Shane Dennis

Born in Fort Scott, Shane Dennis was a standout athlete at Uniontown High School, which did not field a baseball team.  He was all-state in both football and basketball.  He once scored 52 points and had 17 rebounds in a single game and set a 1A state record by scoring 90 points in the 1990 1A tournament, including 33 points in the championship game.

During the summer, Dennis pitched for an American Legion team in Fort Scott, winning 28 games over three years and striking out 418 hitters in 222 innings.

Dennis came to Wichita State in 1991 and became a midweek starter, posting a 5-1 record with a 2.66 earned run average as a freshman for a Shocker team that went to the College World Series final.

As a sophomore, Dennis won 13.  He struggled as a junior but bounced back to go 9-2 as a senior with a 1.35 ERA.  He was named Missouri Valley Conference Pitcher of the Year and first team All-American by the American Baseball Coaches Association and by Collegiate Baseball.  Dennis’s career marks for ERA, starts, strikeouts and innings pitched are ranked in the WSU top ten.

Following his senior season, Dennis was drafted in the seventh round by San Diego and pitched four seasons in the Padres organization.  In 1996, he was the Padres minor league Pitcher of the Year.

In 1997, Dennis pitched the first of two seasons for the Chiba Lotte Marines of the Japan Pacific League.  He returned to the Padres organization to play his final season for Triple-A Las Vegas in 1999.

While at Wichita State, Dennis majored in radio/television journalism and served as color commentator on Shocker women’s basketball broadcasts.  In 2001, he returned to Wichita as play-by-play voice for the Double-A Wichita Wranglers before going back to Wichita State as director of baseball operations for 12 years.

Dennis is now part of the WSU baseball broadcast team and hosts a daily sports show, The Shane Dennis Show, on a Wichita radio station.

Dennis’s father, Don, pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox and was inducted into the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003.