Athletics | Lion VoicesJanuary 08, 2024

A Look Beyond the Records with Curtis Janz

Written By: Ian Silvester

In athletics, most things are determined by what you see. Winners and losers, coaching changes, championship banners raised, every emotion — each item is captured through the eye. But what happens behind the scenes — what you don’t see — is the catalyst for everything else.

At the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith, the man behind the curtain is Athletic Director Curtis Janz. As the lights in the Stubblefield Center begin to buzz to life – before athletes take the court and fans fill the seats – Janz can be found alone with his thoughts and the soft sounds of his footfalls as he guides a broom up and down the hardwood.

Janz arrived at UAFS in 2016 with eight years under his belt as the athletic director at Oklahoma Christian University and more than two decades serving as a coach.

Trading in a Team of Players for a Team of Coaches

Janz grew up on a farm in Tuttle, Oklahoma, just southwest of Oklahoma City. Outside of caring for the farm, his dad was an electrician at Tinker Air Force Base on B29 bombers and “was probably the hardest worker” he’d ever seen. Spending his summers driving a tractor, Janz joked that he quickly knew he wanted to get his education.

He attended Oklahoma Christian University, where he played basketball for Dan Hays, who, with more than 720 career wins, is a member of the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame and is the most influential person in Janz’s life after his father. It’s coaches like Hays that Janz seeks to emulate in following his chosen path.

“I wanted to be a coach,” Janz explained. “I don’t know if I ever wanted to be anything else.”

While playing at Oklahoma Christian, Janz earned his bachelor’s degree in physical education with a minor in history. After graduation, he attended the University of Central Oklahoma, where Janz earned his master’s degree in secondary education. However, his desire to coach hadn’t quite come to fruition.

“I came back to Oklahoma Christian and got a job as the assistant basketball coach, physical education instructor, sports information director, and head golf coach,” he laughed.

After 19 seasons on the bench, Janz permanently moved into his role as athletics director. He held this position until accepting the role at UAFS. It was a natural progression for Janz to move up the ladder to director of athletics, but it was bittersweet.

“I traded in a team of basketball players for a team of coaches,” Janz reminisced.

As a coach, Janz learned how to build up his players. It’s the same approach he took as athletic director to build his programs.

“It starts with me. I have to serve our coaches, our staff, and our student-athletes and then grow. The only way you can guarantee to improve your team is to improve yourself,” he said. “I always tell our coaches, ‘If you want to coach them hard, you have to love them (the student-athletes) harder.’”

‘Love. Serve. Grow. Thrive.’

In sports, the number of games won and championship banners raised equates to success. Of course, behind the flashy records, success comes from the players and coaches who make up the team.

Janz firmly believes in the culture of winning – on and off the court and field. For him, a winning culture starts and ends with developing good character. As a coach and athletic director, Janz’s philosophy has been to be intentional when teaching what good character looks like and what it means.

“We’re on a college campus, we’re part of an educational institution, and if the only thing we do is play games, I really believe we’ve failed at one of our core missions,” Janz said. “We have to be concerned about growing, growing things in our student-athletes that they may not necessarily get inside a classroom. That’s our job. That’s our mission.”

To ensure UAFS student-athletes develop good character and are taught lessons outside the classroom, Janz developed the Lions Impact Series. Each month, the student-athletes of UAFS all come together inside the Stubblefield Center for an event organized by Janz. Some examples from the start of the 2023-2024 athletic calendar include a back-to-school cookout, a conversation about culture by Janz and UAFS Chancellor Dr. Terisa Riley, a speaker who discussed mental health in athletics, and most recently, an international student-athlete panel discussion about the different challenges these student-athletes have that others don’t.

“The culture that we’ve built in athletics values our student-athletes, values the relationships that we build, values the growth and the ability to develop, not just student-athletes, but develop ourselves,” he said. “I say it all the time. Our athletic culture can be described in four words: love, serve, grow, thrive.”

‘Every Challenge is an Opportunity’

In March 2020, Janz, like the rest of the world, was facing a plethora of questions about what would happen next. Games and teams were put on pause as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread across the globe.

“I still remember the night when things weren’t fine,” Janz recollected.

Within a week of that night, Janz’s four-word description of UAFS’s athletic culture was tested. All possible scenarios were discussed in a meeting with Riley and the presidents and athletic directors from the Lone Star Conference.

“We were supposed to be playing a baseball game that day, a conference game, and I remember telling the two coaches don’t start until I get back (from the meeting),” Janz said. “I went to the meeting, and the decision was made. We’re done. We’re suspending the season.”

On his way back to Crowder Field, the weight of reality began to strike Janz. All sports were suspended, and he was responsible for breaking the news.

“I remember going into that meeting with the baseball team and saying, ‘We’re not playing the rest of the year,’ and those guys had tears in their eyes,” he somberly recalled.

But Janz couldn’t dwell on the cancellation of games. With international student-athletes, his attention turned to how to get them all home safely.

“We made the decision early on of don’t try to fight it; don’t try to necessarily make sense of it, just try to find solutions,” Janz said.

As Janz and his coaches gave love and support to the students, Janz was also busy working to figure out the next steps. He navigated getting information from the NCAA, the Lone Star Conference, the state, and UAFS. Then, as time passed, his attention turned to testing, contact tracing, and finding ways to get people back to games.

“Like I said, we were just going to try to find solutions because a lot of questions couldn’t be answered. No one knew. So, let’s just try to be a little more solution-based than trying to get explanations for why we’re doing things,” he explained.

For Janz, serving the teams the best way he could eventually led to finding ways to grow and thrive.

“Every challenge is an opportunity,” Janz emphasized. “For two years, we basically told people not to come to games; now we’re trying to get them to come back.”

Through events like the return of the Toy Toss, the annual UAFS volleyball pink out match, and the scheduling of games against Arkansas Tech for the first time, fans are returning to UAFS. But Janz knew it was more than just the fans that they needed to bring back.

The pandemic shined a light on and brought about more challenges in managing mental health. Janz recognized the overwhelming need to provide every student-athlete, coach, trainer, and anyone else in the department with access to any help needed. As a result, the athletic department built up its relationship with the UAFS counseling center and community resources.

Too Stubborn to Let it Drop

Amid the pandemic, Janz had a project under wraps. In June 2023, his work came to fruition as it was announced that UAFS accepted an invitation to join the Mid-American Intercollegiate Athletics Association in 2024.

The move will make UAFS the first full-time member in Arkansas to join the MIAA – one of the nation's oldest and most successful NCAA Division II conferences. The change will also provide a more significant media presence for UAFS and create regional rivalries.

Janz admitted that shortly after UAFS became a member of the Lone Star Conference, he knew the university wasn’t “a perfect fit.” He wasn’t comfortable with teams taking multiple five- to ten-hour bus rides throughout their respective seasons, saying it’s “not a good student-athlete experience.”

As he began to look for alternatives, Janz said the MIAA quickly got on his radar for offering everything he and UAFS wanted.

“I met with their (MIAA) conference commissioner (Mike Racy) at the NCAA Convention in Orlando,” Janz said, thinking back to the two men’s first conversation in 2019. “There was an interest, so we started the conversation then.”

Janz and Racy continued discussing the move's logistics and met face-to-face again during the 2020 convention. There, plans went on pause with the rest of the world. The two continued to talk, but it became less frequent as both worked to get back to some semblance of normal.

“A year ago, I got a call from Mike, and he said, ‘Hey, I want to talk to you at the convention this year,’” Janz recalled. “This time it wasn’t, ‘Hey, we’ll find each other,’ it was like, here’s the time, here’s the place. So, we sat down, and he said, ‘Now’s the time.’”

Details were ironed out, and approval was granted. Janz said his persistence paid off.

“Maybe I was just too stubborn to sit and let it drop,” he laughed. “I think the tenacity, year after year, staying the course, and knowing it was the best thing for us, would eventually work out. I am really proud of the effort that we’ve all made to get that done.”

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