Tollison will take over as Central athletic director

Central High School turned to an athletic director rookie to man its soon-to-be-open post.

Lance Tollison was named the new athletic director Thursday, replacing Mark Ruark, who announced at the end of February his plans to step down. It will be Tollison's first athletic director job.

"I'm a sports-minded person," Tollison said. "I love sports. I went to school to basically coach. I've been coaching while I was at this district. I coached as recently as a year ago. When you're in administration, I tried to do both, administrate and coach. It got kind of difficult, so I stepped out of coaching for just this one year. But this will get me close to it again, close to my passion."

Tollison, 46, comes to Cape Girardeau after 11 years in the New Madrid County Central district. He taught for two years before becoming an elementary principal, then a middle school principal and now the director of the New Madrid Technical Skills Center.

The job's location was part of the attraction for Tollison.

"I used to live up there several years ago, in the Jackson area, and always loved that area," he said. "The opportunity kind of presented itself for me and my family to think about a change, and this is a direction we sure wanted to go to. We're pretty excited about it."

Tollison served as an assistant coach, then the head coach for the girls basketball team at New Madrid. But the time commitment involved with coaching, plus serving in an administrative role in the district became too much, so he gave up coaching for this year. He's excited to get started at Central and return to athletics.

"I missed it, and that's why I looked at something if I couldn't coach again, what better way to be involved in everything than to be an athletic director," he said. "That is sort of the route I chose here."

He plans to draw on his experience as a coach when building relationships with the coaches he'll oversee.

"As a coach, my AD was important to me because she supported me," he said. "My first goal is always to support the coach. But our goal is also to be in there working for the student-athletes as well, and to get in there and get them excited about it. And to push the coaches to be excited about it. I always liked to have that support of the AD, and I think that's something I'll approach to be supportive of them."

Tollison said he isn't too familiar with Central's programs, but understands the importance of increasing student and community involvement. Those are two areas he plans to address.

"I'll get in there and work the hallways real hard and try to get kids enthused about athletics and the opportunities that could present themselves by being involved in those sports," he said. "And get the community involved in it, too. There's a lot of projects anywhere you go, so this is not any different than any place you go.

"The community support is always important in sports. You can think about what you do in school, but where do you usually see most of the people? It's usually some sort of sports event -- football game, basketball game, tennis. It doesn't really matter. The community, that's their time to pull together and they want to see things done well."

Tollison earned a bachelor's degree from Southeast Missouri State in social studies and physical education, then a master's in secondary school administration from Southeast. He's working toward a specialist's degree in school administration from William Woods University. Tollison, who is married and has two daughters, will begin his new job July 1.