Dave Shelles

Background

About Dave Shelles

I've told stories since I could talk. I started writing, as Bob Knight said, in the first grade but never moved on to anything meaningful. I started reading the paper around the same time and once I learned the names above the stories made a living at it, I set my course for life. Now, originally I wanted to cover a college or major pro team. Check and not check. I covered three years of college hoops, won a couple of awards, survived a coaching change scare and burned out in a big way. So I guess I prefer writing about sports at the grass roots, talking to passionate people who want me to tell their stories. I can't escape writing. Early in my career, I grumbled about working on the copy desk, but learned to like it enough to reboot as a copy editor for about two and a half years — but I ended both copy editing gigs with writing assignments. A two and a half year stint in academia showed me I had a little bit of range. Speaking of passionate people wanting me to tell their story, you haven't lived until you've asked a professor of petroleum engineering to explain his work at a seventh-grade level. Or hiked off the trail at Yellowstone's Norris Geyser Basin with the head geologist. And I've added social media and web content to my arsenal. I can update a CMS like a champ, I can shoot and edit video quickly and my 140-character (I refuse to go longer, dangit) blasts have only made my writing better for the addition of brevity — economy of words and all. So let me tell your story. Let me set a scene and put your readers in the front row, be it on the road, in the stadium, in a concert hall or on the beach. Send me where the story is, and trust me to tell it.