Scott Seltzer will take over as the new executive director of the WPIAL July 1, but his duties as the league boss will be slightly different than his predecessor, Amy Scheuneman.
The WPIAL board of directors met Monday afternoon and voted to slightly reorganize the duties of the league’s top two administrators, mainly to lift some of the burden off the executive director. Vince Sortino, who was previously the assistant to the executive director, will be given the new title of COO. One of Sortino’s main responsibilities will be to run all postseason tournaments, meaning part of his job will be to choose sites and organize all playoff games.
In the past, running postseason tournaments was the job of the executive director. Scheuneman resigned as executive director a few weeks ago, effective June 1. It was her recommendation to change duties of the top two administrators.
“Vince’s main function will be all sports,” Scheuneman said. “Scott will be the executive director and in charge of board meetings, policies, transfers and those types of things.
“I think it will help by giving [Sortino] more responsibility for the operations of the tournaments. I was in charge of it all, running all the tournaments, dealing with eligibilities, transfers, things that were unrelated to actual tournaments. … It was my recommendation of how the league would function better without one person doing everything.”
Besides the change in responsibilities of the top two administrators, the WPIAL also might hire another person to serve as an assistant to Seltzer and Sortino. Seltzer is the assistant superintendent of Chartiers Valley School District. Scheuneman will leave June 1 and take over as new youth programming director at P3R, a company that runs the Pittsburgh Marathon, as well as other races, events and health and fitness programs throughout the Pittsburgh region.
After Monday’s WPIAL board meeting, Scheuneman talked a little about the reasons she resigned and also the rigors of running the WPIAL in general. She took over in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was greatly affecting sports.
“I think we did a good job the last three years of not only just getting through things, but making the league better,” Scheuneman said. “I think the folks on the board, as well as Scott, have the sentiment of they want to continue that. I’m satisfied where the league is under my leadership and I wish them success moving forward.
“It’s hard to know what to expect in this job. There has only been four of us [who were full-time directors]. It’s hard to describe it until you actually live it. I didn’t know what to expect, really. It’s hard to tell somebody what it’s like. It’s a lot to manage. I just had to make the best decision for my family. The job wasn’t something I couldn’t do. It was something I chose not to do.”
Scheuneman believes more issues, like racial incidents, came to the attention of the WPIAL in recent years.
“I think a lot of it has to do with social media,” Scheuneman said. “Information is so quickly disseminated now and brought to light. In the past, it might have been handled locally or by the schools and we might not have even known about it. It’s not that it didn’t happen, but we didn’t hear about it.”
Mike White: mwhite@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mwhiteburgh
First Published: May 16, 2022, 9:12 p.m.
