Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | fall 2004

FALL 2004
Home

Cover Story:
Surviving Stroke

Feature:
37 things to do on an ISU football weekend

Feature:
A new tradition

125th Anniversary Celebration:
A letter from Kristi Kielhorn
Excited about Cy

Departments:
Getting Started
Letters
Around Campus
Alumni Profiles
Association News
College CloseUp
Giving
>>Sports

LIFE AT CENTER COURT

Big 12 basketball officials don’t usually get the sweet treatment at Hilton Coliseum, but amid the tangle of printer cords and piles of papers at press row’s center court rests a container filled with assorted candies. Many refs saunter over before a game to steal a sugary treat, and they can’t help but stop and exchange a few barbs with the candy’s cordial keepers – Steve Shuey, Rich Pope, Dick Horton, and Tim Sheirbon: the eyes and ears of Cyclone basketball.

Combined, the four have volunteered for more than 50 years on Iowa State’s statistics crew. Pope, Shuey, and Sheirbon also do stats for football games while Horton runs the scoreboard. They
have seen a lot of bad games in their time. A lot of great games, too.

They’re an eclectic bunch. Shuey is a construction manager. Pope (’74, MS ’89) is an ISU Extension pest management specialist. Sheirbon owns his own auto body shop. Horton (’62, MS ’63, PhD ’67) is in his 41st year as a professor of electrical and computer engineering at ISU.

“If you think about it, I don’t think that we’d probably even know each other if it weren’t for this,” Sheirbon says, surveying his stat crew chums. “You couldn’t do this if it wasn’t fun, and the reason it’s fun is because you’re doing it with guys you like.”

All four are quick to agree that their crew runs like a well-oiled machine thanks to their compatibility and years of teamwork. They really do keep stats for fun – their compensation is some game tickets that they can’t use themselves. “But,” says ISU’s associate media relations director Erin Rosacker, “they
have the best seat in the house.”

The view from that seat is an important one, and it’s far from easy to keep the official statistics for all home football and men’s and women’s basketball games. Shuey, Pope, Horton, and Sheirbon rarely miss a contest, and they always have to be on their toes, watching every play and following every rumpled jersey number with a careful eye. They have to know the rules, and they have to know the computer. They have to come early, and they have to stay late. And they don’t get to tailgate on football Saturdays.

“People always ask me,” Pope says, “‘Why do you do that when you can’t enjoy the game?’ I tell them we do enjoy the game. We take a lot of pride in what we do. We are as much of a team as anyone who comes here to play.”

Why the president and
vice president don’t travel together
Rosacker says the stat crew members are among the first people who receive the schedules each year. Their dedication is invaluable to the athletics media relations staff.

“It’s such a big weight off our shoulders to know that the biggest part of our job is done by people who do it so well,” she says.

And their expertise is counted upon. Pope and Horton remember a near disaster: a basketball game they very well could have spent trapped in a Hilton Coliseum elevator. The only two people in the building – and probably the only two people in Story County – who knew how to run the basketball stats program had departed the pregame dinner table about 20 minutes before tip-off to head down to the court. When they reached court level, the elevator doors wouldn’t open. For the next 19 minutes and 23 seconds, Shuey prepared to keep the stats manually and crews labored to free the trapped twosome, who could move up and down, but not out. With 37 seconds until tip-off, Horton and Pope finally sprinted out onto the court, much to the relief of the panicked staff.

“This,” Pope jokes, “is why the president and the vice president don’t travel together.”

Foibles and freak-outs
“Any time a computer is involved,” Sheirbon says, “it can get bad.” And the crew has had its fair share of technical glitches. But when the computers go down, they know what to chant in unison: “Dick, start writing!”

On top of technology, the rulebook has been known to cause a headache or five. Pope still remembers the first football game he worked.

“Wyoming!” he says. “The second overtime game in NCAA history. Earlier that week the overtime rule came up [in discussion] and I said, ‘What happens
if we go to overtime?’”

The rookie was given a reassuring reply: “Oh, that’s not going to happen.”

Sure, it wouldn’t. Pope spent a large part of Sept. 7, 1996, figuring out how the rules of overtime worked and how to tell the computer what was going on.

Most memorable
From the bizarre to the beautiful, there are some moments the statistics crew just can’t forget.

Shuey remembers the time Cyclone Lindsey Wilson “took out Sheirbon” while in hot pursuit of a loose ball.

“My glasses were in the third row,” Sheirbon remembers of the crash landing. “But I was unscathed.”

You just never know who’s going to come flying across that table.

That reminds Shuey of another memorable collision. See, the stat crew has this thing going with veteran men’s basketball officials Steve Wellmer and Tom O’Neil.

“We’re judging the quality of their toss-ups on the opening tip,” Shuey explains, chuckling. “We give them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down after each tip-off. One time Wellmer was so taken aback when we gave him the thumbs-down that he looked over at us with a shocked expression and almost got plowed over by a player on the court.”

And then there was the ISU-Colorado football game in 1991. It snowed. And snowed. And as the teams took the field, it snowed some more.

“I remember not being able to see the yard lines at all,” Shuey says. “We did a lot of guessing that day. I remember saying, ‘There’s the 50, so…45, 40, 35…let’s call that the 33!’”

Despite the challenges, there are also those Cyclone moments you live for – when you don’t want to be anywhere else.

“I remember a women’s basketball game against Texas,” Pope said. “There were like 3.2 or 3.5 seconds left, tied. Erica Haugen throws the ball to Megan Taylor, who turns around and hits a falling away three-pointer to win the game. I just remember Steve yelling right in my ear, ‘ASSIST 12! ASSIST 12!’ That’s how we celebrated that game. I called it ‘the assist heard ’round the world.’”

So why stat crew?
Shuey is a stat crew legacy. His father, Ken – a 34-year stats veteran – grabbed him from the stands years ago when a crew member didn’t show, and the younger Shuey has been a proud statistician ever since.

Sheirbon and Pope were loyal Cyclone fans plucked from the stands (“You mean that loud guy?” Rosacker remembers saying about Pope) before becoming stat gurus. Horton got increasingly involved over the years after he was instrumental in purchasing and setting up the first Jack Trice Stadium scoreboard in 1975.

Weird doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling on those rare occasions they sit in the stands like a regular fan. You forget how to cheer, they say – but that’s not what’s exciting, anyway.

“When I just sit and watch the game,” Horton says, “it’s boring.”

Is it less boring to crunch return yardage? Less boring to wire up stat monitors? Less boring to count “dead ball rebounds?” Dick Horton, Steve Shuey, Rich Pope, and Tim Sheirbon say yes. They wouldn’t have it any
other way than living every moment to its fullest at center court.

About the Writer | Kate Bruns is the Iowa State University Alumni Association's assistant director for electronic communications.