Wakefield School’s Sipes named Athletic Administrator of the Year

Fauquier County is becoming the epicenter of athletic administrator excellence.

Wakefield School athletic director Paul Sipes was recently named the 2012 Athletic Administrator of the Year in the independent schools classification by the Virginia Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association (VIAAA).

Last year, Fauquier High activities director Allen Creasy won the VIAAA award in the Virginia High School League (VHSL) AA classification.

Sipes, 44, will be honored March 30 at the VIAAA State Conference in Norfolk.

“The remarkable thing about Paul Sipes is not that he’s a great coach, or a great builder of programs, or a great leader, or a great diplomat, or a guy with the ‘everyman’ touch,” Wakefield headmaster Peter Quinn said. “It’s that he is all of these things, and each at the right time.”

Mike Costello, the athletic director at Wakefield Country Day School, nominated Sipes for the award, and others wrote letters of recommendation. VIAAA past presidents review all the nomination packages and select winners for the VHSL AAA, AA and A classifications and the independent classification.

“It’s pretty cool,” Sipes said of receiving the honor. “I’m excited by it just because it comes from your peers. That’s always more important to me. For them to say it means a lot.”

Wakefield’s athletic director since 2005, Sipes oversees 18 varsity sports and 36 teams for a school that has an 82 percent student participation rate for athletics. He is also the Wakefield girls basketball coach who has led the Owls to five consecutive Cavalier Athletic Conference championships, a Delaney Athletic Conference regular season title, a DAC tournament championship and numerous appearances in the state tournament. His team has a 20-6 record this season and is ranked No. 3 in Division 3 of the latest VISAA poll.

“I think I did a good job of setting a vision and philosophy of how we’re going to…follow the academic vision of the school and still be successful” in athletics, Sipes said. “People think those things are these things are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. [New York Knicks guard] Jeremy Lin is an example” as Harvard graduate and star athlete.

While at Wakefield, Sipes also oversaw the construction of squash courts as well as a golf practice facility with an artificial putting surface and a driving range.

Wakefield also decided to sod its field hockey field with Bermuda grass, but the cost estimate they got from an outside source was around $40,000. So Sipes and a parent volunteer decided to learn how to sod the field themselves, and it cost only $5,000.

“It’s tough economic times for everybody, and program-wise it is about being able to get more for less money,” he said. “We’ve done an excellent job of managing budgets and coordinating facility use…on a tight budget.”

Prior to arriving at Wakefield, Sipes was the athletic director for four years at St. Thomas More School, a boys boarding school in Oakdale, Conn. He was also previously the assistant athletic director at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School for one year.

In the late 1990s, Sipes was the girls basketball coach at Saint John's Catholic Prep (at Prospect Hall) in Frederick, Md. He hoped to one day become a college basketball coach. However, his commute from Columbia, Md., to Frederick altered that career path.

“I was getting home late,” said Sipes, whose daughters are Shelby, 14, and Finn, 8. “I realized at one point I hadn’t seen my oldest kid awake for more than a half hour on a week day in four months.”

His wife, Jennifer, suggested he become an athletic director.

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