Just as most college athletes aspire to be on the NCAA Division-I level, the same can be said for a majority of college athletic directors.
Iolan Kurt McGuffin will have that opportunity after accepting the athletic director position at the University of Tennessee-Martin.
“I had internal goals to get back to Division-I,” McGuffin said. “It was just something that I felt I needed to do and make that jump to give Division-I another try.”
McGuffin gets this chance after spending the past 18 years working his way up through the ranks of college athletics.
The Iolan also likes the idea of relocating to Martin — a population of 11,000 — because it, in part, reminds him of Iola.
“It is a smaller community,” McGuffin said. “I didn’t want to live in a big city, because all of my family is from smaller towns.”
McGuffin started his career at Kansas State University in 2000 and rose to the level of Senior Associate Athletic Director for External Operations by 2010, before moving to the University of Colorado for a year where he served as the Assistant Athletic Director and Director of Athletic Development.
In 2011, he got his chance to sit in the top spot as the Director of Athletics for Missouri Western State University and accomplished some tremendous projects for the university with a new football stadium, new baseball and softball complex and new indoor practice facility all being built on his watch. He also helped bring the Kansas City Chiefs training camp to St. Joseph in 2012, where it has remained ever since.
“Obviously the facilities will always be here and that is the goal of anyone, to go in and build things up,” McGuffin said. “The relationships with coaches and student athletes, winning championships and increasing the GPA from 2.7 when I first started to over 3.05 now are some of the things that you embrace and relish the most.”
Now the work begins for McGuffin and the SkyHawk program, which has other Iola ties already with Ron Schomaker being inducted in the school’s Hall of Fame as a fullback in 1991.
“At some point I knew I wanted to get back into Division-I and we will see where the University of Tennessee-Martin takes me, I may enjoy it and want to stay there the rest of my career or being only 43 years old, I have a lot of work left ahead of me. This is the right move for my family and me.”w
McGuffin jumps to Division-I
