By Mark Carpenter
People’s Defender
When the 2026-27 school year rolls around, the Southern Hills Athletic Conference will be under new leadership. After 11 years on the job, current Commissioner Michelle Gleim is stepping down as is Assistant Commissioner Tony Williams after four years on the job. The new Commissioner will be a familiar face to sports fans in Adams County, as long-time teacher and coach at North Adams, Rob Meade, will take over the duties officially on August 1.
“This was absolutely not something I’ve always had in mind,” says Meade. “At the end of last volleyball season, I got notification that Michelle was going to retire and riding home on the bus that night I just got to kind of thinking about it and it seemed kind of intriguing. When Michelle told the SHAC Board and athletic directors that she was stepping down, naturally some discussion occurred about who might be a replacement and from what I’ve gathered, my name was mentioned.”
“I think that had to do with the fact that I have coached multiple sports over multiple seasons and I was near the end of my coaching career and maybe I would like this transition to stay involved in sports from a different perspective. At that point, I talked to my wife Krista and got her blessing, knowing that I wouldn’t be coaching JV volleyball any more, though I had plans to possibly stay with that if this opportunity hadn’t come up.”
“After Michelle explained to me some of the responsibilities, including attending somewhere around 20 events to cover, I thought that coaching volleyball I was doing many more evenings than that,” Meade continued. “I spoke to Mr. Grooms at the central office to see if they would be supportive of me taking on the commissioner position (and they were) and so I chose to apply, and interviewed on December 10 with the SHAC Board of Directors. I was pretty comfortable in the interview but it was nerve-wracking in the same sense because I was sitting at the head of the table and everyone just went around the table firing prepared questions at me. I don’t recall if it was that day or the next day that they called and offered me the position and it didn’t take me long to say yes.”
Meade explained that in January he went to the SHAC Board meeting and signed his contract, working currently on a supplemental contract to do some job shadowing with Gleim, who also spoke about Meade’s hiring and may also be hired as a consultant at a later date.
“Rob has a good knowledge of sports, good personality to deal with people, and had some great ideas to improve the SHAC,” explained Gleim. “If I am hired as a consultant, I will be around to assist the new Commissioner in anyway they need help. I will answer questions, help plan events, and attend anything they ask me to help with. I have not been officially hired yet.”
Thus far, Meade has been attending board meetings to get the feel for running those plus the AD meetings to get the feel of running those and says that his first big step was the recent SHAC Bowling Tournament.
“I had no idea about the bowling tournament,” said Meade. “I know about the sport of bowling but as far as running the tournament, that was all brand new to me. It was interesting and I enjoyed it, it’s a different group of kids, atmosphere and competitive level. Not long after that, I assisted with the junior high basketball tournaments which I was more familiar with. I helped with the All-Conference voting where I got to introduce myself to the coaches who may not have known who I was.”
“I’m going to have to learn some of the events and some of them will be old hat for me. It will be an adjustment for me to have to plan things a couple of years ahead.”
For the Assistant Commissioner position, current Lynchburg-Clay Athletic Director Mark Faust was hired and Meade is excited about the knowledge Faust will bring to the table.
“I have no experience with the online assigning system for officials and Mark does so that will probably be one of his main duties,” explained Meade. “Mark and I are pretty familiar with each other and I think we’ll compliment each other well with our different strengths that we bring to the table.”
As high school sports continued to evolve in many different directions, Meade knows that the SHAC will have to do the same and between he, the Board and the athletic directors, new ideas and visions are bound to be brought forward.
“I’m a little disappointed in our numbers, especially in the girls sports, and I’d like to make sure that we are doing what we can to build those teams to be able to play the dual contests each night,” says Meade. “I’d personally like to see some changes in the schedules to give them more fluctuation and rotation between the beginning and end of the seasons, maybe coming up with something that changes the idea of playing teams in your division twice and the other division once. I mentioned to the board that I’d like to see all the schools building teams in all the sports, such as soccer and bowling.”
“Another factor that we have to keep in mind when scheduling is the RPI rankings. It’s already used in basketball and I can see that coming for more sports, maybe all of them eventually. Scheduling will be an ongoing conversation because of the changes that are coming down the road.”
On the personal side, Meade graduated from North Adams High School in 1990 and went to Rio Grande and get his Bachelor’s Degree and began his career in education at Peebles in the fall of 1994. His degree was in Communications, not Education, and his first job out of college was working for Western-Southern Life Insurance out of Maysville. He was there six months and decided it was not for him and a grant position came open at Peebles, teaching career building skills and he got that position, with it only requiring a Bachelor’s Degree. He also got his first coaching experience that year, helping with the Peebles baseball team.
“That summer the same position I was doing at Peebles came open at North Adams,” Meade explained. “I transferred to North Adams for the 1995-96 school year and I was coaching volleyball, basketball and baseball at various times and in the meantime had two sets of twins. In the spring of I think 2000, the Educational Service Center in Portsmouth started a program for people who had Bachelor’s Degrees and wanted to teach. Brett Justice was an administrator at the ESC and he told me that I was a perfect candidate for the program but they had a lot of applicants. They ended up taking 25, me being one of them, and with evening classes I got my degree in Intervention through Shawnee State University. This is now my 29th official year in education.”
In his career, Meade coached basketball for 26 years, beginning as an assistant to Coach Dave Young and being an assistant on the 1996 North Adams Final Four squad. None of those 26 season were as a varsity head coach, as he was content to stay at the freshman and JV levels. He was the head coach of volleyball (7 seasons) and baseball and says he just never really wanted the head basketball position, though he says he has coached in nearly 700 basketball contests at North Adams.
“I would not be in the position I am today of it were not for Dave Young,” says Meade. “He saw something in me as a high school player that I for sure didn’t see in myself, though playing for him was tough. At the time, I had no intentions of going to college, I wanted to be a carpenter. But when I grew from 5”10 to 6’7”, Coach Young made it possible for me to play two years of basketball at Rio.”
Obviously, sports has been a center point for Meade and his family, wife Krista (married 31 years), twin sons Trey and Cole, twin sons Seth and Cade, and daughter Aulbrea, a senior at North Adams this year.
“My kids grew up in the gym,” says Meade. “I remember them crawling across the floor to see me so this North Adams gym is pretty special in my life. We have been really blessed as parents All five of our kids graduated with GPAs of 4.0, two of them being valedictorians and one salutatorian. All of that is 100% from their Mom, but I’m so proud of them all. All four of my boys got to play college baseball and Aulbrea had the chance to play college volleyball but she instead chose to focus on her academics.”
“It’s been great and now a new chapter begins.”
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