Grays Harbor’s new athletic director is hoping to bring a more professional look to the Chokers this season.
The college hired Will Rider to fill the athletic director position left vacant by the departure of Tom Sutera, who left the college earlier this summer.
Rider served as the athletic director and women’s basketball coach at Gillette College in Wyoming until he started looking for new employment opportunities in April of this year. He said he’d like to give the athletic department some polish for a program that suffered from compliance issues last year.
“My biggest goal is I want to present a professional front. We want to put professional programs on display and we want to do things right,” he said. “Whether that be compliance, eligibility or showcasing an event, we want to do it right and attract people.”
Though the new job required him and his wife to uproot themselves and move several states away, Rider has already made his way to the Harbor and hopes to buy a house soon.
Rider accepted the job on Monday, July 29, sold his Wyoming home the following Tuesday and purchased an RV to start the drive out west the next day as he headed to the Harbor.
For Rider, things have been moving quickly the past week.
“We had a whirlwind week last week. We resigned in late April and we were looking at some different opportunities within the NWAC, but when we got the opportunity to come out and interview we took it,” he said. “While all that’s going on, we’re moving out of our house and moving all our stuff into a storage unit knowing that at some point we’re going to move somewhere.”
The Wyoming native left his home state after being involved in college athletics since the 1970s. Rider played basketball at Western Wyoming Community College before transferring to Montana-State Northern to finish off his collegiate career.
After graduating from Montana-State Northern, Rider began his coaching career by joining the staff at Turner High School in Montana and then returning to his home state to work as an assistant at Douglas High School in Wyoming.
At the college level, Rider led the women’s basketball team at Chadron State College, overseeing the team’s rise in the ranks from the NAIA to NCAA Division II.
After a 10-year coaching hiatus, Rider got back in the game to coach girls basketball at Mingus Union High School in Cottonwood, Arizona.
He returned to Wyoming in 2009 when he took the women’s basketball coaching gig at Gillette.
Rider has experience as a coach and administrator at Gillette, but looked to take a step back from his coaching duties after the 2017 basketball season.
He won’t be on the sidelines anymore in his latest role, but still enjoys working in an environment that keeps him feeling young at heart.
“The good thing about being AD is that you get involved with every program and engage with all the players,” he said. “College campuses are outstanding places to stay young and be active. The more of those individuals I get a chance to engage with I think it’s going to be positive.”
Rider is also looking forward to engaging with coaches. One of the challenges facing Grays Harbor athletics he hopes to address is coaching turnover.
The college had four coaching vacancies to fill over the summer and doesn’t have a head coach who has been on the job longer than three years with golf coach Ann Swanson and men’s wrestling coaching Phil Pine being the longest tenured coaches.
Rider said he wants to provide the institutional support that may have been lacking in the past to help keep coaches at Grays Harbor.
“I know the demands of the coaching position. A lot of them are part-time coaches, some of them are volunteer coaches. What we want to be able to do is support them the best we can,” he said. “We help fund them and try to increase their longevity. When you’re not making a lot of money and when you’re not getting supported administratively, it’s hard to stick around. We want to attract positive, strong coaching.”
Student success navigator hopes to guide student athletes
Along with the hiring of Rider, Grays Harbor College also a hired PageCarol Woods as Student Success Navigator. Woods will assist student athletes with their class schedules and eligibility and was hired at the same time as Rider. She will help student athletes get their academics in order and help manage operations on gameday.
Woods comes to the Harbor after serving as Assistant Athletic Director for two years at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida.
Woods, who fell into a career in academics after graduating with a communications degree from TCU in 2007, transferred from West Point and originally planned on being a civil engineer.
Wood said she had to seriously reconsider her future when it looked like she may be deployed during the war in Iraq.
“I was not prepared to be deployed and at the time I was there we had just gone to war with Iraq. The question presented to me was: Could I kill someone out of the blue if I were overseas in deployment?,” she said. “I had to a step back and ask myself if I wanted to put my soldiers at risk. In that transition, I didn’t have anybody to guide me.”
After leaving TCU with a different degree than the one she planned on obtaining, Woods spent about 10 years trying to find a new career path.
She took close to 10 years exploring art school, medical school and teaching as potential options before settling at Southeastern to teach speech and public speaking classes.
Woods said she wishes she had an academic advisor to bounce ideas off of when she was in school and wants to provide that sounding board for Choker athletes as they try to find their way.
“I would have never seen this coming. It took about 10 years to come full circle,” she said. “One of the reasons I have the passion I do to talk to students is saying, ‘Hey, this is the path I took. I’m not saying it was a bad path for me, but there are some things I learned on the way, so maybe you don’t have to go through trial and error like this. Let’s figure it out now.’”
