Back home, Selesky staying involved with football

Ron Selesky has been at the right place at the right time quite a few times in a football career that has led him around the country and back.

After playing college football at Division III North Central College in Illinois, he found his way into the NFL for a figurative cup of coffee in 1987 with the Minnesota Vikings.

In 1997, he ended up in the Arena Football League as an assistant coach with the Tampa Bay Storm, jumpstarting a long and winding road throughout the AFL and af2, the AFL’s developmental league.

Over the next 20 years, he coached and held executive positions with nearly a dozen different organizations. But the Trussville resident made his way to Alabama for the first time in late 2005, when he was hired as the head coach of the Birmingham Steeldogs, an af2 team that played at the BJCC.

“We had done a lot of moving around, thankfully most of the time going up the ladder,” Selesky said.

Selesky said the moves were so frequent between coaching stops, after unpacking at anew residence, Selesky would simply store the moving boxes in the garage, knowing they may be needed again in the near future.

“That was something we didn’t want to keep doing,” he said.

Selesky coached the 2006 and 2007 seasons with the Steeldogs before opting to return to the AFL as the defensive coordinator and director of player personnel with the Grand Rapids Rampage. But Selesky and his family had decided to stick around awhile in Trussville, so the family stayed home while he coached the season in Michigan.

But the AFL suspended operations in 2009, pinning Selesky back home with nothing else to do. It was then a phone call changed the trajectory of his coaching career for the next few years. Dale Posey, at the time the Hewitt-Trussville Middle School athletic director and now the Trussville City Schools transportation director, called Selesky to gauge his interest in teaching and coaching at the middle school.

“Why not,” Selesky recalls saying to Posey.

So, Selesky coached the HTMS football team for three years. That gave him a fresh perspective on many levels.

“That was really interesting going from coaching at the pro level to coaching kids in seventh and eighth grade,” he said. “It really taught me a lot, because it kind of helped me relearn the value of patience.”

Selesky wouldn’t remain away from the AFL very long. Once the league resumed operations in 2010, he spent two seasons as an executive with the Cleveland Gladiators, before coaching on staff there 2012-14. In 2015, he did a few different things before coming back to coach the Gladiators in 2016 and 2017.

After the 2017 season, the Gladiators shutdown, setting up the start of the most recent chapter of Selesky’s football journey. With the longing for a successful outdoor spring football league in the United States, the Alliance of American Football and the XFL each made a run at providing that. Selesky joined the Birmingham Iron of the AAF in 2019 as the Director of Football Operations. The AAF failed to make it through its initial season before going bankrupt, and Selesky latched onto the Tampa Bay Vipers of the new XFL.

The XFL had its own issues, and Selesky ended up back home in Trussville in April as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In another instance of being in the right place at the right time, Selesky was hired by Eby-Brown and currently manages much of the state of Alabama for the food service company.

With the XFL planning to start back in 2022 and the Canadian Football League in flux as well, Selesky is unsure of his future in pro football.

His present focus in the world of football has shifted to the company he founded in 2007, ProFind. It was originally created as away to organize and run skills combines for potential arena football players while Selesky was in charge of personnel in Grand Rapids.

It has since transitioned its focus to helping often overlooked and underrecruited high school players secure opportunities to play college football.

Beginning with Robert Aldridge, a 2009 Hewitt-Trussville High graduate, Selesky has been able to use his connections and experience to aid more than a dozen kids in securing a scholarship to play football at the next level.

“I’m mainly just trying to help those kids who want to go somewhere to play and for whatever reason are just not able to find those opportunities,” he said.

The top recruits will have no shortage of options, as they attract plenty of attention. But Selesky believes, particularly with the pandemic making recruiting more difficult than ever for smaller colleges, services like his will be more important than ever.

Selesky said he is content with keeping his ProFind services on a pretty small scale for the time being, as he desires to provide the best service he can to that small number of clients.

“What I would really like to concentrate on is doing what I’ve done with ProFind, trying to partner with some athletes and their families and help kids looking for that next level opportunity,” he said.

For more information, go to profindfootball.com.