Bob Seddon: The Skipper

It's an impressive resume, to say the least. But 25 years, 461 victories, 211 Ivy League wins and five league titles aren't the accolades Bob Seddon wants to discuss. Instead he talks about the Ian Award. It's presented annually, complete with a plaque, to the member of the baseball team who acts the goofiest during a particular season. "I've won that before," Seddon says. "They try to give it to me every year, actually." Seddon is always a leading contender for the award because 25 whole years as Penn baseball coach later, he is more of a kid at heart than he ever was. In the adult world of big-time collegiate sports, league titles and NCAA playoff berths are often the only things that matter. For Seddon, baseball is about having fun under the sun with a group of guys you know and love. He didn't always feel that way. Not to the extent he does now. Growing up in a small New Jersey town in the 1940s and 50s, Seddon was a three-sport star whose biggest asset was his burning desire to win. What people thought of him mattered, but achieving goals was at the top of his agenda. From the time he was in eighth or ninth grade, one of those goals was to be a coach. "It was just something I really wanted to do," Seddon says. "In all the years I've coached, I've never thought it was a job." In 1968, 10 years after graduating from Springfield College in Massachusetts, Seddon found himself not having a job as coach of the Penn men's soccer team. Two years later, the former three-sport athlete became a two-sport coach when he took over the baseball program. He stayed that way until 1986, when he relinquished his soccer duties, a move he says added years to his coaching career. With his attention focused solely on baseball, Penn soon entered the glory years of the Seddon era. From 1988 to 1990 the Quakers won three straight Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball titles. Though Penn came up short of its ultimate goal -- a spot in the College World Series -- each year, the atmosphere around Bower Field was electric. In 1989, the middle of that streak, one player was less thrilled about the situation than most of the others. Tom Bradshaw was a senior outfielder who was hoping he would finally get a chance for some playing time. But the immense talent on the Quakers roster prevented that from happening. Bradshaw was bitter, and he let Seddon know it. But six years later, Bradshaw is still writing Seddon regularly to say hi and let him know what's going on. That makes Seddon more proud than anything -- even the Ian Award. Over the years Seddon has discovered that, at least on the collegiate level, there is something more important than the game of baseball: the players who play it. "The longer you coach, the more you learn," Seddon said. "I think I realize now that the most important thing as a coach is what you're doing for the athletes. They shouldn't think all you care about is wins and losses. "So you try to get involved in their personal lives a little bit. You put pictures on the wall when they leave. You should always know where all your players are and what they are doing. I hope I can look back and feel a little bit like I did something right." For now, though, he does not want to look back. He wants to keep going, and he prays it all doesn't have to end any time soon. "I've been really fortunate to be able to do this for so long, and I really hate to think that someday I'm going to have to stop doing it," he says. "I'm just not mentally ready for that yet."

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