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Scott Selheimer (University of Delaware) – Lifetime Achievement Award
by Kevin Tresolini, The News Journal/delawareonline.com sportswriter
 

On his first day as a student at what was then Millersville State College in Pennsylvania, Scott Selheimer marched into the football office and volunteered to be a statistician for games.

Little did he know he’d opened the door to a long and rewarding career.

Selheimer had grown up playing and loving sports in the Ambler, Pa., area north of Philadelphia.

“I was reading The Sporting News at age 8, memorizing the box scores and reading all the stories,” said Selheimer, who played varsity baseball and golf at Wissahickon High.

Selheimer wrote for school and community newspapers. He was also such a devout player of Strat-O-Matic, in which player cards and dice rolls determined the outcome of baseball games, that one summer he played an entire 30-game schedule for every team, then made a yearbook.

“I was probably about 10 or 11,” he said. “I had standings. I wrote a story about the World Series final game, how it happened. I think I made up quotes. And I made this book, about 50 pages, stapled together, tied with strings.”

During that visit to the Millersville football office, he was directed to the school’s public-relations department and eventually “they introduced me to the guy who did sports information,” Selheimer said.

He had the same enlightenment that ignites the careers of many in the field.

“I never even knew it existed and I liked to keep stats,” recalled Selheimer, who found time to play a season of golf at Millersville. “Wow, there’s a job where people get paid to go to games and write stories. I’m like, man, I’m hooked. It was the week I started at college and I worked from then on.”

Two months after graduating from Millersville in May of 1985, Selheimer was hired to be assistant sports information director at Delaware under SID Ben Sherman after answering a want ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He jumped into the busy fray immediately.

“My first day was August 15^th, media day for football,” he said. “Ben just showed me the ropes. They took a chance on somebody who was kind of raw but they knew I had done it for four years and I just had to learn.”

He knew quickly he was in the right line of work and felt he’d landed in a comfortable spot.
  It was the beginning of a career that would stretch 33½ years – all at Delaware – until Selheimer’s January, 2018, retirement.

Selheimer, who succeeded Sherman in UD’s top media relations spot in 1992, continues to serve UD on a part-time basis as a writer, statistician, public-address announcer, web archivist and Athletics Hall of Fame director. He is also serving other area schools as a statistician and plans to work for the Delaware Sports Museum and Hall of Fame.

Selheimer embraced the job’s gritty demands, such as the need to work many nights and weekends, knowing it’s what was required to make sure UD athletic teams – the Fightin’ Blue Hens – could be adequately publicized. He welcomed the support from wife Amy, an elementary school teacher and now a principal whom Scott met at Millersville, and their son Kyle.

Looking back on his years at Delaware, Selheimer has numerous events he can choose as highlights.

When the Blue Hens made the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament for the first time in 1992, Selheimer was widely quoted when he said Delaware was “first to ratify, last to qualify,” referring to the state being the first to ratify the U.S. Constitution in 1787 but the last with a Division I team to make the NCAA men’s tourney.

“We got great attention with that,” he said. “We had never been there before. And we had an awesome team – 27-4.”

Four other UD men’s team qualified during Selheimer’s tenure (1993, 1998, 1999 and 2014).

Delaware’s football team won the NCAA Division I-AA title in 2003, walloping Colgate 40-0 in the title game in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was the school’s sixth national football title but first at I-AA.

“That was huge,” he said.

So was, he added, the men’s lacrosse team’s run to the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four in 2007, when it played Johns Hopkins in front of 52,004 at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium.

“And every single game that Elena played,” he added, referring to women’s basketball All-American Elena Delle Donne, who attracted large crowds to the Bob Carpenter Center from 2009-13 and sparked the Hens to NCAA berths her final two seasons. “It was just like you knew you were going to see a show.”

Delle Donne is among a cavalcade of top-notch Blue Hen athletes Selheimer was thrilled to know and watch, including future NFL quarterbacks Rich Gannon and Joe Flacco, national lacrosse player of the year John Grant and future major-leaguer Kevin Mench.

Disappointment also comes with the territory, of course, though Selheimer prided himself on an even-keeled approach to work. The football team’s 20-19 loss to Eastern Washington in the FCS title game after the 2010 season, when Delaware had a 19-0 lead and was doomed by late-game officiating controversy, still stings as the most disheartening defeat he’d witnessed.

Delaware has long been known as a place where people work and excel for the long haul. That was true of notable coaches such as football’s Tubby Raymond (36 years as a head coach), baseball’s Bob Hannah (36 years) and lacrosse’s Bob Shillinglaw (39).

Selheimer found Delaware to his liking much the way they did.

“I think the university has always treated athletics with class, been very supportive, had the right balance of education, and our coaches have done the right things the right way,” Selheimer said. “I’ve been very proud to be at a place that I’ve never had to deal with things like major NCAA violations. I had a great relationship with administrators, coaches, certainly athletes, and with the media.”

Media members found that Selheimer understood their needs and did his best to assist them without ever compromising his perspective, integrity, nor loyalty to the University of Delaware.

In retrospect, Selheimer’s UD career was everything he could have imagined.

“I think I knew when I was 10 I wanted to do this, but I didn’t know you could do it,” he said.