This past season at Community R-6 was a great one for athletics.

The baseball team earned the program’s second-ever state Final Four berth, the girls basketball program won their eighth district title in 10 years and track and field sent two athletes to the state meet. The new athletic director and current track and field head coach Trent Pummill wants more recognition to come the Trojans’ way.

“The big thing I’m wanting is we have some athletes who can definitely get some college scholarships,” Pummill said. “Social media is a great tool not only to spread the word of how great our program is doing and how great our teams are doing but also get the notoriety for those athletes.”

Pummill is stepping into his first athletic director role, and administration role, after seven years of teaching and six years of coaching. The Stover High School graduate, soccer player and elementary education and early childhood education degree holder from Central Methodist University, and athletic administration master’s degree holder from Northwest Missouri State University said he had a passion for sports for a long time. 

In high school, Pummill said he remembers participating his senior year involving soccer and cross country in the fall, basketball in the winter, and golf and track in the spring. The interest in being involved on an administrative level happened early in his teaching career and the decision to switch to a sports-focused path was around the same time.

“I still wanted to go the admin route and athletic directing was more in my love more sports but with a little bit less headache that principals have to deal with,” he said.

Pummill acknowledged he is going in as a first-year AD but has had some great resources to prepare him for this stage in his career. The high school principal and girls basketball head coach Bob Curtis and district superintendent Bob Larson each have AD backgrounds, Pummill said, so he has been asking them questions constantly.

“The most daunting thing will be making sure day-to-day operations are running smoothly, and we have everything we need for game day. It will be a big learning curve for sure,” he said. “I have a great resource in Mr. Larson and Mr. Bob Curtis.

“They’ve probably been annoyed by how much I’ve gone to them already,” he said, jokingly. “I’ve only officially taken over the role for two weeks now (as of June 6), and I’ve probably asked millions of questions already. They’re super helpful in that aspect. They’re willing to help me out with any kind of question I have.”

Larson said he is confident Pummill is the one to lead Community athletics following the departure of Tad Shotten as he pursues opportunities outside of education.

“Mr. Pummill is an intelligent young man with a bright future in leadership,” Pummill said. “He was impressive throughout the interview process and is a welcomed addition to the leadership team.”

Pummill said he had a “trial by fire” already, though, to test the skills he needs to be a successful AD. Every year in January to late February, or sometimes March in years where there are 80 teams, Community R-6 runs a youth basketball league that involves various elementary-school children — third through sixth grade — from small schools around the area, and he said he helped out at the latest one.

The league had many moving parts and coordination points, Pummill said, that included but wasn’t limited to scheduling games and finding officials for a six-week period of games that happened every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 3 or 4 p.m. Despite all of the difficulties, he said it is a great way to develop skills and interest in the game.

“I took over two weeks before the league started, and we didn’t have a schedule, we didn’t have all of the teams needed,” he said. “Trying to recruit teams, get officials to do it, set rules for ‘here is what third-grade division will do, here is what fourth-grade division will do’ and all that kind of stuff. But the biggest headache was making sure a schedule would fit all of the teams needed. That was a welcome headache because it was pretty fun to do.”

Transitioning from this period to a full-time position that manages every sport at every level will be a welcome challenge and one Pummill anticipates giving much passion and effort for a district he’s been in for four years. He said he came to Community as the track and field coach in the COVID-19 pandemic year and has focused on Trojan athletes’ futures ever since.

When he was in high school, Pummill said he played as many sports as he could to take advantage of the opportunity and reap the benefits of being a multiple-sport athlete, making that pitch as the track coach and planning to continue that as the AD. Pummill said the graduated Gavin Allen is a “mark of success” for that as he convinced the college-bound pitcher to take up track his junior season before qualifying for state in baseball and track this past year. There are benefits for everyone that plays multiple sports, even if state isn’t achieved.

“There’s a lot of kids that do have athletic potential in really any sport so trying to meet those kids at the junior high level or elementary level and really try to reach them and say, ‘You can have success in this sport, especially with how limited our numbers are,’” Pummill said. “Something that can be beneficial for them is they get to have the sense of being part of something bigger than them. Obviously, as an athletic director, you want your programs to be successful in the win-loss records, but that’s not everything that you want. You want kids to gain valuable life lessons, and sports is one of the biggest opportunities to learn those.”

As far as ways Community can grow, Pummill said its online presence is important to let everyone know there is a small school in Audrain County doing great things and that merely involves regularly posting scores, stats and other pertinent info from games and events on Facebook, Twitter and possibly Instagram. Twitter is a social media platform Pummill wants to increase presence on so Trojan athletes’ efforts don’t go unnoticed and helps them be discovered easier by potential interested college programs.

“Not many people have heard of Community R-6 so the bigger social media presence that you have, the more people that are going to see, ‘Hey, this school in the middle of nowhere just off a roundabout, they’re doing some things athletically,’” Pummill said.

“Some of those kids have that dream to play college sports, but they don’t know how to get their name out themselves,” he said. “Trying as an athletic program to not only boost our records and our success but boost our athletes as well, if they have those dreams to play in college, being that medium to help them get those goals.”

Mainly, Pummill wants to make sure all the information is available for parents, fans, media outlets and others as soon as possible. He is well-aware how long the road trips are for Community just in its own conference, the Central Activities Conference, with several exceeding an hour so quickly updating the people who can’t make it to those games is a focus.

Pummill cautions that having a new softball field is a far-off dream that is years away but is something he is thinking about in response to the baseball team’s recent success. The baseball Trojans made the state Final Four for the first time in 22 years in the same year they played their first fall season. The problem is that conflicts in the scheduling with the softball team’s fall season with the school having only one field at the school so making it so each program can thrive more easily is an attractive idea. 

The field idea is only one idea that is swirling around Pummill’s head as he looks forward to all of the positives of leading and working with other coaches and negatives of long days as an AD, but he views everything concerning the job as a positive.

“I lay awake dreaming, ‘Oh man, I can do this tomorrow to really help us out,’” Pummill said. “It’s going to cause a lot more sleepless nights for me, not just from the added headache of a higher-up job. It will be a very welcome headache. It’s an excitement headache, if you want to put it that way.”