Note: This is the 13th article in the CoSIDA Special Awards feature series which will highlight all 2013 Special Award recipients. All recipients will be honored at the
CoSIDA Convention (June 12-15) in conjunction with the NACDA and Affiliates Convention at Orlando's Marriott World Center.
See the full list of recipients and features schedule.
See list of all Arch Ward Award recipients
by John Antonik
West Virginia University Director of New Media
For someone who has made a career out of publicizing the exploits of others, it’s always nice to be recognized, too.
Such is the case for Auburn Assistant Athletics Director of Media Relations Shelly Poe, who is this
year’s recipient of the Arch Ward Award. This honor is presented annually by the College Sports Information Director’s of America (CoSIDA) to a member from the university (Division I) division who has made outstanding contributions in the field of sports information and through their activities has brought dignity and prestige to the profession.
It is considered one of the profession’s highest honors.
That is certainly fitting for Poe, CoSIDA's 1st Vice President who takes the reigns as the organization's 2013-14 President during the June CoSIDA Convention in Orlando.
Poe will be recognized on June 14th during the Special Awards Luncheon. At the end of the convention, she will become only the third female to hold the post of CoSIDA president.
Poe got her start in the business more than 30 years ago as a high school student keeping the scorebook for West Virginia University women’s basketball and baseball games. From there, she became a student worker in the sports information office before her rapid ascension, first as a full-time assistant and then as the school’s sports information director in 1987 at age 24 to become the youngest person and the only female SID covering Division IA football at that time.
It was during her first year working with the Mountaineers in 1988 that WVU produced its first undefeated, untied regular season in school history and met Notre Dame in the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl for the 1989 national championship.
That began a run of success under coaches Don Nehlen and Rich Rodriguez that transformed Mountaineer football from a regional power to a national contender, and Poe was right there to chronicle it all. From 1987 to 2007, she worked with 14 bowl teams, promoted finalists for the Heisman Trophy, Rimington, Outland, Doak Walker, Lombardi, Butkus and Nagurski Awards, worked with 47 players who were drafted by NFL organizations and publicized 34 National Football Foundation scholar-athletes.
Yet it was a string of consensus All-American football players - nine in all during a 25-year span - that really sets her apart from most of her peers. It’s one thing to do it at schools such as Notre Dame, USC or Ohio State, but it’s something entirely different to do it at West Virginia University – a school that had just two consensus All-American football players in its history prior to Poe’s arrival.
Shelly Poe’s success promoting All-American football players and her bulging Rolodex attracted the attention of Ohio State, which hired her in the summer of 2007 to promote the Buckeye football program. She spent five seasons in Columbus before assuming her current role as assistant athletic director for media relations at Auburn in 2012.
During her career, she has covered football teams that have played in all four major bowl games, teams that participated in the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments as well as teams that have competed in other sports championships.
Due to her outstanding media relations reputation and work, Poe served as official scorer for the 1996 Women’s Final Four held in Charlotte, NC, was the chief press officer for shooting sports at the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis and was the host media coordinator for the 2012 NCAA Rifle Championships.
Poe is no stranger to being honored by her colleagues and peers. In 2002, Poe was inducted into the CoSIDA Hall of Fame, becoming the first WVU publicist and just the fifth female to be honored. In 2012, she received CoSIDA’s Trailblazer Award, presented annually to pioneers of that organization. At the time, she was just the 12th recipient of the prestigious award.
Poe joins an elite group by winning this year’s Arch Award, becoming one of only three females to be recognized since 1958 - the other two being Tennessee’s Debby Jennings and Penn State’s Mary Jo Haverbeck.
A National Merit Scholar coming out of high school, the Morgantown native graduated with honors (maagna cum laude) from West Virginia University’s Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism as one of the first class of University Honors Scholars. Poe was recognized in 2006 as one of the National Merit Scholarship 25-year alumni of distinction in that group’s annual report.