Civil engineer Zae Sellers pivots from point guard to project manager
Zae Sellers is a civil engineer with Mortenson Construction. Photo by David Pierini
By David Pierini, Editor
Point guard is the most difficult position to play in basketball, but Hazae’lee Sellers dribbled with aplomb, called all the plays and popped crisp passes throughout a distinguished high school and college career.
The lifelong Northsider no longer drives the lanes, but does run the point on West Broadway Avenue as a civil engineer and project manager helping to oversee the rebuild of businesses damaged during the civil unrest that followed the police murder of George Floyd.
Sellers, who goes by Zae, is 23 and works for one of the nation’s largest construction and engineering companies, Mortenson Construction.
Sellers said she grew up around construction sites, doing clean-up for her father and uncle who were in the business. Yet construction or engineering was not an obvious choice for her, she said.
“I was a laborer and I was cleaning up jobs as my relatives did stuff, but I wouldn’t say construction was the thing,” Sellers said. “When I went to college, my goal was to get a degree in psychology and be a therapist and that just changed.”
“I never thought I would be doing this full-time. It has just been a blessing. I’ve been letting God guide me through it all.”
Sellers played basketball at DeLaSalle High School and was a sophomore when her team won a state title. She earned a scholarship to play basketball at North Dakota State College of Science. After earning an associates degree, she made a brief stop at Ohio Valley University before landing at George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario.
At Ohio Valley, she began to think about engineering after she met a water resource engineer. This got her interested in how to ensure communities have access to clean water. She transferred to George Brown and discovered the school did not have a psychology degree program. It did however offer civil engineering, which she pursued at the encouragement of her family.
Sellers was an intern at TRI-Construction in North Minneapolis at the time of George Floyd’s murder and became part of a team that is now called Twin Cities Rebuild Communities (TCRC), a coalition of groups helping small businesses on West Broadway Avenue, Lake Street and Midway in St. Paul that were damaged in the unrest that followed.
Mortenson Construction, familiar with her work on the Twin Cities Rebuild team hired her in November to be a project manager for TCRC. She is a project manager for rebuilds on both West Broadway Avenue and Lake Street.
“Though young in the industry in terms of experience, Zae has shown that she is a leader,” her supervisor, Matthew Helleen, said. “Zae’s input has been consistently sought out by project leaders on all types of issues, small and large.”
Sellers sings in the youth choir Known and remains close to the court as the junior varsity basketball coach at Edison High School.
Her journey to a career in engineering and how her first job allows her to participate in a historic rebuild made for interesting conversation. The story in her own words follows and is lightly edited for brevity.
How the skills of a point guard translate to project manager: Oh my goodness, teamwork and being vocal, being able to vocalize instruction. I even like scheduling because of how collaborative it is. It’s just like a basketball team, everybody has their roles, their strengths and weaknesses.
I enjoy helping people maximize their strengths. You have to have patience with people. On a basketball team, not everyone likes to be spoken to the same way. Some react well to the yelling because they like that fire and others just shut down. From that you learn how to speak to people and how to resolve issues in a calm and cool way.
The pivot from psychology to engineering:
I finished my associates degree in three semesters in North Dakota and so I was thinking about what should I do. So I’m like, ‘OK, I’m gonna keep on with psychology, I’m going to get my PhD and be a psychiatrist.’
But I didn’t want to go to medical school and I started to think about what my family does. They were always talking about construction. I didn’t necessarily want to do that, but I could do other things. My god mom was talking to me about STEM and how those careers are financially stable. OK, some type of engineering. I know women in engineering, especially minority women in engineering, are rare. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll try some type of engineer.” Chemical wasn’t my thing and I didn’t think I’d like mechanical.
In Canada, I had a coach, he was the bomb and he said Brown (College) had civil engineering. I said, ‘Well, God got me this far,’ and that’s how I got into civil.
Civil engineering is the design of bridges, tunnels, roads and even waterways. I originally went into engineering to become a water resource engineer. So that's the path, it’s just going to come later down the line. Water is something everybody needs. We all need clean water and the quality of the water we put in our bodies impacts our mental health and overall health.
“Though young in the industry in terms of experience, Zae has shown that she is a leader. Zae’s input has been consistently sought out by project leaders on all types of issues, small and large.”
Being a woman in a male-dominated field:
You have to be confident and ask questions. Men have as many questions as I do. A lot of times, though, we do know the answer but a lack of confidence is what holds us back. Be courageous and be able to break the barriers for the person coming after you.
The confidence comes from... It comes from sports, it comes from family and it comes from God. This journey has been a blessed journey and it wouldn’t have happened without God. There are people that grab a hold of you and bring you onboard like Cavonte Johnson (a community construction manager at Mortensen who recruited her). God put him in my life for a reason. (TRI-Construction founders) Calvin (Littlejohn) and Lester (Royal) and even the
guys at Mortensen. God put them in my life for a reason. The confidence came just from life.
But yeah, I was a point guard and I knew how to lead a little. Playing point guard is definitely project management.”
Helping rebuild the place she calls home:
I feel like an active participant and it’s just so awesome. I live here, I live near these buildings and so it feels really nice to help make change. So it’s been a true blessing for sure. This is not just construction. This is a team truly rebuilding a community.
Something her mother told her:
Pray and do things right. I remember this very distinctly. I was younger and I rushed through some homework to play outside. The handwriting was sloppy and so my mommy erased the whole thing and said, ‘Do it right or don’t do it at all!’ So that’s something I’ve been trying to walk, to do things correctly. She didn’t want me to just slide. Don’t do something just to move on, do things with quality, do it the right way.