It was announced on Monday that Rick Tribit, who has served as Athletics Director at Celebration High School for the last five years, will replace Jim Bird in the same position at Osceola High.
Bird, the legendary wrestling coach and athletic director, resigned earlier this month to take a teaching position at Gulf Breeze High in northwest Florida to be closer to family.
“I’m really excited about the opportunity to return to Osceola, it’s a special place for me,” Tribit, who served as assistant wrestling coach and assistant AD under Bird from 2006-2015, said. “Taking over for a great coach and administrator is a daunting task, but I am looking forward to the challenge.”
In five years at CHS, Tribit is credited with building an outstanding overall athletic program. An afterthought in the past in the race for the Orange Belt Conference All-Sports Trophy, Celebration has put in strong showings recently – finishing second behind Harmony for this year’s title.
The Storm won OBC titles in boys’ swimming, competitive cheer, boys’ soccer, boys’ and girls’ tennis and boys’ volleyball this year and finished in second in six other sports to tally 152 team points and finish second to the Longhorns by just nine total points.
Football, which is not an OBC sport, was also vastly improved under Tribit’s guidance. In two decades, the Storm has had just one winning season. Last season, the Storm won a school record seven games, including a bowl victory, while playing in the toughest district in the state. Facilities were also vastly improved under his leadership, as the school installed a state of the art synthetic turf for football, soccer and lacrosse.
“Leaving Celebration was a really difficult decision for me, I love the school and love what we were building there. Conner (Gilbert, CHS principal) is a great leader. Celebration has an outside reputation of being a school full of spoiled rich kids and nothing could be further from the truth. It is one of the most culturally diverse schools in the state with a lot of language and economic barriers that we have to overcome. I am proud of our recent athletic accomplishments, but I am more proud of academic accomplishments of our athletes. We were able to put together a great staff of coaches, who were able to win, yet were mostly concerned about the students and their academic progress.”
Under Tribit, Storm athletes finished the most recent school year with a cumulative grade point average of 3.405 – tying St. Cloud for the OBC Academic Award.
Tribit, a UCF graduate, has a long history in both coaching and administration. He stated his career as a substitute teacher and assistant wrestling and football coach at Lyman High in 1993, before moving to Oviedo as a wrestling coach and teacher for three years. He took his first athletic director job and served as head wrestling coach at Winter Springs; before spending 10 years at Osceola High as assistant wrestling coach under Bird. He moved to Sarasota High for one year to attend to his ailing mother, before moving back to Osceola County where he took a job as wrestling coach and teacher at St. Cloud for the 2016-17 year. Wanting to get back on the administration side, he applied and accepted the athletics director’s job at Celebration a year later.
One of his first orders of business will be to hire a new head wrestling coach, a position Bird served in a dual capacity. Although highly qualified to serve as both wrestling coach and AD, Tribit stopped short of saying he would be a candidate.
“I will have discussions with (Osceola Principal Johana Santiago) and we will decide what direction we want to go in,” Tribit said. “Wrestling has been a hugely successful sport under Coach Bird and we will make a decision that we believe will be in the best interests of the program and our athletes.”
Under Bird, Osceola had had 16 consecutive top six team finishes and has produced at least one state champion every year during that time.
As far as how things may differ under his leadership as Athletics Director, Tribit called that “the $25,000 question.”
“I am taking on a role where I will have massive shoes to fill. I’m also the type of person that isn’t going to try to fix things that aren’t broken,” he said. “That said, Coach Bird and I are different people and there will be things I may try to tweak here and there. We have outstanding coaches in many of our programs and my main job will be to give them the support they need to be successful.”
