I still remember my high school athletic director as vividly as if she were sitting across from me having coffee right now.
Aptly named, Izzy Stearns was quite, in fact, just that: stern. Well, at least as it always pertained to me. I say that with a grin because I deserved every bit of that frequent look askance, or that leery eye in the hallway. I’m more than certain I went out of my way to creep under her skin but I do know this: she respected feats of athletic accomplishment, she respected hard work and effort and she absolutely treated student-athletes with the respect they earned from her by being good citizens of the school.
For decades she was a pioneer of women’s athletics at my alma mater, and I’m not so sure I’ve ever seen or known another athletic director who put the kind of effort into helping make a school “great” than she did, which is likely why she is enshrined in the school’s athletic hall of fame and more than deservedly so.
But to be fair, everyone is different. There truly is no real model for being a “great” athletic director other than, from my experience, being genuinely friendly, having a good sense of humor, being devoid of ego and certainly, acting like being in that role is something you enjoy; that being immersed in the everyday insanity that is adolescence is something you thrive on and embrace. Certainly, being a vibrant part of the community you are charged with helping mold and shape is a prerequisite. Fostering relationships with often close-minded alumni is critical. Slamming doors and burning bridges and being unfriendly and rude certainly never offered much to the longevity of any “AD.”
Falmouth High School athletic director Kathleen Burke talks to Clipper girls’ ice hockey coach Erin Hunt after a recent game.
Sean Walsh/Capecod.com Sports
Former longtime Barnstable High School athletic director Steve Goveia was truly exceptional at embracing just about everyone who came across his path. His coaching career might not have been the stuff of legends, but it was long enough to at least give him the capability to empathize with coaches and the day-to-day problems and issues that today’s kids face. His sense of being “one of us,” and not above everyone around him was a reflection of true humility. He still helps kids today by mentoring them at Our Lady of Victory Parish in Centerville through any number of youth programs he’s still a big part of in the Town of Barnstable.
If anyone ever deserved a chance at being an athletic director, certainly Dennis-Yarmouth’s Paul Funk did when he was hired last year. If for no other reason than he completely revitalized the Dennis-Yarmouth community at large by creating a football dynasty, practically out of thin air, Funk was first and foremost an athlete’s-athlete, a teacher and a longtime successful coach before being handed the keys to Dolphin-Land. Could anyone doubt he’d do anything but a fabulous job in keeping the Green & White at the top? Thirty years ago would anyone have envisioned such success? Not a chance.
But if you bump into him anywhere you go, he’s almost invariably pleasant and takes a second to give you a legitimate hello or a handshake, not in smarmy, quasi-political fashion, but you actually believe he’s interested in just greeting you. People know when others around them are happy. He has a way of emitting positive energy and one can’t help but think that would help a school community thrive. Granted, you’d hate to be opposing him in any sport, because he is a tried-and-true competitor, but that’s what makes him a more likable person as the person “in charge.” Would you really want someone as an athletic director that had never really proven themselves as an “athlete?”
Take, for example, Falmouth High School’s Kathleen Burke as another athletic director who “gets it.”
Having never met the woman in my life prior to this recently concluded winter season, when she first warmed up to me I practically thought she was going to take out a warm apple pie from behind her back and offer me a slice. In the brief span of about five minutes, I honestly felt welcomed in her presence and appreciated, not just another sportswriter stumbling into “her world” in an invasive way.
Frankly, she should teach a seminar to would-be athletic directors on “how to engage the media.”
I inadvertently took a minute or two at a Falmouth High hockey game this winter just sort of viewing how she interacted with people and how she interacted with the event itself. You honestly could not tell her apart from any of the other bazillion Clipper fans on hand. She looked like anybody’s mom, cheered on the team with applause, kibitzed with passers-by and those around her and seemed readily at home.
It was refreshing to say the least.
But I honestly have never been more impressed with an athletic director than when I was literally hounded by a basketball coach to attend a Nauset basketball game – okay, it was a subtle, friendly sort of “hounding” — than I was with Nauset’s Keith Kenyon. I had never met Coach Kenyon before (he’s not the basketball coach) and walking into the Nauset field house a couple months ago, packed to the rafters with fans, you would think I would be the last person on earth a successful professional like him would have time for.
Spit-polished yet giving an immediate aura of approachability and down-to-earth friendliness, I couldn’t help but associate the packed gym, at least partially, to a societal-phenomenon engendered by him. Granted, it was a big night for the basketball program but still, there have been dozens of big nights for any number of high school teams this winter without half as many fans present. In fact, I’ve been to games so infinitely more important in terms of league or postseason ramifications, with so few fans, I couldn’t help but attribute the sheer tenor of the gym to him.
I didn’t see the typical athletic director all stressed out from 1,500 screaming teenagers, I saw an athletic director who fostered that environment and helped create genuine school spirit for all in attendance. He embraced the “teen spirit” as anarchistic as it may often seem to be. Kenyon, too, had been a longtime successful coach before taking the athletic director reins at Nauset. Here was a person who fully grasped the lure and positive energy that can be created by the “Friday Night Lights” because he had lived it. He immediately struck me as intelligent, happy to be there “after hours” and well, when you see a man in a clean-pressed dress shirt and tie holding the door for people and smiling as they filed into the gym, you have to have respect for that person and respect engenders respect.
In one two-minute phone conversation with him a couple of weeks later, I found myself sincerely cracking up, as he was, on the other end of the line. A sense of humor goes a long way with most folks.
But about seven or eight years ago I was at a high school football game and the usual 7:00 pm Friday night game time had been changed by the athletic director to 6:00 pm without so much as a phone call to the booster club that was in charge of the massive undertaking of providing concessions for that game or consulting with anyone who knew anything about high school football about what that unceremonious time-change would do to effect the program. Would it affect gate attendance profits? Of course it did! Would it affect the 50 or so lives of volunteers making the game a huge success? Of course it did! Would it drive people away from the football program, rather than more to it? Eventually, yes, it did.
When I asked the athletic director why he would just make the executive decision to change the game time to 6:00 pm from the decades long 7:00 pm time slot without so much as a two-minute discussion about it, his answer was “I changed it because I want to go home and watch the Red Sox and not miss any of it.”
And that, my friends, is precisely what it takes to succeed in beginning to lose the support of all the “little” people who worked so hard to help you get to where you got in the first place.
An athletic director should first and foremost be someone who “gets” what high school sports really are all about and not create an animosity from the very people whose tax dollars are funding his or her salary. It certainly doesn’t help a school become a better, more successful place to come off as the “boss” of bosses.
It helps, invariably, to be a friendly, genuine, decent human being.
Sean Walsh is the sports editor for Capecod.com. His column, One On One, appears weekly. To email him, send to [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm
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