By Sean Umstead
Courtesy of the Carrboro Commons
When the Charlotte Bobcats began their inaugural season in 2004, they won a modest 22 percent of their games. Setting up one team clearly has challenges; setting up 20 new teams could be overwhelming.
That is what April Ross, Carrboro High School’s athletic director, has on her plate after taking over for Steve Reinhart, who resigned in December.
Ross, originally from Bath, was an athletic administrator at Briggs High School in Columbus, Ohio before returning to North Carolina.
“I had been looking to come back home, and to open a brand new building to start something great from the beginning, which was one of my career goals,†Ross said.
Ross said her responsibilities include managing coaches, monitoring athletes’ academic eligibility, ordering transportation, scheduling and everything else that’s required to make a program run smoothly.
Ross said the new student-athletes are putting forth an extraordinary effort to get teams off to a good start.
“The student-athletes try extremely hard,†Ross said. “They give it 100 percent.â€
Ross said she understands the difficulty of a new school trying to compete with established and perennially successful teams.
“We don’t have that experience factor,†she said.
Ross said chemistry within each team is key to building strong foundations and that such foundations can be established by athletes working with their teammates throughout the summer.
“That is where the work is actually done,†Ross said. “That’s really where you build skills and chemistry.â€
Although winning is the dream of every team within the athletic program, Ross said there are more important goals in high school sports. She said the school must first establish its identity in order for the athletic program to be highly successful. This, she said, can be done in the classroom, where every student, athlete or not, is able to come together.
“My goal is that our athletes achieve in the classroom and have a great experience playing, because high school is where competitive [sports] end for most people,†Ross said.
Ross said she also hopes to see major facility improvements, including grandstands, bathrooms, concession sales, a press box and lights for the tennis courts and baseball field.
“If we are going to put a great product on the football field, we have to have the facilities to support them,†Ross said.
Ross is looking forward to the future and sees a lot of potential for improvement. According to Ross, such success can be achieved through hard work in three specific areas.
“Academics, sportsmanship and teamwork,†Ross said. “Those are the three things I stress, because those are the foundations of interscholastic sports.â€
Sean Umstead is a UNC-CH student writing for the Carrboro Commons, a bi-weekly online lab newspaper for Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism class at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.