He’s been a Sammie, a Minuteman, a Huskie and a Cougar. Now, Adam Kramer can’t wait to get started as a General.
The 33-year-old Kramer will officially begin his duties as the new athletic director at Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School on July 15.
Having most recently served as the assistant director of athletics at Austin Prep High School in Reading, Kramer is excited to be joining what he feels is already an outstanding athletic program.
“Hamilton-Wenham seems like an awesome area,” said Kramer. “It’s a great school with great athletics and a great fit for me … exactly what I was looking for.”
Kramer takes over for Craig Genualdo, who had served as the school’s athletic director for the previous 14 years. He left to take a similar post, as well as serving as the Dean of Students, at Cape Ann League rival Amesbury High.
The Hamilton-Wenham community, said Kramer, is similar in both size and its tight-knit feeling as where he grew up in Sutton, which is about 10 miles south of Worcester.
“It seems like a place where everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves in the athletics world, which is what drove me here” said Kramer. “I’ve met some great people in terms of some of the administrators and coaches.
“This is a school that competing in almost every sport and not just making the MIAA playoffs,” he said, “but advancing through multiple rounds and winning state titles. The athletics program has been highly successful under Craig, so I’m hoping to build on that.”
Kramer also raved about the school’s year-old “state of the art” facilities on campus, which include two turf fields, a turf baseball diamond, new tennis courts and a new track.
A three-sport athlete and captain of the football, basketball and baseball teams his senior year at Sutton High (where the boys’ athletic teams are called the ‘Sammies’ and the girls are known as the ‘Suzies’), Kramer went to UMass Amherst to study sports management at its Isenberg School of Management, earning his degree while also majoring in psychology.
He worked full time for The Bay State Games as an operations and communications coordinator for a year before returning to school at Northeastern University to get his master’s degree in sports leadership. While there, a graduate assistant job opened up that he got; Kramer was then promoted to the full time assistant’s job for a few years before becoming the Assistant Director of Athletic Operations.
But he knew he eventually wanted to make a difference at the high school level, and when that opportunity came about at Austin Prep he jumped at the chance.
“I had a really good relationship with my high school football coach at Sutton (Jeff Parcells), who was also my guidance counselor,” Kramer said. “Because of him, I knew I wanted to work in high school sports and have the same impact on others that he, my coaches and teachers had on me.”
He spent four years at Austin Prep, joining the Cougars as they were going from a Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) school into the New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) ranks.
“We were thrown into it and figured it out,” he said.
The timing was right when the Hamilton-Wenham job opened up, he said.
Among his immediate duties, he’ll work on finding a new Thanksgiving Day football opponent for the Generals after long-time rival Ipswich announced its own football team would be merging with Triton Regional for at least the next two seasons.
Naturally, he’d like to see students growing up in Hamilton and Wenham to stay at their local high school, feeling the athletics program and facilities are both top notch.
“We want to get people involved at the grass roots level, get kids on our fields playing when they’re young,” he said. “We want kids to grow up thinking of themselves as Generals and think of playing for us in high school. I’d be naive to think we’ll keep every kid here because of our facilities … but we’ll try our best.”