sharpie.

“Black Lives Matter,” they read altogether.

Shane’s father founded his own massage therapy company in 1997. Her mother has more than 25 years of experience as a psychoanalyst. Shane described both as healers. They’re also her “little checkerboard of love.”

 

 

 

 

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“I grew up at the dinner table having two people that focus on the body and the mind coming together and really tried to help people feel good in life and feel safe, heard and healthy,” Shane said. “I really am super thankful to have them and now to hopefully make them proud trying to do the same and be a healer in my day-to-day life.”

Shane works full time as a brand associate for the Verb Energy — an energy bar and drink mix startup. It’s a fitting name for her place of employment. Shane tries to be “a positive wave of energy” for others. It’s more like a constant incoming tide. The vibe is evident from the Friday fits to the pregame chest bumps, the dance moves on the sidelines in the final moments of a win and the TikTok she recorded with Treanor and Caylee Waters set to Doja Cat’s “Get Into It (Yuh)” after their games last Friday night were postponed due to weather.

Milling around after Victoria Garrick spoke to the players for last week’s “In The Crease” in the ballroom of the hotel, Treanor grabbed the microphone but quickly made an assist to Shane. She then laid down a jaw-dropping impromptu beatbox beat. Treanor said it should be in a movie.

“How is it possible you have another talent that’s so amazing?” she asked Shane.

Shane was a vocal percussionist in the acapella group 58 Greene during her playing days at Michigan, where she’s the program’s all-time saves and save percentage leader.

Her foray into DJing occurred more recently.

Shane developed a passion for running long distances while quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic. The five, six, eight miles became therapeutic for her as she tried to see how far she could go while listening to hourlong sets on SoundCloud by DJ Mölly. For her father’s birthday on March 23, 2020, Shane organized a dance party via Zoom with her parents’ friends as well as her own. A tradition took root. Every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. for the next five months, Shane kept an open invitation and the 45-minute virtual gatherings going.

“Everyone was cutting loose and wouldn’t care about the dances they were doing on the Zoom,” Shane said, like her parents did the other weekend at the Athletes Unlimited games. “They were bringing their best and most authentic selves to every dance party.”

That last adjective operates as Shane’s thesis. It’s the driving force of her journey. “I believe in being my most authentic self that others can count on,” she said in a video for Michigan’s Athletes Connected program that highlighted her struggles with mental health early in her time in Ann Arbor. She feels she’s more fully come into her own, loving who she is and wants to be since graduating. She celebrated her second anniversary with her girlfriend, Ruthie DeWit, in late April.

When Shane returned to Ann Arbor last fall as the Wolverines’ volunteer assistant coach, she picked up the DDJ400 from a Guitar Center 30 -minutes away in Canton Township. That was only after doing a ton of research and sourcing opinions from other DJs about what she should get. She took lessons over FaceTime from a Parisian techno artist in Brooklyn and Nicole Myint, aka DJ Myint, the resident DJ for several Michigan teams.

The practice proved a beautiful mixture of Shane’s love of music and seeing people have a great time. She always loved to perform, whether singing acapella or playing jazz saxophone. Now behind the turntables she can tap into and at times control the vibe and energy of the social environment.

“I feel that when I'm in the cage, too,” Shane said of playing goalie. “You kind of set an energy level and let people vibe around you. You're looking at everybody on the field in front of you and kind of looking out to your audience.”

The hobby and creative outlet also further connected Shane to her uncle, Michael Shane. Everyone called him “Mic.” He became an institution in the Chicago hip-hop scene, working in marketing sales and promotions at Know 1 Radio for more than 30 years. Mira was his only niece.

“Soul Flower,” he called her after The Brand New Heavies by the same name. He texted her daily with words of positivity despite his health struggles. Mic Shane died June 23 at age 59 from a rare and fatal heart condition.

Mira Shane is playing for the Black Heart Association in her uncle’s honor. The last stanza of a poem she wrote after his death and posted on “The Mic Shane Show Funeral Fund” she created on GoFundMe speaks to their relationship.

You said Soul Flower could be anything she put her mind to / So as your niece I march on for you / I carry my soul with the love you blessed me with / But I think I must tell you / You were always my Soul Flower too.

To Shane, a Soul Flower is someone that isn’t afraid to show their heart and inner workings. In other words, they’re open. “I always call myself an emotional shotty,” she said. “I kind of wear my heart on my sleeve, which can be good and bad at times.”

Shane likes to say that music feeds her soul. She has a playlist dedicated to her uncle with more than 50 songs he sent her over the past couple years. She called it the “The Mic Shane Show,” after the title of the radio broadcast he hosted.

“I’ve been listening to it with my dad and also listening to it on my own time, but sometimes it’s almost too intense to listen to,” Shane said.

Shane posted her first set as “DJ Miracle” on Instagram in January from the backyard of her family’s home in Princeton, N.J. “Inauguration Mix for MLK Day,” she titled it.

“I have a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words echoed at the start then interjected periodically during the 14-minute set that included songs like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and the clean version of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.”

Max Shane danced in the background throughout the performance.

A similar scene unfolded last Saturday. In a video recorded by Lara Bennett, Tumolo’s fiancé, Max and Mira Shane bounced and swayed almost in unison to J Hus’s “Lean and Bop,” as Mira intently tapped at her MacBook.

“I like this one, too,” she said after adjusting her large headphones.

She put them back on and continued to immerse herself in the beat.

“It’s a gift to know Mira,” Treanor said. “The more you can listen to her, the better of a person you become.”