Dover, Delaware · Founded 1891 · Too Fly (the Hornet)
“Delaware's only HBCU — a 134-year-old land-grant school in Dover that just hired DeSean Jackson to coach football and made history as the first HBCU to buy another college outright.”
The Storm's halftime show from the 2019 Route 1 Rivalry game against Delaware — the First State Cup matchup — under director Jovan Alexander Wilson, from the band's own official channel.
The 2026 season opener vs. Stony Brook — DSU's first-ever night game, which the Hornets won — with the full Approaching Storm halftime show under new director Eugene Diggs II.
The official band channel's 'Shed' series spotlights the Eye of the Storm drumline — 'the calmest part of our storm and the heartbeat of our band' — running quints through 'Bryant.'
Meet Me On The 50's footage of the Storm's full halftime field show on the road at Morgan State in 2025 — the MEAC trip that ended with the famous rain-soaked fifth-quarter battle.
MMOT50's improved-audio cut of the 2025 fifth-quarter battle between the Storm and Morgan State's band — the back-and-forth Andscape wrote about after DSU's 14-12 win in a monsoon.
The November 22, 2025 season finale in Dover: South Carolina State's Marching 101 vs. the Approaching Storm in the fifth quarter, with a Celebration Bowl berth on the line for the football team.
Raw, unedited 2021 field show footage of the Storm vs. Norfolk State's Spartan Legion — a straight-on look at the band's sound and drill with no production filter.
Archival footage of the Storm's halftime show at the Atlantic City Classic in the 1990s — a rare look at the band's earlier era.
Eight To Five Entertainment's 2016 clip of the Storm playing its signature 'DSU Big Band Riff' — the kind of stand anthem Hornets fans know by heart.
HBCU Gameday's interview with DeSean Jackson after the record-breaking 70-23 homecoming win over Southern Connecticut State (Oct 11, 2025): 791 total yards, 608 rushing, both program records.
An alum's full homecoming 2023 vlog — the BHOE experience: Greek step show (Alphas win), the plots, the vibes, and the family-reunion feel of DSU's biggest week.
The Storm's 2024 homecoming tunnel entrance — the march into Alumni Stadium that opens homecoming Saturday.
Wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers (1987-1995) who caught the game-winning touchdown from Joe Montana in Super Bowl XXIII; three-time Super Bowl champion.
Legendary jazz trumpet virtuoso who attended DSU in the early 1950s before his meteoric, tragically short career reshaped modern jazz.
NFL wide receiver (Washington, Philadelphia) who set DSU and MEAC records with 18 touchdown catches in 2000, tops among all Division I-AA players that year.
NFL offensive lineman who anchored the Philadelphia Eagles' offensive line from 2004 on, starting at center for one of the league's best fronts.
U.S. Representative for Maryland's 1st congressional district, 1990-2009; one of the few DSU alumni to serve in Congress.
Former NBA player for the Atlanta Hawks and Seattle SuperSonics (class of 1991).
Canadian Football League running back (1990-1996) and DSU class of 1988 standout.
NFL wide receiver (class of 2008) who earned two All-MEAC first-team honors and was the league's preseason wide-receiver rookie of the year.
NFL offensive lineman (Cleveland, San Francisco, Washington) and Super Bowl champion with the 49ers.
NFL wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers.
Represented Venezuela in basketball at the 1992 Summer Olympics after his DSU career.
U.S. Ambassador to the Marshall Islands beginning in 2006.
Editor-in-chief of The Source magazine, hip-hop's bible.
Bank of America executive recognized by Fortune in 2002 as one of the '50 most powerful black executives in America' (class of 1986).
Public-address announcer for the Washington Wizards (class of 2003).
NFL sports agent (class of 1998) representing professional football players.
On May 15, 1891, the Delaware General Assembly created the Delaware College for Colored Students under the Second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states to provide land-grant education for Black students or lose federal funds. The school opened on a 100-acre farm property just outside Dover with three buildings and a mandate to teach agriculture and mechanical arts. Wesley P. Webb served as the first president, and the first degrees were awarded in 1898.
State legislators renamed the school the State College for Colored Students in 1893 to eliminate confusion with Delaware College — the white institution in Newark. The name would stick for more than half a century, and generations of alumni still say 'State College for Colored Students' or 'SCCS' when they talk about the old days. The school's colors and Hornet identity trace to this era of stubborn survival on meager state appropriations.
The first organized music at the school began as a 10-piece brass band — the direct ancestor of today's Approaching Storm. A brass band at a Black land-grant college in 1902 was both a practical necessity for parades and ceremonies and a point of pride. That little ensemble is why DSU's band claims one of the longest continuous lineages of any HBCU marching band in the country.
William C. Jason, a Methodist minister, led the college for 28 years — still the longest presidency in school history. He steered the institution through the Jim Crow era when Delaware's Black citizens were shut out of the state's white university, making the little Dover campus the only path to a degree for generations of Delaware Black families. His name now sits on the William C. Jason Library.
Richard S. Grossley took the helm in 1923 and held it for 19 years, guiding the college through the Great Depression and into World War II on threadbare budgets. Enrollment held, the faculty kept teaching, and the school's land-grant mission in agriculture kept it relevant to Black farming families across Kent and Sussex counties. Howard Gregg succeeded him in 1942 and served through the immediate postwar years.
By legislative action the State College for Colored Students became Delaware State College in 1947, dropping the racial designation from its name. The timing was cruel: the Middle States Commission had granted provisional accreditation in 1945, then revoked it in 1949. The college fought for eight years to get it back, finally regaining full accreditation in 1957 — a scar the institution still remembers when it talks about resilience.
Jerome H. Holland took over in 1953 and, in the university's own words, 'navigated the institution through instability in the 1950s with the promise of future prosperity.' He was building during the Brown v. Board era, when Delaware's own school-desegregation battles were national news. Holland left in 1960 to lead the Hampton Institute, and Luna I. Mishoe — who would define the modern college — succeeded him that October.
Luna I. Mishoe's 27-year presidency (1960-1987) is the spine of modern DSU. He presided over the Delaware State College era's greatest physical and academic growth, and his name is on the Mishoe Science Center. Decades later his daughter Wilma would become the university's 11th president — the first child of a former president to hold the office anywhere the school can document.
Under chemist William B. DeLauder's presidency, the legislature granted university status on July 1, 1993, and Delaware State College became Delaware State University. DeLauder, remembered by Delaware's business community as 'a visionary leader' and 'a gentleman of the old school,' oversaw the research build-out that would eventually carry DSU to R2 doctoral status. He served until 2003.
The Storm crossed the Atlantic to march in London's New Year's Day Parade in 1995, then sent its jazz band on a 1998 tour of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. For a band from a small Dover campus, those trips announced that the Approaching Storm belonged on an international stage. A decade later, in 2005, sixteen members would perform in New York City with the Temptations, the Spinners, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.
The Storm stole the show at the Fourth Annual Ford Football Classic at Ford Field — home of the Detroit Lions and the site of Super Bowl XL — in 2006. By then the band was a regular at NFL stadiums, with three Philadelphia Eagles appearances plus games for the Giants, Washington, and the Bills on its resume. It cemented the band's reputation as Delaware's most in-demand musical attraction for parades and statewide celebrations.
On September 21, 2007, two 17-year-old DSU freshmen were shot on campus; one of them, Shalita Middleton, died 32 days later on October 23 from her injuries. Freshman Loyer D. Braden of East Orange, New Jersey, was arrested and charged with murder. The shooting shook the small Dover campus and remains the darkest day in the university's modern history.
The Hornets won the MEAC football championship in 2007 and earned the program's first FCS playoff berth — drawing in-state Delaware in the opening round on November 23, 2007. The Blue Hens won 44-7 before 19,765 fans, the largest playoff crowd in Delaware Stadium history, but the game planted the seed for everything that followed: two years later the schools would agree to play every year for the First State Cup.
The Approaching Storm got the call every HBCU band dreams of: marching in the 56th Presidential Inaugural Parade in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2009, for Barack Obama's first inauguration. Band director Randolph Johnson led about 110 students, plus the Sweet 16 flag team and D'Elegance dancers, down Pennsylvania Avenue as Delaware's representative. They had warmed up weeks earlier in Delaware's own Returns Day parade, a colonial-era election tradition.
On February 25, 2009, Delaware coach K.C. Keeler and DSU coach Al Lavan stood with school officials and state politicians in Dover to announce the first regular-season meeting between Delaware's only two Division I programs. The game was played September 19, 2009 at Delaware Stadium, with the winner receiving the new First State Cup — a 40-inch trophy designed by Derek Alexander of Delaware Industries for the Blind, its name chosen by News-Journal readers. Delaware won, as it would win all twelve meetings through 2025.
Harry Lee Williams became the 10th president on January 10, 2010, leading the university through a period of enrollment growth and campus investment. He left at the end of 2017 to head the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the advocacy organization for public HBCUs. His departure opened the door for the Mishoe family's historic return to the presidency.
DSU, already one of the first HBCUs with a no-smoking policy, began phasing out smoking entirely in 2015 — restricting it to four designated areas, then going fully tobacco-free that August. The push earned the university the 2017 ACAS Health Leadership Award, presented jointly by the Public Health Service Officers Foundation, the Truth Initiative, Arizonans Concerned About Smoking and the Arizona NAACP. It was a public-health stance few universities of any kind had taken that early.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden delivered DSU's May 2016 commencement address, a home-state honor for the Delaware school. The appearance underscored how far the little land-grant college had come — a sitting vice president on the Dover stage. Biden, a University of Delaware and Syracuse man, praised the graduates of the state's HBCU in an election year.
The fall of 2019 brought the opening of Tubman-Laws Hall, the 620-bed, 200,000-square-foot residence hall built by American Campus Communities — the largest housing investment in school history. President Wilma Mishoe dedicated it that November, noting the names carried forward Harriet Tubman and Lydia Laws, the school's first female instructor. The new hall let 2,900 of DSU's 5,054 students live on campus.
Tony Allen became the 12th president on January 1, 2020 — a Wilmington civic leader and former MBNA and Bank of America executive who had been DSU's provost. Three months in, COVID-19 forced him to end in-person classes and residential life; the university raised $1.5 million for a Student Emergency Relief Fund and reopened dorms that fall with 1,700 students while classes stayed mostly virtual. Then in December 2020, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave DSU $20 million — the largest single gift in school history.
On July 1, 2021, DSU finalized its acquisition of Wesley College, the 157-year-old Methodist-founded private college in Dover — the first time any HBCU had ever acquired a non-HBCU institution. The 41-acre campus became 'DSU Downtown,' absorbing most of the College of Health and Behavioral Sciences as the Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences. The same month, the university appointed alumni Sidney Sessoms Jr. and Vincent Adkins to lead the Approaching Storm band.
DSU cut the ribbon in February 2022 on its 35,000-square-foot riverfront building in Wilmington, consolidating 26 graduate, adult and continuing-education programs that had exploded from 300 students in 2017 to more than 1,000. President Allen also went to the state that year seeking funds to modernize Alumni Stadium — 400 more seats, suites, a hospitality club — and to convert Wesley's old Dover library into a rehabilitation research center. The ask signaled a university planning for 10,000 students by 2030.
In December 2024, DSU stunned the HBCU world by hiring longtime NFL star DeSean Jackson — three-time Pro Bowler, the league's greatest deep threat, with zero coaching experience — as head football coach, ten days after his former Eagles teammate Michael Vick took the Norfolk State job. Jackson inherited a 1-11 team that had fired Lee Hull and hadn't posted a winning season since going 6-5 in 2012. Six months later the school paired him with a new band director, Morgan State drum-major alum Eugene J. Diggs II, and Andscape chronicled the parallel rebuilds.
Jackson's first team went 8-4 in 2025 — the program's first winning season in 13 years — and played South Carolina State in the finale with a Celebration Bowl berth on the line. The October 11 homecoming demolition of Southern Connecticut State, 70-23, set program records with 791 total yards and 608 rushing yards, and Jackson noted it was DSU's first homecoming win since 2018. 'The Hornets are no longer the homecoming game,' he declared on the MEAC coaches call — nobody's easy win anymore. An Amazon Prime documentary, 'Go Deep: DeSean Jackson Story,' filmed by his brother Byron, captured the turnaround.
Delaware's only two Division I programs finally met on November 23, 2007, when DSU's MEAC title earned it a first-round FCS playoff trip to Newark — Delaware won 44-7 before the largest playoff crowd in Delaware Stadium history. In February 2009 the schools agreed to a regular-season series for the First State Cup, a 40-inch trophy designed by Derek Alexander of Delaware Industries for the Blind and named by News-Journal readers. Delaware has won all 12 meetings (2007-2025), most recently 35-17 on August 28, 2025, but the game still packs meaning: it is the one day Delaware's HBCU and its flagship share a field.
On the field and in the stands, Morgan State is the MEAC foe DSU measures itself against. In October 2025, after DSU's rain-soaked 14-12 win in Baltimore — part of the DeSean Jackson turnaround — the two bands staged a marathon fifth-quarter battle in a veritable monsoon, with new director Eugene Diggs II leading the Storm. The November 22, 2025 season finale against South Carolina State, with a Celebration Bowl berth on the line, added the Bulldogs as the newest high-stakes entry in DSU's rivalry book.
🥁 The Approaching Storm Marching Band · since 1902
At Delaware State, halftime is literally called 'show time,' and the football experience isn't complete until the band's fifth-quarter post-game performance. The Storm dates to a 10-piece brass band at the State College for Colored Students in 1902 and has since played London's New Year's Day Parade (1995), a European jazz tour (1998), the Fourth Annual Ford Football Classic at Ford Field (2006), the Obama inaugural parade (2009), the Apollo Theater stage, ESPN's First Take, and NFL stadiums from Veterans Stadium to M&T Bank. In 2005, sixteen members performed in New York with the Temptations, the Spinners, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Under new director Eugene Diggs II, the band is in a deliberate rebuild for longevity and tradition, mirroring the football program's own 2025 resurgence.
DSU student 1980-85 who returned to hold the baton briefly in 1988 before building a career leading bands at Lincoln (MO), Clark Atlanta and Livingstone. He led Clark Atlanta's percussion ensemble at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Led the band when it represented Delaware in the 56th Presidential Inaugural Parade in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2009, marching about 110 students plus the Sweet 16 flag team and D'Elegance dancers down Pennsylvania Avenue after the Returns Day parade at home.
Director of Bands during the 2019 season, documented on the band's own official YouTube channel. Oversaw the Approaching Storm's halftime show for the Route 1 Rivalry game against Delaware that fall, with Michael Purnell on percussion, Chester Knapp on logistics, and the Sweet Sixteen and D'Elegance auxiliaries.
DSU class of 1995 alumnus who directed the Storm around 2020, the year it was tapped to become the first band in more than a century to perform inside Franklin Field at the Penn Relays for the 100th anniversary of HBCU participation. Carried the band through the COVID-disrupted 2020 season.
Came home for real in July 2021 as the permanent Director of Bands, with fellow alumnus Vincent Adkins (DSU '88, Delaware Symphony Orchestra instrumentalist and Motown's Final Mixx veteran) as assistant director. A Sinfonia brother who had spent three decades leading other HBCU bands, he called it 'coming home to Del State.'
Morgan State graduate and four-year drum major who tripled the band at Lincoln University of Missouri before DSU hired him in June 2025, six months after DeSean Jackson took the football job. He told Andscape the Storm's missing ingredient was longevity — 'Del State has had 10 or so band directors over the last 20 years' — and he intends to be the one who stays and builds tradition to match FAMU, Southern, and Jackson State.
The Divine Nine of the National Pan-Hellenic Council are active on the yard, and the homecoming step show is one of the week's biggest tickets — a 2023 alumni vlog of the show notes an Alpha Phi Alpha win that year. Greek plots are a homecoming-day gathering point, and probate season brings the whole campus out.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Built by American Campus Communities on the Dover campus and dedicated November 21, 2019. The nearly 200,000-square-foot, five-story hall houses 620 upperclassmen in semi-suite and suite-style units, with a dining facility, a ground-floor innovation center, a cafe, game room, study lounges and an on-site Dunkin' Donuts. It replaced the two oldest residence halls on campus — named for Harriet Tubman and Lydia Laws, the school's first female instructor — keeping both names alive while wiping out more than $15 million in deferred maintenance.
On July 1, 2021, DSU finalized its acquisition of the 157-year-old, Methodist-founded Wesley College in Dover — making Delaware State the first HBCU ever to acquire a non-HBCU institution. The 41-acre second campus was renamed 'DSU Downtown,' and most of the College of Health and Behavioral Sciences moved there, rechristened the Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences to preserve Wesley's name. The deal added 21 buildings to DSU's footprint overnight.
DSU cut the ribbon in February 2022 on a six-story, 35,000-square-foot building at 1 South Orange Street on the Wilmington riverfront, valued at $4.7 million. It became the headquarters for the university's 26 graduate, adult and continuing-education programs — which had grown from 300 students in 2017 to a projected 1,000-plus — with open layouts, five conference rooms, a Capital One-backed workforce development center, a business incubation hub, and an office for President Tony Allen.
On September 25, 2025, President Tony Allen, Delaware's secretary of education, and state and university officials signed a ceremonial steel beam at the halfway point of construction on the two-story Early Childhood Innovation Center. The facility anchors DSU's push into early-childhood education and teacher training, with the education department chair and the center's executive director on hand.
In 2022 President Allen asked the state for capital funds to modernize Alumni Stadium: roughly 400 additional seats, a hospitality club, premium suites, and upgraded concessions. His pitch to the committee was blunt — 'what you see is a beautiful field, but what you may not see is a state-of-the-art stadium and seating' — arguing that athletics is the gateway for a university on the rise.
Part of the same 2022 capital request: $3 million to convert the former Dover public library — inherited through the Wesley College acquisition — into an interdisciplinary rehabilitation research center with kinesiology, exercise physiology, rehab, injury prevention, and gait-and-movement analysis labs plus a demonstration kitchen. Seven additional research labs were planned for the 18,000-square-foot space.
DSU's Campus Master Plan (the 'REACH 2026' era) called for breaking ground on April 25 on the first new academic building since 2010, anchoring an agricultural corridor on the south end of the Dover campus. The plan lays out reimagined pedestrian walkways, gateways, interconnected residential clusters, research plazas, and athletics venues for a university targeting 10,000 students by 2030.
A $2.6 million, 6,270-square-foot shared building on Division Street in downtown Dover, owned by NeighborGood Partners and partially funded by DSU, houses the Restoring Central Dover plan on its first floor and DSU's Launcher Program — a small-business incubator for students and local entrepreneurs — on the second. It extends the university's footprint into Dover's commercial core beyond the DSU Downtown campus.
Notable coaches in program history include Al Lavan, who stood with Delaware's K.C. Keeler in 2009 to launch the Route 1 Rivalry series, and Lee Hull, whose firing after the 1-11 2024 season opened the door for the Jackson era. On the academic side, DSU's research rise — R2 Carnegie classification, the Center for Applied Optics for Space Science (a NASA University Research Center), and the only full-service university-based flight school in the mid-Atlantic — is the institutional backbone Allen is building on.
12th president (2020-present); former provost and Wilmington civic leader driving the Wesley acquisition, DSU Riverfront, and the DeSean Jackson hire.
Athletic director who hired DeSean Jackson in December 2024, calling him 'a perfect fit for our institution — incredibly competitive, optimistic about the prospects for our collective future.'
Head football coach since December 2024; three-time NFL Pro Bowl wide receiver who took a 1-11 program to 8-4 in his first season.
Director of Bands since June 2025; Morgan State drum-major alum rebuilding the Approaching Storm for longevity and tradition.
DSU is a small-city HBCU where the whole calendar bends around homecoming week — alumni call it 'BHOE' and pack Dover for the Hornet parade, the Greek step show, concerts, alumni parties, and the Saturday football game at Alumni Stadium. Game days run on the Approaching Storm: the band pumps up the team from pregame through the fifth-quarter post-game show, win or lose. With about 6,600 students, four colleges, a 13:1 student-faculty ratio, and a campus that stretches from the historic Dover core (Loockerman Hall, on the National Register since 1971) to DSU Downtown and the Wilmington riverfront, the school feels like a place in the middle of becoming something bigger — which, under Tony Allen's 10,000-student plan, it is.