A change in guard

There’s new blood leading the athletics programs at Jay County, Fort Recovery and South Adams High Schools.
The athletics directors at the three area schools combine for less than two years of experience in their current jobs. There have been challenges and successes for Steve Boozier, Kurt Rammel and Jason Arnold in the early going, but all three say they are looking forward to continuing to lead their departments into the future.
“So far, I can’t complain,” said Fort Recovery’s Rammel. “It’s been great.”
“It’s been a whirlwind, but it’s been enjoyable,” added Boozier, a 1985 JCHS graduate who is now heading up the athletics program at his alma mater.
The three new ADs came at their new jobs from very different perspectives.
Boozier, who coached the Patriot football team for three seasons before transitioning to the athletics director job this summer, had similar positions twice before. He was the AD at Wes-Del before coming home to Jay County, and also served as athletics director while also coaching the football team at Tri-County North in Ohio during the 1990s.
Despite having held those jobs though, he has already had some new experiences this year that required getting help from those around him.
During the fall season, he wasn’t quite sure how the boys tennis sectional was to be played — both semifinal matches at the same time or one after the other.
And Nov. 21 marked the first time he was in the AD position to host a swim meet. (Neither Tri-County North nor Wes-Del have swim teams.)
“The great thing is, the people around here are so well established that a lot of that stuff just pretty much runs itself. You’re just kind of there to troubleshoot.
“You’ve got (JCHS athletics secretary Joni Penrod) sitting across the hall. … She keeps you informed … keeps everything up to date.”
While Boozier was a long-time high school coach with previous experience as an AD, Rammel came to his job without having spent any time working in high school athletics.
A 2002 Coldwater graduate, he had served as an assistant coach for the Tiffin University baseball team after earning a bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the school in 2007 and 2009 respectively. Like Boozier, he credited the administrators and coaches he works with for making the transition go smoothly.
The biggest difference, he said, from being involved in running the baseball program at Tiffin to running a high school athletics program is the overall scope of things.
“I left a microscope of college athletes and a baseball team, and I entered a broader spectrum,” he said. “To me the big challenge was being able to reach out to all coaches and being able to get them the stuff that they needed and get their questions answered and being there for each sport equally instead of just focusing on one sport.”
Though he’s been in his job the longest of the three, it’s safe to say Arnold had more adversity than his counterparts in taking over at South Adams.
He rose to the position of leadership when the Starfires found themselves looking for a new AD after his predecessor resigned. He stepped into the job while still coaching the football team in the fall, and then made it his full-time focus after the season was over.
“It wasn’t something that I had a lot of time to plan for,” he said. “I didn’t go out searching for an AD’s job. … I haven’t really tried to chance too much in the first year. I’ve tried to get ideas of how I want to handle different things. … I’ve kind of been slow implementing new things.”
One of the first changes Boozier introduced at Jay County was the Patriot Athlete Leadership Council. Boozier meets with a group of 25 athletes — one representative from each sport as well as four at-large selections — in an effort to help create a community of leaders to support each other and the other student organizations within the school. It’s an idea he’s had for a while, but not one that he had the opportunity to implement at either one of his previous AD stops.
“That’s probably the thing I’m proudest of so far is we’ve got 25 kids who are working their tail off,” Boozier said. “I think they’re excited about helping lay the groundwork.
“I’ve been out of school longer than these kids have been alive. We need young voices and young ideas. I wanted to make sure we kept in touch with them. …
“These kids have valuable input, and I think we need to always have our pulse on that.”
But Rammel said he would like to help athletes from Fort Recovery have the kind of experience he enjoyed after high school while playing baseball at Defiance College and Tiffin. Ten former Indians are slated to play for college teams this year, and three seniors signed national letters of intent in November.
“It just opens you up to a whole new spectrum of people,” said Rammel, noting that he just wants to see those numbers continue to grow. “You’re always going to have your high school friends, the kids you grew up with and rode your bike around town with for 12 years. College is when you go away from mom and dad for your first time, so those are like your band of brothers.”
One of the things the new ADs have pushed has been interaction with athletes and fans via social media, especially at Jay County and South Adams where Twitter and Facebook accounts were previously non-existent.
Jay County and South Adams use the Twitter handles @JayCoPatriots and @SA_Athletics respectively. Fort Recovery’s various Twitter users end their posts with #frindians.
Arnold noted that he doesn’t have a personal Facebook or Twitter account, but that he felt it was important for his athletics program to have a social media presence.
“I know that’s where society is,” he said. “And if I’m going to reach the kids and try to promote them … I need to go there to get that job done. I want to communicate them. I need to go there because that’s where they are …”
Boozier, Rammel and Arnold, in addition to working within their own schools, have also reached out to each other.
Jay County and Fort Recovery are scheduled to play each other in football for the first time in 2014. The game is part of an effort to have the Patriots and Indians compete against each other in as many sports as possible.
“We want to keep a good rivalry together, and not just in football and basketball,” said Rammel. “We want to open it up in all athletics.”
South Adams and Fort Recovery have also discussed meeting on the gridiron in the future. And Arnold said he’d like the Starfires, whose trips across the state line have mostly been limited to nearby Parkway in the past, to expand their horizons in Ohio.
“I love the idea of getting into western Ohio,” he said. “It would just open up new avenues. Besides our conference schools, we don’t have a lot of schools our size that are within a half hour, 45 minutes of each other. … They just open up a whole new area where we can get competition with schools (our size).”
And while Jay County and South Adams already compete against each other in most sports, their connection will grow even deeper during the 2014-15 school year when the Patriots join the Starfires in the Allen County Athletic Conference.
Boozier said he’s looking forward to JCHS joining a conference after spending four years as an independent and said the school is slated to host the first Allen County Athletic Conference girls golf tournament at Portland Golf Club.
Like his counterparts, he expressed excitement about the future. And he said the best part of his new job is that it’s at Jay County.
“I’ve had this job two other places, but it’s not the same,” he said. “When you walked down these hallways 25, 30 years ago, and now you get to help make decisions to help kids have those same experiences that I did … I think that’s the most rewarding part of it.
“I love it.”[[In-content Ad]]