Sage Hill hires athletic director

After conducting a national search, Sage Hill School has named John Poffenberger as its new athletic director.

Poffenberger, who spent 11 years as the Associate Dean of Students at a prestigious East Coast boarding school, replaces Sage Hill’s inaugural athletic director, Nate Miller.

Miller, a math teacher who also coached track and field and cross country, will remain on staff as a teacher and coach.

“[Miller] wanted to resume full-time teaching,” said head of school Jacqueline Smethurst. “He has done an incredible job. He has been a wonderful founding athletic director. He gave the school those years as an administrator. It’s a shift in the balance of his responsibilities. He was ready to shift the balance back to teaching.”

Miller, who is on vacation, could not be reached for comment.

Smethurst sought out Poffenberger at a convention in Denver, at the beginning of March, Poffenberger said. He was looking for a job opening in the southwest, after falling in love with the region on a vacation to New Mexico with his wife, Karen.

“She said to me, ‘We don’t have the desert, but we have the ocean,’ and that pretty much sold me,” Poffenberger said.

Poffenberger, 37, spent the last 11 years coaching various sports while acting as the Associate Dean of Students at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Mount Hermon, Mass. He became the acting athletic director at Sage July 16.

“We were lucky to find someone with such strong athletic credentials who is also familiar with the whole experience, the whole life of a student,” Smethurst said. “He understands young people very well in all phases of their life at the school.”

Like Miller, Poffenberger was a head coach for track and field and cross country. He was also an assistant coach for football, basketball, and wrestling. He will teach a strength and conditioning class, and plans to help with track and field in the spring.

Poffenberger said he was “very happy and very content, and had a lot of job security,” at Northfield, but it was time for a change.

“I didn’t want to become a lifetimer out there,” he said. “I still wanted to experience new things and get back in athletics and focus more on athletics than the discipline I had been doing.”

Under Miller’s direction, the boys’ soccer team won the Academy League title, finishing the 2006-07 regular season 14-0-2. The boys’ and girls’ cross country teams each captured league championships, as well, and the girls’ basketball team won a share of a league title.

“The transition has gone well, it’s nice having Nate still here at the school,” Poffenberger said. “He’s been kind enough to have left me his number so I can still call him.”

Former baseball coach Mark Talmo is no longer at Sage Hill. It’s not clear if he was fired, or if he resigned.

“I heard through word of mouth that he wasn’t coming back after the season,” said Tom Multari, an incoming senior on the baseball and football teams. “There was no controversy. He was a good guy and a good coach.”

Poffenberger, who lives in Dana Point, has received four or five e-mails and phone calls from candidates seeking the baseball coaching job, but said he has yet to contact anyone. He is waiting for Miller to return from vacation, and hopes to have someone hired by September.

“I really can’t comment on that. I don’t know if [Talmo] just decided to step down, or what the story is,” Poffenberger said. “I don’t plan on looking into that. I just want to move forward with the program and not think about what’s happened in the past.”

The Lightning’s football team has a new coach in Pete Anderson. He replaced Tom Monarch, who was fired in April.

Miller said it was a move that reflected a “major philosophical change at the school” to move away from walk-on coaches.

Poffenberger said it was too early to think about making any big changes to the athletic program at Sage Hill.

But he wants to concentrate on getting larger community audiences at the school’s sporting events.

“I want our kids to be able to show off their skills in front of large crowds, and not just play for each other,” Poffenberger said. “Here, you take small steps, by getting current students to watch their friends in other sports.

“I plan to make sure the Sage Hill name is getting out in publications so that people in the Newport Coast community will want to get out and see what’s going on at the Hill.”

— David Carrillo Peñaloza contributed to this story

SORAYA NADIA McDONALD may be reached at (714) 966-4613 or at [email protected].