Athletic Director Josh DeVoll recently announced his upcoming resignation from the chief athletics position with an email addressed to all Granville Schools staff appearing in inboxes on February 23. The announcement is not immediate, as DeVoll states that he will be stepping down from his position at the end of the school year.
The announcement of his resignation comes in tandem with an announcement of his hiring as Athletic Director at Bexley City Schools, a district located in Columbus with a very similar population size as Granville’s. In his email, DeVoll noted that the decision to leave Granville was not easy.
“My time in Granville has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding chapters of my career,” DeVoll said. “I am deeply grateful for the support and collaboration you [the staff] have shown me throughout the last 6 years. Granville is a special place.”
In the email DeVoll names some of the many athletic department achievements seen over his tenure as Athletic Director. He lists over 60 LCL championships across multiple sports, almost 20 district championships, 7 regional tournament appearances, and a handful of state championships.
On-the-field success aside, DeVoll is also incredibly proud of some of the other impacts he has helped made possible during his time at GHS. His favorite achievement was the advancement of student-athlete mental health resources.
“One of the initiatives I am most proud of is securing the $100,000 student-athlete mental health grant,” DeVoll said. “This funding allowed us to build the innovative Granville Athletics Mental Performance Initiative, an effort that not only supported our own students but became a model that schools across the state sought to replicate.”
According to Principal Scott Hinton, DeVoll’s impact goes beyond his push for better student-athlete mental health resources.
“Our facilities have received some big upgrades in his time of being here,” Hinton said. “Obviously, the stadium went in. We have just replaced all of the lights, and every athletic complex has received brand new scoreboards as of the last couple of years.”
On top of the mental health initiative and upgrades to essentially every athletic complex at GHS, Hinton also states that DeVoll made a big impact on the retention of some of the coaches students have learned to love in their time in the GHS athletics department.
“If you look around at different schools and the coaching turnover that is happening along with the lack of applications that are coming in, there are some schools who have head coaching openings and who now have zero applicants for [those] positions,” Hinton said. “What people don’t understand is that [DeVoll] has done a good job of both keeping head coaches and streamlining methods to get quality people to apply and take our positions when they open up.”
After receiving word that Athletic Director DeVoll would be stepping down at the end of the year, administration did not hesitate in setting up a replacement. Only eleven days after the initial email from DeVoll, Superintendent Jeff Brown sent out an email announcing current Assistant Athletic Director Jessica Wills to take up the title of Athletic Director at the beginning of next school year.
Wills, having only been hired as Assistant AD in August of 2024, has already made quite an impact on athletics at GHS.
“Mrs. Wills has demonstrated in the last couple years her dedication to our student athletes through just the genuine care and excitement she has for their success in the athletic program,” Hinton said. “She puts kids first.”
The journey to become the next AD at Granville was not a straight shot, Wills describes.
“I was a middle school math teacher for 10 years and I coached middle school track during that time,” Wills said. “When I moved up to the high school to teach freshman algebra, I also moved up to coach varsity track for a little while.”
After coaching varsity track at her old school, she took a break from coaching. During that break, the school’s Athletic Director asked her to help manage some of the many athletic events going on.
“Well sure, I’ll do that, I’m going to be here anyway,” Wills said. “That just kind of progressed into me helping out the athletic department quite a bit. And then I went into school administration. I was an assistant principal for a long time, and then this job became available.”
Will says that she feels prepared for the upcoming promotion thanks to her time as the Assistant Director.
“Mr. DeVoll has been really great about teaching me all the ropes,” Wills said. “I had a lot of experience going into it but I’ve also been able to learn a lot from him. Especially with some of the day-to-day things that I didn’t really deal with before.”
Wills believes that the adjustment for athletes continuing their sports journeys shouldn’t be too drastic next year after she takes over the reigns from DeVoll. However, she stressed that she is a different kind of leader than DeVoll and will execute the duties of the position in her own way. One standout area that Wills wants to focus on is student leadership.
“I really want our athletes to take on much more larger leadership roles,” Wills said. “The kind of leadership that goes beyond the traditional team captain.”
At the end of the day, Wills believes she is here to serve the students first.
“My plan is to be super visible, really put students first with everything,” Wills said. “I want to focus more on our student athletes’ autonomy and their ability to make decisions, whether that’s practice plans or team dynamics. I want to give them more of a voice.”
