Addison Miller is a sophomore, which means she still has two years to go — but she's already in everything Joppa-Maple Grove offers.

Volleyball. Basketball. Softball. Beta. FFA. "Probably everything that they offer here," she says.

Her favorite sport shifts with the season. Right now, having just come out of basketball, it's basketball. Come fall, ask her again. She also has two younger sisters in the building — Brooke, a seventh grader, and Cayla, a fifth grader. They are, she reports, mean to her. She says this with a smile.

The sports are what she'll remember most, she thinks, when she comes back for a reunion someday. Not the games themselves, necessarily, but what happens around them.

"The bus rides," she says. "Those are my favorites."

Specifically, the ones on the way home.

That post-game bus is something different — the loud music, the dissection of every play, the conversations that wander from basketball to everything else. The shared territory of being on a team that knows each other well. In a school where the same students have grown up together from elementary through high school, that kind of closeness goes deep.

"It's not just going to be one person catching you," she says, when asked what makes Joppa feel like it does. "It's the entire school."

She wants to be a teacher someday. She'd also considered medicine, but crossed that off — "I don't really like needles, so I kind of marked that one out." Teaching, possibly ag, following the model set by her FFA advisor, Ms. Heady.

"She's always engaged with us," Addison says. "She's never just sitting down."

That presence — someone who shows up fully — is what Addison notices, what she values, what she hopes to someday replicate.

The people trying to build something stronger in athletics at Joppa are operating on a similar instinct: show up, stay at it, trust the process.

Joseph Craig came to the district from Benton, Illinois, took a position as the elementary PE teacher, and found himself stepping into a co-athletic director role alongside the job. He and his co-director, Rylan Quinn, inherited a department that had some catching up to do.

One of their priorities is a weight training program for student-athletes — something Joseph sees as foundational.

"It's an essential part of athletics that we've been lacking," he says. "You can really tell in the injuries we sustained over the season — the stress and pressure we put on our athletes, they just cannot take the load we give without the proper training."

Rylan Quinn came to Joppa by a different route. A December 2024 SIU graduate from Salem, Illinois, he got married in June 2025, followed his wife to Paducah while she started OT school, and found a job at Joppa. Junior high history and PE teacher. Head softball coach. And, midway through his first school year, co-athletic director.

The role arrived fast.

"We kind of got it thrown into our laps in the middle of basketball season," he says.

Schedules to build. Officials to secure for softball. Volleyball after that. A conference calendar that needed attention immediately. He and Joseph divided the tasks, checked in daily, and worked through it piece by piece.

"Just chipping away," he says. Twice.

The vision — what they're building toward — is a program where athletes, coaches, and the community are all moving in the same direction. "It's going to take time," he says. "But Joey and I are on the same page."

What keeps Rylan going through the logistics isn't the scheduling. It's the 50 minutes a day with students.

There's one student from this year he thinks about — someone who came in struggling, who spent the first months cycling through trouble in multiple classrooms. Rylan's approach when things escalated was simple: sit down, lower the stakes, talk.

"You're not in trouble. I'm not mad at you. I've been in your shoes — I've gotten worked up over a game." They'd sit in the gym. "We just need to take a minute to reset, and then go back out there."

The student's body language would shift. The bracing-for-consequences posture would ease. Someone was talking to them like a person.

"Seeing how much they've changed and matured from August until now," Rylan says.

He's been here eight months. He's already someone students trust.

"Although my job may seem minuscule," he says, "I can make an impact on so many people."

He doesn't seem to think it's minuscule.

Neither does Addison, who is doing everything the school offers, learning from people who show up, and someday planning to be one of them.