When it came to filling the vacancy for West High’s athletic director, Mayer was a strong contender. Through many years of coaching at the school, learning the environment wasn’t something that Mayer would have to do. Athletic Secretary Brianna Nigg said this was a major reason he stood out as a candidate for the job. 

“He’s been a coach for 15 years and been in the district for just as long so he knows that West High has this tradition of excellence and we know that all of our coaches are holding their kids to that same excellence standard across all of the sports,” Nigg said. 

Mayer believes the reason for his passion for his newly-acclaimed title is simply because of his love for sports. 

“Sports have been in my family ties for a long time. And I think this just gives me a different way to stay involved in athletics and stay active in supporting what we can do here at West High,” Mayer said. 

In terms of creating positive change as he begins to lead the athletic department, Mayer hopes to improve the overall aspect of the athletic program. 

“The goal that we have is to try to continue our success and maybe build upon that success,” Mayer said.

There’s one mission Coach Frese, Brianna Nigg and BJ Mayer all have in common this year: get students excited about sports. Encouraging participation in attending games and matches, especially for the girls’ teams, is a simple goal. Building school spirit and pride is really what it’s all about.

“We’re trying to do different things to bring kids to sporting events so that they can be supportive of their classmates and their peers,” Mayer said. “We are doing more with our teams where they have to help out in the concession stands and different things like that so that we can just build a much broader sense of community and a sense of school pride. We’re working on potentially, in fact, we are working on getting a new mascot, so that we can have a little bit more pride with that and do some different things along those lines.”