Don Dufek, Sr. - Athletic Director at Grand Valley State and Kent State

Athletic Director At Grand Valley State and Kent State

In 1972, Don Canham recommended Dufek for the position of athletic director at Grand Valley State University. Dufek served as Grand Valley State's second athletic director from 1972-1976. Dufek helped turn Grand Valley into a sports power. Grand Valley coach Jim Scott noted: "Don helped to start some of the football stadium project here and was the one who hired Jim Harkema as our head football coach, which was a pick that really got Laker football off and running."

Dufek recalled that Grand Valley had gone 0-13 in 1971 and 1972. "When I got there, they had never won a football game, which is hard to believe given the great success of football up there now. ... I hired Jim (Harkema) away from Triton College outside Chicago, and the program started to head in the right direction."

In June 1976, Dufek was named athletic director at Kent State University. Dufek held the A.D. position at Kent State until he resigned in April 1980.

Read more about this topic:  Don Dufek, Sr.

Famous quotes containing the words athletic director, athletic, director, grand, valley, state and/or kent:

    Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.
    Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)

    In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.
    Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)

    Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.
    Fanny Brice (1891–1951)

    An old French sentence says, “God works in moments,”M”En peu d’heure Dieu labeure.” We ask for long life, but ‘t is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Over the mountains
    Of the moon,
    Down the valley of the shadow,
    Ride, boldly ride,”
    The shade replied,—
    “If you seek for Eldorado!”
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    My generation, dear Ron, swore on the Altar of God that whoever proclaims the intent of destroying the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate.
    Menachem Begin (1913–1992)

    Main Street was never the same. I read Gide and tried to
    translate Proust. Now nothing is real except French wine.
    For absurdity is reality, my loneliness unreal, my mind tired.
    And I shall die an old Parisian.
    —Conrad Kent Rivers (1933–1968)