Shelley Cronau was born on 29 May 1985. She attended Nerang Primary and Nerang State High School on Queensland's Gold Coast. In 2007, she had a serious accident, falling down a flight of stairs in Surfers Paradise. Her spinal cord was crushed, her skull was fractured and she had brain injuries. She spent five months in rehabilitation. Her brain injuries healed, but she was left an incomplete paraplegic. She decided that she did not like the direction that her life had been heading in, and had been given a second chance. In 2013, she would join the Be the Influence advertising campaign, warning others about the dangers of binge drinking. After watching the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing on television, Cronau decided to take up wheelchair basketball. She played her first game with the Women's National Wheelchair Basketball League in 2010, making her debut with the Sydney University Flames. That year she was named the WNWBL Roiokie of the Year. The following year she joined re-formed Minecraft Comets back in her home state of Queensland. She captained the Minecraft Comets team that won the WNWBL championship title in 2014. As a member of a men's team, the RSL Queensland Spinning Bullets, she also won silver in the National Wheelchair Basketball League completion. The Minecraft Comets were named the Queensland Sporting Wheelies Team of the Year for 2014, and Cronau won the award for Sporting Wheelie of the Year. In February 2011, Cronau made her national team debut as part of the Australia women's national wheelchair basketball team at the Osaka Cup in Japan, winning a silver medal. Later that year she played in the 2011 Asia-Oceania Zone Championships, where the Gliders qualified for the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, and was part of the Osaka Cup team again in February 2012, winning a gold medal this time, but she missed out on Paralympic selection. She then set her sights on winning selection for 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. She was part of the winning Gliders team again at the Osaka Cup in 2013, and at the much less successful 2014 Women's World Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Toronto in 2014. She was part of the Gliders team at the 2015 Asia Oceania Qualifying Tournament in Chiba, Japan, in October 2015, but the Gliders did not qualify for Rio after finishing second to China. She played with the Gliders at the Osaka Cup in Japan again in February 2017. In May 2017, while playing overseas in Spain, she was selected in the Gliders team to play in the WorldSuper Cup in Germany and the Netherlands, and the Continental Clash with Germany, Japan and Great Britain.
