VanSanten is a Dutch name. Her ancestry is 75% Dutch and 25% Norwegian.
As a model, she has been featured in magazines like Teen Vogue and Seventeen.
Among the sports Shantel is skilled at are volleyball, knee-and-wakeboarding, track and field, water-, slalom-, and jet-skiing, Frisbee, flag football, softball, badminton, sprinting, and running.
She plays the older sister of Bethany Joy Lenz's character Haley James Scott in One Tree Hill (2003) despite being four years younger than Lenz in real life.