Hill’s Athletic Program: It Plays to Have Fun

Hill’s Athletic Program: It Plays to Have Fun

By Leonard Shapiro

Zach Roszel is known to many students around The Hill School campus simply as “Coach,” even if the Middleburg school’s Athletic Director doesn’t coach any single sport, because, he said, “I prefer to know and work with all the teams.”

He also knows what he and Hill want to accomplish with an athletic program that had a tradition of excellence under the direction of Sydney Bowers long before he arrived. She also encouraged him to apply for her AD’s position when she retired in 2020 after 44 years at the school.

“I don’t expect any of our kids to go pro…I don’t expect anyone to be the next Brett Favre,” Roszel said. “If I have a young girl who can take a frisbee and toss it across the field, or pick up a football and throw a spiral and have a friend catch it, that’s kind of cool to me. I want our students to go on from here and eventually play intramural when they go to high school and college. And I want them all to have fun while they are here.”

Zach Roszel and a young Hill School athlete.

Said Head of School Treavor Lord, who hired Roszel, “Zach brings such energy and enthusiasm to his position as AD. He understands Hill’s philosophy including the value of interscholastic competition for our oldest students as well as making sports an active and engaging part of all Hill students’ experience.”

Hill’s Athletic Department remains one of the main elements of the school’s Total Education philosophy—strong academics and meaningful participation in art, theater, music, and sports. And Roszel and his team go about it with obvious joy and great passion, also adding new elements like flag football, floor hockey and even wiffle ball to the mix of activities.

“I like teaching through games, not just by having drills,” Roszel said. “With everything we do, there is an element of competition. It could be sharks and minnows, keep-away. We’d dribble a basketball and make it into a relay race.”

Roszel also credits “my right hand man,” physical education teacher and coach Mike Barreda, with helping him run the program.

“He was here for many years with Sydney and really showed me the ropes,” he said. “We’ve got a great relationship and he’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful.”

Roszel’s younger brother Will, a fine high school lacrosse player at Fauquier High School, is also a Hill School coach and instructor in the athletic department. And eight other Hill classroom teachers coach boys and girls teams.

“I wanted our coaches to be Hill teachers,” Roszel said. “We have 100 percent Hill full-time faculty and staff on our fields, and they’re a huge, huge reason the sports department is successful. They’re positive, energetic, exactly the kind of coaches I want. And best of all, the students have all bought into what we are doing.”

Roszel, who lives in Unison with his wife, Kim, and their daughters Olivia and Brooklyn, is a Fauquier County native who grew up in nearby Marshall and graduated from Fauquier High School. He was recruited by East Carolina to play soccer, then had to transfer to Radford when ECU dropped the sport after his freshman season. At Radford, he started 71 Division I games over three seasons.

He was a business and marketing major and not long after he graduated in 2009, he combined his love of sports with his academic background and started a soccer goalkeeping academy—ZAR soccer academy —based in northern Virginia.

He still works with young goalies and over the years he’s helped train and coach a number of Northern Virginia athletes who have gone on to play college soccer at schools like Virginia, Princeton, Arizona State, and North Carolina State.

He first connected with Hill when the school partnered with his company to run its summer camps back in 2017. That evolved into coaching 4th and 5th grade sports at Hill in 2018 and 2019. When Sydney Bowers retired, “She told me ‘you should apply for this job.’”

Roszel interviewed in the spring of 2020 and was offered the AD position about a month later.

“I guess you could say I was at the right place at the right time,” he said.

Hill’s students, parents, and his colleagues surely would agree.