City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Mark Seidenburg hadn’t really considered a career in basketball.

A deep reserve at Elizabethtown College, the Fox Chase native ended his playing career after his sophomore season to help his family care for his ailing father, making the more than three-hour round trip multiple times per week to live at home while still attending class.

Though the 2001 Cardinal Dougherty grad got a job upon finishing college as a sales manager with ADP, a Fortune 500 company, he also took an assistant coaching job in the fall of 2006 to help out his cousin at Northern York High School in Dillsburg, Pa.

And at some point over the two years that followed, the bug bit.

“That’s how I fell in love with coaching at 24 years old,” he said. “Just an assistant high school basketball coach...during that process, fell in love with it and put myself back through school a second time at night and got an elementary education degree, because I knew that would allow me the best opportunity to be a basketball coach.”

That’s how Seidenburg began the path that, at 32 years old, landed him the job of head men’s basketball coach at Delaware Valley University.

It’s a path that took Seidenberg from Northern York to a volunteer assistant job at Dickinson in 2009, which opened the door for assistant coaching positions at Penn State-Harrisburg (2010-12) and then Messiah College (2012-16).

“I’ve really sacrificed personally, financially, professionally to make it work,” he said. “It cost me about $3000 to make it work at Dicksion, driving 45 minutes every day, paying tolls, and it was just something I was willing to do because I finally found something I was passionate about morning, noon and night.”

Del-Val announced Seidenburg’s hiring last week, making him the official successor to maintain the astounding success that new Millersville head coach Casey Stitzel brought to the school in his eight seasons at the Doylestown, Pa. institution.

Stitzel took over an Aggies program that had only two winning seasons in the previous 36 years and turned it into one of the strongest D-III teams around, making three NCAA Tournament appearances by winning three MAC Freedom championships.

Before Stitzel arrived, no Del-Val team had won even a single playoff game.

But, as Seidenburg put it, he’s not hitting the reset button -- despite the graduation of three starters from last year’s 20-8 squad, which lost to Oswego State in the opening round of the NCAAs.

He’ll have to lean heavily on rising senior Tyliek Kimbrough (13.4 ppg, 4.0 apg) and rising sophomore Alex Matsinye (7.9 ppg, 4.0 rpg), one of a class of seven freshmen last year who will collectively have to take a big step forward.

“We’re taking the momentum coach had and we’re working to win the MAC Freedom again,” Seidenburg said. “It might be a lofty goal but it’s something that’s been accomplished three of the last six years at Del-Val and we’re not going to be content with a rebuilding year, a retooling year, we’re working our butts off right now to continue the recruiting process and build our team over the course of the next month.”

The move from central Pennsylvania back closer to the Philadelphia area brings Seidenburg near to his Fox Chase and Catholic League roots, and a chance to reunite with old friends like Mark Heimerdinger, his former Dougherty coach who’s now in charge of the program at Samuel Fels.

It’s a move he’ll make with his wife, Misty, and their two children, daughter Camryn (3) and son Christyn (1); they’re expecting a second daughter, who they've already named Carsyn, right around the beginning of the season. They’ll be back near his parents -- his father is back in good health -- and his 15 cousins, who all lived on the same street growing up.

Seidenburg said that he’ll be trying to keep the recruiting footprint that Stitzel established, bringing in players from Maryland, Virginia and New York in addition to several local players.

Being back around the Catholic League has its own appeals as well.

“I’ll tell you, the thing that I’m most excited about -- obviously the recruiting’s a big piece of it -- is just to get back into some of those storied gyms that I had some heartbreaking losses in, had some thrilling victories in,” he said. “Whether it’s Father Judge or some games up at Archbishop Ryan, so that would be cool. Just to be able to see people that you competed against, that you’ve become peers with and be in a different professional setting is going to be such a neat opportunity for me.”