After Tyler Whitney-Sidney’s 1,000th Career Point, All Eyes Are on March

A senior guard on the Mountain Hawks men’s basketball team, Tyler Whitney-Sidney led Lehigh and finished fifth in the Patriot League with 15.2 points per game last season en route to earning First Team All-Patriot League honors. He scored his 1,000th career point against Colgate in March and helped Lehigh reach the Patriot League Championship for the first time since 2017.

Major: Political science with minors in Africana studies, philosophy and sociology

In your athletics bio it says you’d take care of your mom and start a business with $1 billion. What business?

Basketball takes up a lot of your time, and also minoring in three different things as well. But are you involved in any other groups or activities at Lehigh?

I was part of the first-ever LEAD (Leadership, Empowerment, Athletics, and Distinction) scholars cohort that was founded by Cathy Engelbert ’86 ’23P, the WNBA Commissioner. It’s a program that was created last year, and it was headed by Cait Gillard and Julie Ammary ’07. You go deep in-depth on how to lead and how to understand your teammates and how to communicate better in pressure situations. How can you manage yourself in order to serve your teammates? And then this year, I’m taking one with Jordan Wood ’22, who was an all-time great wrestler at Lehigh. It’s called vocal leaders. That’s basically about how you’re able to speak up. What’s positive talk? What’s negative talk? This will be my second year being a captain [on the basketball team], so it’s just constantly trying to build my communication skills, not only for my team, but also for when I go into the real world.

Last year you were First Team All-Patriot League and you scored your 1,000th career point. Were either of those your best athletic achievement so far?

Making the [Patriot League] Championship game, because my whole life my goal has been to play in March Madness. When I was 10, I told my mom, ‘I want to play Division I basketball.’ Being able to taste what it takes to make a championship game and now understanding whatʼs required to win a championship game and make March Madness, that was great. We had a lot of ups and downs. … Being able to persevere through that and still make the championship game was really impressive. For a personal accomplishment, 1,000 points is always cool in three years. … It was definitely cool too, because my mom, both my aunts and my grandmother were there.

What’s something most people may not know about you?

In middle school I played multiple instruments. I played the clarinet, the cello and the viola all through middle school. And then I also played the drums in high school.

What’s the outlook for this season?

We have upperclassmen that know how to lead, we know what it takes. And we have underclassmen who are [buying in]. This is probably the most confident I’ve been going into a season, realistically. A lot of people every year lie to themselves. I’ve never been that way. I’ll be like, ‘We’re alright, but weʼll see what happens.’ I’m very confident we can win a championship this year. I think we have the makeup, we have what it takes. A lot of other teams have lost things, where I don’t feel we lost a lot of point production that we can’t replace. This should be a really fun year for us. We should be back to where we were my sophomore year, a top-three seed.