It’s really hard being a high school athletic director. I mean, really hard.
To do that job at any school, you have to have a servant’s heart. You have to be prepared to be gone five evenings a week. Your spouse is someone that you remember spending time with, and their car is still in the driveway when you get home at 11 p.m., but you don’t spend too many waking moments with them from August to Memorial Day Weekend.
Sure, the pay is good, but when you line that up with the job description and the reality of what is required to do the job right, it doesn’t add up.
So, when an AD announces he is moving on or retiring, it’s a pretty big deal. It leaves a pretty big hole for the school administration to fill.
Think about it: what other job in a school corporation outside of the high school principal and the superintendent are responsible for more staff members (especially non-teaching personnel), is directly involved with more students, and whose job involves generating income for the school through both event attendance and advertising.
So, when Duane Burkhart walks out of Tippecanoe Valley for the last time as the athletic director, the hole left behind will more like a chasm than a hole.
There had been whispers about Burkhart starting to plan an exit strategy for a couple of years, but he left no doubt of his intentions last August. The Warsaw Tigers visited Valley for the preseason football scrimmage last fall, and Burkhart calmly and confidently walked into the press box and announced (loudly) that this would be his last year and there was no chance he’d be having second thoughts.
Well OK then!
He was smiling when he said that – the kind of smile that lets you know he meant what he said, and he was happy about it.
Burkhart was the girls basketball coach at Valley when I first met him in 1991. As a matter of fact, he coached in the first basketball game I ever broadcast at WRSW that November.
He transitioned to athletic director well. He has done a great job as host, he works well with the media and he has made attending Tippecanoe Valley sporting events in any capacity a positive experience.
He is credited with several quality coaching hires, including taking a junior high boys coach and naming him the head girls basketball coach. To say that it has worked out would be a major understatement. All Chris Kindig has done in his nine years is win 132 games and lead them to the 3A state finals in 2015.
But it has not always been rosy at Tippecanoe Valley for Burkhart. He was the leader of an extra-curricular program at a school who was mired in a shroud of sadness and death and grief. He was charged with giving kids and the Valley community something, anything, to boost morale. That’s what sports are supposed to do, right? They are supposed to be a diversion from the problems of life. They are supposed to be fun.
He was responsible for making sure they were, and that’s a pretty lofty expectation.
And we can never forget that he’s the one who bore the burden of telling us all that a plane had crashed near Clemson, South Carolina – a crash that claimed the lives of four people, including very special people in his own life.
While the rest of us were in a deep state of mourning for the loss of Scott Bibler, Charlie Smith, Scott Smith and Tony Elliott, Burkhart had to organize one of the largest viewings and funerals in the history of the county. He lost as much that night as anyone outside of the families of those four guys.
But in that moment, he put his own need to grieve on hold so he could provide the rest of us a place to share ours.
That’s what a servant’s heart looks like in practical application.
I’ll miss him. Tippecanoe Valley will miss him. Eventually, he will miss it – or at least the best parts of it.
He’ll still be around, be sure of that. But now you are more likely to find him with a golf club in his hand and a golf ball at his feet … and that smile on his face.
