by BOB HERTZEL, sports reporter for
The Dominion Post. Write to him at
bhertzel@dominionpost.com.
IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1981, the first time Shelly Poe walked into the Coliseum as a member of the West Virginia University sports information staff, a freshman-to-be who had come up through George W. Phillips Elementary, Riverside Junior High and University High.
“First day I took the box score from the basketball team that was traveling in Australia,” she recalled.
Seven years later, a journalism degree with honors hanging on her wall and six years of taking box scores and writing articles behind her, she was named to head the sports information department.
The year, you might recall, was 1988 and, as Frank Sinatra might say, “It was a very good year.”
West Virginia University’s football team went unbeaten through the regular season before losing to Notre Dame in a Fiesta Bowl played for the national championship. The basketball team went 26-5 and put together the nation’s longest winning streak of 22 games, losing to Duke in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
It was a helluva introduction for what was then a rather rare bird in the world of such highpowered NCAA athletics.
Shelly Poe, you see, is ... a redhead.
Oh, yes, she is also a woman.
There weren’t many women writing sports then and there were far fewer doing SID work for men’s football and basketball programs.
“Being a woman in that job never bothered me,” she said. “If anything bothered me it was that I was young. I was only 23.”
Poe pooh-poohs the thought of being a pioneer, but as her career at West Virginia comes to an end and she leaves next week to become director of football communications at Ohio State, there can be little doubt she was a Daniella Boone in her field.
“There were times,” she said, “when I’d get calls from the media and they thought they were talking to the secretary.”
She understood the confusion, laughed at it, and turned it into a way of making yet another friend.
There was, of course, the matter of being accepted by the athletic staff. Football and basketball are macho worlds even now and were far more so a couple of decades back.
“The coaches were great,” she said. “Oh, we’d get together later in my career and they’d tell me they didn’t want any part of me. The defensive coaches in particular were that way then. They said ‘We’ll get rid of her in six months.’”
Turns out it took 19 years and only Bill Kirelawich of the defensive staff from those days remains.
As for the players, she says she never experienced a problem with them.
“After I told them I would not be coming into their locker room everything was fine,” she said.
Ah, the players. Shelly Poe was part house mother, part teacher, part disciplinarian to her players.
They loved her for the way she treated them, giving them a pat on the back when they were down, bringing them honors even they could not believe. Seven consensus All-Americans came along under Poe, a Remington Award winner in Dan Mozes and finalists for the Heisman Trophy, the Nagurski Award, the Outland Trophy and the Doak Walker Award.
It was no wonder that at 7 a.m. on Monday she received a call from Charlotte. Linebacker Jay Henry, the 4.0 student who was working in the field of finance after graduating this year, was on the line.
“I just read about you leaving,” Henry said. “I can never thank you enough for what you did for me.”
Hundreds of others have the same feeling.
She knew everyone’s birthday, their mother’s and father’s birthdays.
“It’s a family,” she said.
That’s why the good times, when someone won an award or did something special, were important and why the bad times hurt so much.
“To have Tanner Russell call me and tell me Rick Gilliam was dead,” she said, referring to the harder things to take. “I remember what I was doing when I received the call that Lawrence Pollard and Wilfred Kirkaldy were in a car accident.”
There was the dreadful evening when she had to call coach Don Nehlen to tell him his recruit, Caleb Cooper, had been severely injured in an automobile accident and his father was killed while heading to the Victory Awards dinner or telling everyone as they entered the Puskar Center that volunteer coach Scott Shirley had died while playing noon-time basketball on the court at the stadium.
But the good outweighed the bad and Poe wound up being inducted in the CoSIDA Hall of Fame for sports information directors.
Now, for the first time in her life, she’s leaving WVU for another job.
She leaves with some regret but filled with optimism.
“What they did at WVU for me as a woman was a great thing,” she said. “I just hope they continue to give opportunities to women.”