Along the Way: Accrediting athletic directors; Blossom Music Festival returns

I have seen Jeff Kurtz, an iconic sports figure on the local scene, in numerous capacities: as a young Record-Courier sports reporter, as an announcer for Kent State University football and basketball games, athletic director for Ravenna Schools, as athletic director at Hudson Middle School and assistant athletic director at Hudson High School, plus as an all-around good guy and talented athlete.

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Recently, I learned Jeff is also a lecturer in leadership training programs for NIAAA (National Interscholastic Association of Athletic Administrators).

I learned that while meeting Jeff and Alan Mallanda, executive director of the New York State Athletic Administrators Association for breakfast at the Brimfield Family Restaurant two weeks ago. Mallanda, whom I had never met, is married to my cousin, Heather Westcott Mallanda. The two of them were visiting our family during a family reunion that my sister, Kris, and my cousin, Doug, organized at Sandy Lake, that drew probably 60 or more, several of them relatives I have not seen in decades.

Janet and I accepted Alan’s invitation to join them the following Monday morning with Jeff in Brimfield. Doing so was an eye opener on the connected world that high school athletic administrators has become.

Alan met Jeff through the NIAAA for which Alan was president in 1993. Jeff emceed Alan’s induction into the National Interscholastic Association of Athletic Administrators in 2011.

“He’s a fantastic announcer and we want to get him to New York State next March to emcee our awards banquet and Hall of Fame inductions,” Alan said.

Jeff is a faculty member of NIAAA’s National Leadership training Institute, which offers more than 50 professional development courses for athletic administrators. He is national course chair for the course, “Management of Game and Event Announcing” and is certified to teach other courses.

Stressing the importance of professional accreditation of athletic administrators, both men pointed out that school athletic programs take care of our young people from the time classes end until night-time. A nationwide accreditation standard should be the goal, the two say.

Robinson to the rescue

Kudos to Keith Robinson, the cellist in the Miami String Quartet, who at the last-minute substituted for a Blossom Music student in a quartet last Sunday in one of the several free Kent State Blossom Music Festival concerts the program offers the public.

COVID had sidelined the student whose group of four was to perform Haydn’s String Quartet No. 25 in C Major to conclude the Sunday afternoon recital. A retired professor of cello in KSU’s School of Music, Robinson, rehearsing on campus at the time, rushed over to help when made aware of the situation.

Ricardo Sepulveda, an assistant professor who leads the Blossom Music Festival said,

“But for Keith Robinson, I would have had to cut the recital short.” It would have denied the three other students in the quartet the opportunity to perform the Haydn piece they had worked so hard to perfect.

The Blossom Music Festival, in its 54th year, began with the opening of Blossom Music Center in 1968. The Festival is a collaboration between the renowned Cleveland Orchestra and KSU’s Hugh A. Glauser School of Music. George Szell, music director at the time and one of the great conductors of the 20th century, considered a summer home for the Cleveland Orchestra as well as music education and outreach important.

The Music Festival attracts highly motivated students, this year 43 of them from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. It focuses on small group chamber music that requires precision, teamwork, and long hours of rigorous preparation over a five-week, July-August session. Cleveland Orchestra members, Kent State faculty, and others teach.

Local families volunteer to host students to help reduce the cost of their participation. Dave and Sherry Joy, one of the families who have hosted students for years, persuaded Janet and me to start hosting a few years ago and it is fun. We have gotten to know terrific young adults from China, Japan, Taiwan, plus Missouri and Ohio and have improved our admittedly limited knowledge of classical music in kitchen gabfests that Janet usually initiates.

The grand finale of the program schedules those students who qualify by the session’s end, to perform with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Center pavilion in Cuyahoga Falls at the edge of the beautiful Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

This year, the students and the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, will present Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Sunday at the pavilion on Aug. 7.

Kent State has been unable to host the Blossom Music Festival since 2019 because of the pandemic. It is wonderful to see this prestigious music education partnership returning to Kent State.

David E. Dix is a former publisher of the Record-Courier.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Jeff Kurtz stresses importance of accrediting athletic administrators