Retiring Naperville North athletic director Bob Quinn has come through tumultuous situations shining on the other side.
Literally, he’s a survivor.
A 1982 graduate of Wheaton Warrenville High School, the current site of Wheaton Warrenville South, which replaced Wheaton Central — we’ll get into that — Quinn will hang it up June 28 after 10 years at Naperville North and 38 years overall in education since coming out of Loras College in spring 1986.
The bulk of his career, 23 years, was spent at Wheaton Central and Wheaton Warrenville South, before five years as Loras College athletic director, driving back on weekends.
Naperville North’s athletic director since 2014, under Quinn’s overall leadership Huskies teams have won 14 state championships.
While cause for celebration, state titles are not his goal.
“One of the things that I believe deeply as a leader, and as an athletic director, and one of the things that I’ve tried to do everywhere I’ve been, is that my mission for athletics and my mission for being an athletic director is very, very simple,” said Quinn, who lives in Warrenville.
“We leverage the teachable moments that happen the hundreds and thousands of times student-athletes experience with athletics to teach life lessons and help them be great adults.”
Born in Pennsylvania and coming here at 5 years old, as seen in a fine interview with Naperville Community Television 17, Quinn played baseball, a catcher for coach Jim Humay at Wheaton Warrenville.
Humay shepherded the Wheaton Warrenville Wolverines when two of their teammates, Quinn’s classmates and best friends Drew Mook and David Campbell, died in a car accident in May of their senior year.
Along with his parents, Jack and Anne Quinn, to whom Bob credited his work ethic and “servant leadership,” he cited Humay’s role in his development.
“He was a tremendous influence in my life. He’s probably the reason, when it comes down to it, that I’m a teacher,” Bob Quinn said.
A Warrenville resident, Naperville North athletic director Bob Quinn will be retiring after this school year, his 38th in education.
Dave Oberhelman; doberhelman@dailyherald.com
Returning home in 1986 after studying special education at Loras, the prep scene had changed.
Wheaton Warrenville High School opened in 1973 and closed in 1983, turned into a middle school. Despite those like the late Jack Quinn who rallied to save it, enrollments couldn’t support three Wheaton public high schools, plus St. Francis.
A “messy” scenario, Bob Quinn said, it affected families as well as District 200 administrators, teachers and coaches.
Bob and his older brother, John, both graduated from Wheaton Warrenville. Younger brothers Christopher and Neil graduated from Wheaton North. Poor middle brother David Quinn attended Wheaton Warrenville three years, then finished at Wheaton North.
By 1993, with the closing of Wheaton Central and the opening of Wheaton Warrenville South, Bob Quinn was back in his old building.
He already had revisited old ties and mentors and met new ones, like John Thorne.
“Guys like Barry Brennan, Ken Geppinger, John Stacy, Rich Jarom — those were all guys that I had as teachers that really were good to me as a young coach and a young teacher and taught me how to do things,” Quinn said.
Quinn became a successful varsity baseball coach for the Tigers, but a few seasons after “wonderful” WW South Principal Chuck Baker hired him as assistant principal, he had to stop coaching.
In 2003 Baker hired Quinn as athletic director. Through spring 2009 the Tigers won six state titles, five of them coming from Bill Schreier’s boys volleyball program.
“The things about hard work, kids first, all of those things were ingrained in me at places like Wheaton Central and Wheaton Warrenville South,” Quinn said.
They continued at Naperville North, where Kathy Kavanagh has been Quinn’s assistant the past decade of her 23 years in Huskies athletics.
“We get along pretty good. He’s Irish, I’m Irish,” she said. “We have a mutual respect for one another.”
She said because “we are family,” everyone pulled together when Quinn was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in November 2018.
After chemotherapy treatments, by March 2019 he was in remission, and there it’s stayed.
He called his triumph over cancer “the greatest experience of my life.”
“All is good,” Quinn said. “Kicked its ass — and that was a ton of it. I believe attitude is crucial to everything that you do. I never thought I was going to die, I never let that be a part of the process.”
He did note sadly that 1990s Tigers football star Phil Adler also had been in remission from Stage 3 colon cancer, but it returned and Adler died on April 21.
“You do worry about stuff like that, but not for too long,” Quinn said.
Perhaps drawing on lessons from the District 200 upheaval two decades earlier, Quinn has been a consistent leader in guiding the new-look DuPage Valley Conference after four schools, including both Wheaton high schools, left the conference to start the DuKane Conference with former members of the Upstate Eight.
Quinn has grown sons, Chris and Will, living in Chicago and Evanston, respectively. Between his boys and his love for the area he’s got no plans to move.
Always a baseball man — he scouted for the Florida Marlins for nearly a decade — Quinn already landed a dream job, for the Chicago Cubs with the Wrigley Field grounds crew.
He was hired by co-lead groundskeeper Graham Flora, but his contact was retired Naperville Central baseball coach Bill Seiple, now an official scorer with the Cubs. Quinn’s debut is the Cubs’ May 6 night game against the Padres.
“Staying out from underneath the tarp will be the goal,” he said, jokingly.
“I’m happy to do a job where I’m told what to do and I can go home and I’m not waking up at 2 in the morning sending myself an email for something I’ve got to get done,” he said.
doberhelman@dailyherald.com