INDIANAPOLIS, IN — The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) will award NFHS Citations to eight high school athletic directors December 18 in Orlando, Florida, including one from North Carolina.
Bobby Guthrie of the Wake County schools will be among those recognized during luncheon festivities at the 41st annual National Athletic Directors Conference, sponsored jointly by the NFHS and the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association.
NFHS Citations are presented annually to outstanding athletic directors in recognition of contributions to interscholastic athletics at the local, state and national levels. State associations nominate athletic directors for NFHS Citations, and the NFHS Board of Directors approves recipients.
Guthrie, CMAA, is the senior administrator for athletics and driver education of the Wake County school system and has spent his entire career promoting education-based athletics in North Carolina.
After starting his career as a teacher at Scotland High School in Laurinburg, Guthrie became a baseball coach at the collegiate level. He was a graduate assistant baseball coach at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for a year before moving to the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he was the head baseball coach from 1983 to 1991.
Returning to the high school ranks, Guthrie became a teacher and coach in the New Hanover School System in Wilmington in 1991. From there he moved to Wake County, where he has been in his current position since 1994. While at Wake County, Guthrie has assisted with numerous North Carolina High School Athletic Association championships, developed a cheerleading coach education program, established a sportsmanship education program and initiated the Wake County Schools Sports Medicine Symposium.
Guthrie is an outspoken advocate for coaching education on the national level. He is the NIAAA representative on the NFHS Coaches Education Committee and is a certified instructor of the NFHS Fundamentals of Coaching course. Earlier this year, Guthrie was named the NFHS Coach Educator of the Year. In addition, he was the first Accredited Interscholastic Coach to be certified in the United States through the NFHS Coach Education Program.
At the state level, Guthrie served on the boards of directors of both the NCHSAA and the North Carolina Athletic Directors Association (NCADA), and he has served as chair of the NCADA Mentoring Committee since 2003. Among his numerous awards, Guthrie was named athletic director of the year by the NCADA in 2007 and received the NCADA Award of Merit in 2001.
Guthrie received both his bachelor’s (1974) and master’s (1978) degrees from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
The NFHS, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, is the national leadership organization for high school sports and fine arts activities
