SE: ‘I Think I like Being Bald’ — K-State WBB Senior Kali Jones’ Journey to Handling Alopecia with Confidence
Oct 01, 2018 | Women's Basketball, Sports Extra
By Corbin McGuire
One day last February, K-State women's basketball forward Kali Jones sat in her room. It felt more like she was at a crossroads, however. The scars and irritation on her scalp had become overwhelming. The daily charade of trying to hide something she never asked for weighed heavily on her.
"Sitting in my apartment," Jones recalled, "I was, like, 'I can't do this anymore.'"
She contemplated shaving her head completely, turning into the skid Alopecia Areata — an autoimmune disease that attacks hair follicles — threw her life in, instead of against it. This prompted her to wonder what people would think of her if she did. What would her family think? Would their Christmas pictures be ruined because of it?
Amidst the moment of crisis, Jones turned the internal questioning to herself.
"I just put all that aside," Jones said, "and thought about, 'How would this make me feel?'"
The answer? Relieved. So, she picked up the phone and called her parents.
The conversation was emotional, to say the least. Tears poured out on both ends of the phone, from California, where Jones spent most of her life, to Kansas, where she was recruited to play basketball for the Wildcats.
She explained to her parents how she was "tired with being uncomfortable," exhausted from the constant itching and pain she endured wearing a hair piece, all to look "normal." When her father spoke, the tears stopped and a realization set in for Jones. If she did this, it could help more than her mental state.
"'If you do this, then you'll be an inspiration to many people who do have (Alopecia) or are struggling with something they are embarrassed about,'" Jones said her father told her. "I think it was his words that made me think about the bigger picture. Like, it's not just me. If someone is struggling with Alopecia who is very young and in school being bullied, I can be the role model for them to say, 'Hey, just be comfortable in your own skin.'
"That was the moment where I was telling myself, 'If you're born with this,' because Alopecia you're born with, 'then might as well embrace it.'"
About 30 seconds after the phone call ended, Jones handed some clippers to her roommate and former teammate, Anastasia Tsybaeva. A few minutes later, she was bald.
"I looked in the mirror and was like, 'Wow, I really did this,'" Jones remembered thinking. "I wasn't really big on change, but I knew I wasn't going to be comfortable if I continued to pay to get these hairpieces done and continued to try and upkeep them just to fit into society, saying I'm normal, I guess. But nothing's normal."
***
Jones first noticed her Alopecia around her 19th birthday, in May of 2016, though she didn't know what it was at the time.
It started as a small bald spot at the bottom her head near her neck. She thought it was from constantly wearing ponytails for basketball, that the pull from them caused it. Her family thought it was stress.
Then the spot continued to grow. Jones went to her family doctor. He knew right away.
"It's Alopecia," Jones recalled hearing him say.
Like most people, she wasn't very familiar with the disease — multiple studies estimate its prevalence in the United State at about 2 percent of the population. While Alopecia is not simple — it currently has no cure — it essentially turns someone's immune system against its hair follicles. It can be permanent or cyclical, coming and going throughout someone's life.
There are treatment options, however.
Jones' first doctor recommended her to a physician more qualified in dealing with Alopecia in San Diego, about an hour commute from her hometown of Murrieta. This doctor suggested she go on a trial, which included getting about 10 to 15 shots once a month in the affected areas – she had three bald spots at this point – along with taking pills.
"After a couple months of doing that the spot was still getting bigger," Jones said. "Over the year, it just kept getting worse."
Jones grew tired of making the hour commute and stopped the treatments. She tried some natural remedies for a few months, but those didn't work, either.
By this point Jones, who played the 2016-17 season at Mount San Antonio College in California, was nearing her time to go to K-State. Ebony Haliburton, K-State's director of student-athlete development, suggested Jones try out a sewn-in hairpiece. Jones reluctantly said yes, the self-consciousness of the bald patches outweighing her preference to natural hair, which used to fall below her shoulders.
For a while, this worked perfectly. Jones always wanted a short hairstyle, so that's the type hairpiece she had made. As last season went on, however, her real hair continued to fall out. The bald spots grew in number and surface area. This made sewing in her hairpiece more difficult. She tried to make up for it with sticky patches, which only made things worse.
"They were very, very uncomfortable," Jones said. "With sweat over time, they started irritating my scalp and (leaving) a whole bunch of scars over my scalp."
Adding to the physical frustration the Alopecia caused were some of the relationships Jones said it ruined. She said she heard and read comments from people she knew about "how people with Alopecia aren't attractive." Then in January, her grandmother, someone Jones was very close with, died.
"All those low moments really pushed me… I'm trying not to cry," she said, wiping tears from her face, before continuing, "they really pushed me to not let them get me down. They really challenged me.
"All of those bad days leading up to the day I shaved my head, I feel like that day was a release."
***
The day after Jones shaved her head for the first time, she walked into the Ice Family Basketball Center with a beanie on. When she pulled it off in the locker room before practice, she was taken back by her teammates' reactions to her new appearance.
"You look so good!" one person said.
"You're the only person who can pull it off!" someone else followed.
Haliburton said to Jones, "I didn't know Halle Berry was on our campus."
"Then that kind of told my age," Haliburton said, laughing. "I tried to think of someone younger."
The positivity poured over Jones, washing away any leftover doubt she had about the decision.
"They were just showing me a whole bunch of love and support, and I knew at that moment I loved and appreciated my teammates because they helped me through that little break," Jones said. "It boosted my confidence up a little more, kept me pushing throughout the day. If they wouldn't have said anything, yeah, it would've been OK. But it's not their obligation to say anything. It's that they did that made me really, really happy. It made me glad that I chose this school."
Conversely, her choice to embrace her situation inspired those around her.
"It was a symbol of courage. Not only did it show our players to live a life fearless of what people would say about you but live a life where you're ready to encourage someone else because of what you're going through," Haliburton said. "It encouraged everyone in some way. Whatever your flaws are, whatever that thing is that you're embarrassed about or could be embarrassed about or you're struggling with, the very thing that can be seen as a weakness is that thing you can use to encourage someone else. That's what I saw with Kali."
K-State head coach Jeff Mittie agreed.
"I just think there's a lot of courage to be able to do that," he said. "When she was going through this, she really didn't want any extra attention. That wasn't the reason she did it and she made the decisions that she made. From our standpoint, from a basketball standpoint, she really just wanted to make sure she wasn't affecting the team negatively — 'Hey, I want to make sure I'm doing the right things here.' That's kind of the type of person she is. She's a really good teammate."
"I couldn't imagine (going through it). She's a very strong girl, definitely. Any female who's going through that… hair is kind of important to us. It's kind of a big thing," senior Kayla Goth added. "Watching how she handled that was definitely inspirational to the team."
***
Jones writes in a journal every day. She started this habit as a freshman at UC Santa Barbara but re-dedicated herself to it the day after her grandmother passed. It's her way to express what she experienced each day. If she's mad, "I just go off," Jones said. If she's happy, "then I express it," she added.
"I was never a fan of journaling," Jones said. "I thought it was pointless, but it's really, really helped me a lot."
Occasionally, Jones goes back to the days where she was really struggling. These flashbacks remind her of how far she's come since then.
"There's nothing you can't get through," she said. "That's why I always go back to the bad days to see how much I've grown from that experience."
For example, Jones made the Big 12 Commissioner's Honor Roll her first semester at K-State. Her grades beforehand nearly kept her from getting to Manhattan, largely a product of everything going on in her life at the time.
"She was dealing with becoming completely bald, her grandmother had cancer, and they have a tightknit family, so she had that on top of, 'You have to pass this amount of hours in this time.' Then you are going to move from Murrieta, California, to Manhattan, Kansas, a town thousands of miles away from family," Haliburton said. "It was tough, but I've never seen a kid as tenacious as Kali, as far as dealing with the obstacles and the trials that have come over the last year."
Jones still has her struggles, days when being a bald woman is not easy. She said she's just more equipped to handle them now.
"When I go to banquets and my whole team has beautiful long hair and I'm the only one with a bald head, that is kind of sad and it does get me down, but over these last couple of years I think I've grown emotionally stronger to go day to day without a full head of hair," she said. "I just try looking at the positive side more than the negative side because really the only negative is that I don't hair. The positives: I'm still alive. I'm healthy. It doesn't affect my basketball in any way, which is awesome."
More positives? She can get her head wet, something she had to avoid with the hairpiece. Her first shower after shaving her head was one to remember, she said, laughing.
"It felt amazing to have water running down my head," she said. "We only had two showers working and I swear I spent like 20 minutes in that shower. I just stayed in there. All of my teammates were, like, 'Hurry up!' I was, like, 'You guys don't understand.'"
Another? Getting ready to go anywhere became a whole lot faster. It suits Jones, who described herself as a "simple person." It's another piece in Jones' transformation.
"I definitely see that I've grown, I've matured, and I can see the bigger picture now. These past years, I had just been focusing on the negative, and I have seen how that really hasn't gotten my anywhere," she said. "I look at life now as a glass half full instead of half empty. Because I have Alopecia… normally people would be sad and depressed and try to hide it 24/7. I just didn't want to live that way. I didn't want to let it affect me. I didn't want it to affect my basketball or my scholarship or my education or relationships. I feel the only way to deal with it is you live with it, you accept it, you embrace it.
"I think I like being bald."
One day last February, K-State women's basketball forward Kali Jones sat in her room. It felt more like she was at a crossroads, however. The scars and irritation on her scalp had become overwhelming. The daily charade of trying to hide something she never asked for weighed heavily on her.
"Sitting in my apartment," Jones recalled, "I was, like, 'I can't do this anymore.'"
She contemplated shaving her head completely, turning into the skid Alopecia Areata — an autoimmune disease that attacks hair follicles — threw her life in, instead of against it. This prompted her to wonder what people would think of her if she did. What would her family think? Would their Christmas pictures be ruined because of it?
Amidst the moment of crisis, Jones turned the internal questioning to herself.
"I just put all that aside," Jones said, "and thought about, 'How would this make me feel?'"
The answer? Relieved. So, she picked up the phone and called her parents.
The conversation was emotional, to say the least. Tears poured out on both ends of the phone, from California, where Jones spent most of her life, to Kansas, where she was recruited to play basketball for the Wildcats.
She explained to her parents how she was "tired with being uncomfortable," exhausted from the constant itching and pain she endured wearing a hair piece, all to look "normal." When her father spoke, the tears stopped and a realization set in for Jones. If she did this, it could help more than her mental state.
"'If you do this, then you'll be an inspiration to many people who do have (Alopecia) or are struggling with something they are embarrassed about,'" Jones said her father told her. "I think it was his words that made me think about the bigger picture. Like, it's not just me. If someone is struggling with Alopecia who is very young and in school being bullied, I can be the role model for them to say, 'Hey, just be comfortable in your own skin.'
"That was the moment where I was telling myself, 'If you're born with this,' because Alopecia you're born with, 'then might as well embrace it.'"
About 30 seconds after the phone call ended, Jones handed some clippers to her roommate and former teammate, Anastasia Tsybaeva. A few minutes later, she was bald.
"I looked in the mirror and was like, 'Wow, I really did this,'" Jones remembered thinking. "I wasn't really big on change, but I knew I wasn't going to be comfortable if I continued to pay to get these hairpieces done and continued to try and upkeep them just to fit into society, saying I'm normal, I guess. But nothing's normal."
***
Jones first noticed her Alopecia around her 19th birthday, in May of 2016, though she didn't know what it was at the time.
It started as a small bald spot at the bottom her head near her neck. She thought it was from constantly wearing ponytails for basketball, that the pull from them caused it. Her family thought it was stress.
Then the spot continued to grow. Jones went to her family doctor. He knew right away.
"It's Alopecia," Jones recalled hearing him say.
Like most people, she wasn't very familiar with the disease — multiple studies estimate its prevalence in the United State at about 2 percent of the population. While Alopecia is not simple — it currently has no cure — it essentially turns someone's immune system against its hair follicles. It can be permanent or cyclical, coming and going throughout someone's life.
There are treatment options, however.
Jones' first doctor recommended her to a physician more qualified in dealing with Alopecia in San Diego, about an hour commute from her hometown of Murrieta. This doctor suggested she go on a trial, which included getting about 10 to 15 shots once a month in the affected areas – she had three bald spots at this point – along with taking pills.
"After a couple months of doing that the spot was still getting bigger," Jones said. "Over the year, it just kept getting worse."
Jones grew tired of making the hour commute and stopped the treatments. She tried some natural remedies for a few months, but those didn't work, either.
By this point Jones, who played the 2016-17 season at Mount San Antonio College in California, was nearing her time to go to K-State. Ebony Haliburton, K-State's director of student-athlete development, suggested Jones try out a sewn-in hairpiece. Jones reluctantly said yes, the self-consciousness of the bald patches outweighing her preference to natural hair, which used to fall below her shoulders.
For a while, this worked perfectly. Jones always wanted a short hairstyle, so that's the type hairpiece she had made. As last season went on, however, her real hair continued to fall out. The bald spots grew in number and surface area. This made sewing in her hairpiece more difficult. She tried to make up for it with sticky patches, which only made things worse.
"They were very, very uncomfortable," Jones said. "With sweat over time, they started irritating my scalp and (leaving) a whole bunch of scars over my scalp."
Adding to the physical frustration the Alopecia caused were some of the relationships Jones said it ruined. She said she heard and read comments from people she knew about "how people with Alopecia aren't attractive." Then in January, her grandmother, someone Jones was very close with, died.
"All those low moments really pushed me… I'm trying not to cry," she said, wiping tears from her face, before continuing, "they really pushed me to not let them get me down. They really challenged me.
"All of those bad days leading up to the day I shaved my head, I feel like that day was a release."
***
The day after Jones shaved her head for the first time, she walked into the Ice Family Basketball Center with a beanie on. When she pulled it off in the locker room before practice, she was taken back by her teammates' reactions to her new appearance.
"You look so good!" one person said.
"You're the only person who can pull it off!" someone else followed.
Haliburton said to Jones, "I didn't know Halle Berry was on our campus."
"Then that kind of told my age," Haliburton said, laughing. "I tried to think of someone younger."
The positivity poured over Jones, washing away any leftover doubt she had about the decision.
"They were just showing me a whole bunch of love and support, and I knew at that moment I loved and appreciated my teammates because they helped me through that little break," Jones said. "It boosted my confidence up a little more, kept me pushing throughout the day. If they wouldn't have said anything, yeah, it would've been OK. But it's not their obligation to say anything. It's that they did that made me really, really happy. It made me glad that I chose this school."
Conversely, her choice to embrace her situation inspired those around her.
"It was a symbol of courage. Not only did it show our players to live a life fearless of what people would say about you but live a life where you're ready to encourage someone else because of what you're going through," Haliburton said. "It encouraged everyone in some way. Whatever your flaws are, whatever that thing is that you're embarrassed about or could be embarrassed about or you're struggling with, the very thing that can be seen as a weakness is that thing you can use to encourage someone else. That's what I saw with Kali."
K-State head coach Jeff Mittie agreed.
"I just think there's a lot of courage to be able to do that," he said. "When she was going through this, she really didn't want any extra attention. That wasn't the reason she did it and she made the decisions that she made. From our standpoint, from a basketball standpoint, she really just wanted to make sure she wasn't affecting the team negatively — 'Hey, I want to make sure I'm doing the right things here.' That's kind of the type of person she is. She's a really good teammate."
"I couldn't imagine (going through it). She's a very strong girl, definitely. Any female who's going through that… hair is kind of important to us. It's kind of a big thing," senior Kayla Goth added. "Watching how she handled that was definitely inspirational to the team."
***
Jones writes in a journal every day. She started this habit as a freshman at UC Santa Barbara but re-dedicated herself to it the day after her grandmother passed. It's her way to express what she experienced each day. If she's mad, "I just go off," Jones said. If she's happy, "then I express it," she added.
"I was never a fan of journaling," Jones said. "I thought it was pointless, but it's really, really helped me a lot."
Occasionally, Jones goes back to the days where she was really struggling. These flashbacks remind her of how far she's come since then.
"There's nothing you can't get through," she said. "That's why I always go back to the bad days to see how much I've grown from that experience."
For example, Jones made the Big 12 Commissioner's Honor Roll her first semester at K-State. Her grades beforehand nearly kept her from getting to Manhattan, largely a product of everything going on in her life at the time.
"She was dealing with becoming completely bald, her grandmother had cancer, and they have a tightknit family, so she had that on top of, 'You have to pass this amount of hours in this time.' Then you are going to move from Murrieta, California, to Manhattan, Kansas, a town thousands of miles away from family," Haliburton said. "It was tough, but I've never seen a kid as tenacious as Kali, as far as dealing with the obstacles and the trials that have come over the last year."
Jones still has her struggles, days when being a bald woman is not easy. She said she's just more equipped to handle them now.
"When I go to banquets and my whole team has beautiful long hair and I'm the only one with a bald head, that is kind of sad and it does get me down, but over these last couple of years I think I've grown emotionally stronger to go day to day without a full head of hair," she said. "I just try looking at the positive side more than the negative side because really the only negative is that I don't hair. The positives: I'm still alive. I'm healthy. It doesn't affect my basketball in any way, which is awesome."
More positives? She can get her head wet, something she had to avoid with the hairpiece. Her first shower after shaving her head was one to remember, she said, laughing.
"It felt amazing to have water running down my head," she said. "We only had two showers working and I swear I spent like 20 minutes in that shower. I just stayed in there. All of my teammates were, like, 'Hurry up!' I was, like, 'You guys don't understand.'"
Another? Getting ready to go anywhere became a whole lot faster. It suits Jones, who described herself as a "simple person." It's another piece in Jones' transformation.
"I definitely see that I've grown, I've matured, and I can see the bigger picture now. These past years, I had just been focusing on the negative, and I have seen how that really hasn't gotten my anywhere," she said. "I look at life now as a glass half full instead of half empty. Because I have Alopecia… normally people would be sad and depressed and try to hide it 24/7. I just didn't want to live that way. I didn't want to let it affect me. I didn't want it to affect my basketball or my scholarship or my education or relationships. I feel the only way to deal with it is you live with it, you accept it, you embrace it.
"I think I like being bald."
Players Mentioned
G
/ Women's Basketball
F
/ Women's Basketball
C
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