WVU's 295-pound lineman started out as a dancer

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06324/739816-144.stm

Monday, November 20, 2006
By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Before he was a brute about to be named all-Big East guard, he was once Mr. Dance Kentucky.

Before he was a 295-pound, tribal-tattooed hulk bashing into giant, sweaty linemen from Pitt, South Florida and the conference circuit, he was gracefully elevating tutued girls in Coppelia, Swan Lake and a midwestern Christmas tour.

Before he navigated West Virginia woods in tattered outdoorsman ballcap seeking fish and deer for his trophy wall, he was a man in tights.

OK, so that last part is an exaggeration.

In his former life as an artiste, a danseur and national star on the teen-age dance stage, manly Mountaineers right guard Jeremy Sheffey steadfastly refused to perform in a leotard.

Blame it on the grand jete.

His first few attempts at that ballet leap as a high-schooler from Catlettsburg, Ky., dance instructor Yvonne DeKay Sinnott recalled, "he would always rip his pants. He didn't know he needed stretch pants, and they were hard to find for a boy his size. He used to say, 'I'll wear the pants, but you'll never get me in tights.' "

Wouldn't you know, when he advanced to the national finals in New York, rules required him to wear Spandex. Sheffey tiptoed around the rules by donning form-fitting pants.

Made quite an impression, too. Not just for his outfit, but his ability.

In the competition, he was asked to hoist the reigning Miss Dance America. He tossed her so high, she screamed "Oh my God" in mid-air.

"Nobody has ever thrown me that high before," she said. "What do you do?"

"I play football."

Hardly the stuff of Nureyev, but it's classic Sheff.

"Football and dance," he began to explain earlier this week, "if you really break it down, if you take away certain aspects like two guys pushing on each other, and then you look at dance and put the feet together -- there are a lot of things that are the same, exact moves. We just have different names for them. Instead of doing violent stuff, you're being graceful."

Therein, between the zone-blocking ferocity and the elegant glissade, stands the dichotomy that is this 6-foot-3 mountain of a Mountaineer. He is a man from both suburbia, in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., corridor, and the country hills just down the Ohio River from Huntington, W.Va.

He is a man who shares a tattoo with friends from his old Kentucky home and shares time hunting and fishing with Mountaineers linemates Dan Mozes and John Bradshaw. He is a man who prepares to graduate with a dual major in sports behavior and athletic-coaching education, who mashes opponents on game days for Division I-A's second-best rushing team to the point where postseason honors will follow.

When Boyd County High retired his football number in September, he asked his old dance teacher to attend.

He is a renaissance man, a prototypical lineman, a jumble of so many different men that perhaps it's no accident his girlfriend, Ashley Scalercio, has a psychology degree from West Virginia.

Her father is such a Pitt fan that it prompted considerable back and forth in the run-up to the Mountaineers' 45-27 defeat of the Panthers Thursday, just before Sheffey and the eighth-ranked Mountaineers (9-1, 4-1) embark on that big South Florida-Rutgers finish the next two Saturdays.

"We have a love-hate relationship at times," Sheffey joked of Monaca's John Scalercio. "About football, anyway."

Sheffey can poke fun nowadays about how middle-school buddies bamboozled him into registering for dance class, how he strained to keep his dual life a secret from his football mates, how he gleaned insights into women from being outnumbered at some competitions 500 to 1, how dance provided him with the footwork that may provide him an NFL chance.

Yet he remains earnestly serious about his affinity for dance and about attempting to alter cultural mores in those Bluegrass hills and beyond.

"You just have to change the stereotypes," Sheffey said.

No easy feat, in slippers or jazz shoes.

He was in a Catonsville, Md., magnet middle school, where he was a math and science major. ("I used to be smart.") His friends struck upon the notion that they would join a dance class to meet girls, but "I was the only one who actually signed up.

"My buddies didn't tell me; they thought it was pretty funny. They all had gym class the same period, so they always got to see me change into my ballet clothes while they were changing into their gym shorts. Seventh grade, that's real cool to do to a kid, right? I got sucked into that dance class, but I ended up liking it. And I got pretty good at it."

His father was transferred by CSX Corp. to Kentucky, and the boy continued to dance across the river at DeKay's Ironton, Ohio, studio. "For me, dance was almost like my offseason training."

He'd leave Boyd County High Lions football practices at dark, eat dinner amid the 40-minute commute, then finish dance around 10 p.m. Outside of football season, he was at dance practice five to seven days a week.

"Coming from the city to, you know, 'Green Acres,' you kind of keep your mouth shut. Kids, where I'm from now, they don't understand these things. There is a cultural bias toward what dance is and what football is."

Lee Evans, the Boyd County head coach who was defensive coordinator at the rival school back then, recalled his Ashland boys discovering Sheffey's other activity: "Oh, yeah, I know we did [give him grief]. But I'll tell you, when they went up against him, they quit talking about it. 'Cause there wasn't any dancing going on out there. If you play physical, you can get away with that. If you don't, it can haunt you."

Sheffey, who called that period "a hundred pounds ago," effectively ended his dance career not long after that 2000 Dance Masters of America competition in New York. Yet the former career, the background that allowed him to tour in Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati and other burgs, followed him to Mountaineer Field, where offensive line coach Rick Trickett employed such fodder in practice rants.

"Coach Trick used to make fun of him doing side-steps and little ballerina twirls," Mozes recalled, and the jig was up (he said Sheffey then confessed in his "deep, craggy voice").

"His ballet definitely did help him become a better athlete than what he is. We're not oversized. We're not overathletic. We're guys who'll go out and hit you in the face. Try to get in your head."

Move you out of the way of Steve Slaton, et al.

Nowadays, this fifth-year senior maintains he doesn't even dance for his girlfriend. This much is certain: If he ever becomes at minimum a decent NFL lineman, "Dancing With the Stars" will be his.

Remember Sheffey talking about changing stereotypes and cultural biases? Apparently, he made a difference. The Yvonne DeKay School of Dance recently got five new members -- eighth- and ninth-graders from Boyd County High football teams.

(Chuck Finder can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1724. )