Greenwood tabbed as new athletic director for ACA
By TIM GAYLE
When Alabama Christian Academy’s new athletic director Aaron Greenwood looks at the Eagles’ athletic department, one of the first things he points out is the dedication of school administrators toward continual enhancement of the program.
“The biggest thing for me -- and I don’t know the headmasters at the other (local) schools -- but I know that here, from the top down, athletics has support,” he said. “And I’ve been places where that hasn’t been the case and you can tell. That’s going to allow us to make huge strides moving forward in the future.”
Greenwood was hired in mid-September as the school’s athletic director, filling a 16-month vacancy following the departure of Scott Galloway, but didn’t officially start until Monday. On Wednesday, the school held a reception for boosters, teachers and administrators to meet Greenwood.
“The four pillars for our athletic department, moving forward, are very simple,” he told them. “The first one is to preserve and enhance the mission of Alabama Christian athletics. The second (is) student-athlete well being … and that they are getting better physically, spiritually, academically (and) psychologically. The third is fiscal responsibility. We want to make sure on both sides that we’re spending our money wisely and we also want to do a better job at raising funds. The last one is a commitment to winning. We’ve got to win games and that’s going to give us a bigger platform in this community to make an impact for Christ (as well as) give us a more opportunities where student-athletes want to come here.”
Greenwood’s arrival comes at a time when ACA athletics is enjoying some success but still needs to make strides to be a championship contender.
The football team is currently going through what is arguably the best stretch in school history, with five playoff victories and two quarterfinal appearances in the last five years, but desperately in need of facility upgrades and still lagging behind its Capital City Conference rivals (who are enjoying success on the gridiron as well).
The boys’ basketball, girls’ basketball and baseball teams all won area championships last year, but endured struggles in recent years prior to the 2021 breakthrough.
The one consistent winner, softball, lost the school’s winningest coach to retirement last spring and its facilities are not on par with those one would expect from the state’s top fast pitch program.
Greenwood, head of school Greg Glenn would insist, is best qualified to lead the department at this juncture because of his past experiences in promoting and fund raising at Samford. A 2009 graduate of Faulkner, he spent three years in coaching in Texas and two more as an assistant boys’ basketball coach at Thompson before moving on to Samford in 2014.
There, he served as assistant director of basketball operations for two years, marketing director for two years and assistant director of development for the last three years.
“In addition to my first two years of coaching, I worked in the marketing department with Sanford athletics,” Greenwood said, “so I got to do a lot of things there with digital and social media and game day promotions. I got the opportunity there to work with every coach and learn how every coach ticks and how to work with different coaches to accomplish things. After that, I moved into development -- which is a fancy word for fund raising at that level -- and spent the last three years on the fund raising side.”
While he had no previous connection with ACA, he was familiar with the school during his time at Faulkner as a basketball player for Jim Sanderson’s Eagles while his wife Lindsey played softball at Faulkner.
“We’ve known a lot about ACA,” Greenwood said. “The two schools share a lot of the same community. When this position came open, there were several people in the community that reached out to me.”
Greenwood believes his past experiences in marketing and with fund raising will help him explore some options in developing the ACA athletic program.
One of the priorities, he noted, will be enhancing the school’s facilities. None of those facilities have been upgraded in recent years -- he mentioned the school’s locker room and weight room -- and track and field and baseball have no on-campus facilities.
“To have a head of school that is committed to athletics and is open to looking at facilities’ enhancements and things like that is a huge step in the right direction,” he said. “The leadership from the top is that we’re committed to improving athletics. There are a lot of things we need to look at. There is some low-hanging fruit where some unique partnerships with Faulkner could benefit us.
“We have to develop a facilities’ master plan. Some of it is maintenance but everything has a time limit. We’ve got some things that are due that we need to work on.”
While Greenwood is the latest in a line of athletic directors in the Capital City Conference, his tenure isn’t far behind the rest. Catholic’s Daniel Veres, hired in 2014, is the dean of Capital City Conference athletic directors. The remaining four have all been hired in the last three years.