I've had the chance to talk with athletic directors across the country. Every so often, a conversation sticks with me longer than most. My recent sit-down with Geoff Dixon, AD at River Valley High School, for our "Inside the AD Playbook" series was one of those.
We covered a lot of ground — purpose, problem-solving, leading through change, innovation. Here are three moments from our conversation are the ones I keep coming back to.
Before we got into strategy or systems, I asked Geoff how he'd define the job beyond the logistics of buses, officials, schedules, etc. His answer reframed the whole conversation.
"I refer to us as being administrators of interscholastic or scholastic athletics. We're not college athletics, we're not professional athletics. We're here to teach. And ultimately, at the end of the day, we're educators... I always try to remember that we're here to teach and we're here to help kids learn, and that athletics is simply our avenue to do that."
"I always try to remember that we're here to teach...athletics is simply our avenue to do that."
Geoff spent 16 years as a teacher before moving into administration, and it shows in how he talks about the role. He put it simply: our job is to create experiences that let the kids in our care grow into better people, "so that they leave our care in a little better place than when they entered it."
That's easy to lose sight of on a Tuesday buried in scheduling conflicts. It's worth writing on a sticky note.
I asked Geoff how he identifies problems before they become fires. His answer wasn't a system or a piece of software — it was showing up.
According to Geoff, "Being present is the number one thing. The other day, it was one of the hottest days we've had here all summer, and I went out and stood on the football field for a while just to watch the end of football practice just to see, okay, what are the reactions, how are the kids reacting to the coach's message today. Maybe there's a parent or two down there. You make your face known."
And when problems do surface, Geoff traces almost all of them back to one root cause: "The times you get problems is when there's not a clear message to parents, there's not a clear message to coaches, or there's not a clear message to student athletes. Those are the three main stakeholders. As long as your messaging to them is clear, that makes identifying problems so much easier."
Presence plus clear communication. Not a new idea, but Geoff's living proof it's still the whole ballgame.
Change is a constant in this job. Geoff's approach starts by not overwhelming people.
"I like change. I welcome change...but you gotta make it incremental, right? You can't just say, 'We're scrapping everything we used to do in favor of this new change,'" explained Geoff. "It's gotta be one step at a time. And then you have to give people a reason to understand why the change is important."
But the part that really got me was how intentional Geoff is about who's in the room when change happens. It's not just the top programs.
"We're not just doing it with the football team and the football coaches," he said. "We're going to do it with the basketball team. What about the tennis team? What about the cross country team? They're smaller groups of people, but then they'll actually feel like they're valued more because they're in the same conversation with the football team."
Shared vision, one step at a time, everybody included. That's how Geoff gets buy-in instead of resistance.
Everything above takes time: time to be present, time to communicate clearly, time to walk programs through change. So I asked Geoff what's actually freed up that time for him.
"In just the last two weeks, we got our transportation company onboarded. We used to spend an hour, maybe an hour and a half, every Sunday looking over where are all my teams going, typing out an email, double-checking, triple-checking this bus needs to pick up at this location, drop off at that location. Now I can put all that into my event schedule on Bound, and the transportation coordinator can log in from the bus garage or from home. If that saves me an hour and a half on a Sunday where I could be with my family, or focus on what I do with my student athletes for the next week, that's huge."
"When everything's in one location, it makes your job so much more efficient."
He said the same thing applies across the whole department. "When you have one location that I go to, I can register kids, I can schedule events, I can schedule gym time for my teams, I can schedule transportation, ticketing. When everything's in one location, it makes your job so much more efficient."
And when I asked him to sum up what Bound has meant for his role, Geoff didn't need a full sentence: "It's a game changer. It makes our job so much easier and so much more efficient."
None of these are flashy. They're not hacks. They're the daily discipline of remembering why you took this job in the first place — and Geoff's proof that it pays off.
These are just three takeaways from a much deeper conversation. Geoff also shared how he's led through a school-system consolidation, added new programs like unified bocce and clay target shooting, and gotten his athletic department out of "management mode" for good.
Want the full conversation? Watch the on-demand webinar: Inside the AD Playbook — 5 Things High-Performing Pennsylvania Athletic Directors Do Differently, with Geoff Dixon.