David Hines spent the last week on the job keeping his arm warmed up. He threw out ceremonial first pitches for state softball and baseball championship games on back-to-back nights.

At the Open boys and girls basketball championship games in March, he was introduced as retiring at the end of this 2024-25 academic year as executive director of the Arizona Interscholastic Association.

Hines was accompanied by his wife, children and grandchildren.

Even though he's had more than 30 years in education, as a teacher, a coach and administrator, it's been a short ride as the lead person for the state's largest high school organization, a tenure that began in 2017.

But, in his eight years, the 1973 Tempe High graduate placed his stamp on high school sports perhaps more than any previous director in the AIA.

Nobody before him had to face the challenges he had in front of him in the spring of 2020.

COVID-19 created chaos, and by mid-March of that year all the spring sports were shut down due to the global pandemic.

Hines, like everybody else, was taking on the unknown, and, when schools returned the following academic year, there were balancing acts between the associations, school districts and health officials on whether to play sports and what to do when sports were played.

"The challenges that we've had that we've not dealt with before. COVID was one of the big, big challenges, because we didn't have a playbook,'' he said. "We never had to deal with that before. When you're working with coaches and athletic directors and the athletes we have, the parents that we have, I think some of the times they don't know what they don't know."

Who can forget wrestlers, basketball players and soccer players having to mask up in competitions and being reminded to keep those masks pulled up over their noses?

It was a wild, anxiety-ridden time. And just one of the challenges Hines was dealing with.

Open Division, power shifts

In 2019, Hines led the association's creation of the Open Division eight-team football playoff due to the so-called "destiny" schools dominating their respective big-school conferences year after year. Arizona's open school enrollment policy has made it easier for student-athletes to transfer to such schools regardless of where they live, although under AIA rules, they sit out part of the following season.

Chandler dominated 6A, Peoria Centennial plowed through 5A and Scottsdale Saguaro stockpiled championships in 4A. The Open Division was designed to let them all battle it out for the top dog regardless of conference.

At the same time, the AIA began realigning conferences and leagues annually for football, moving schools up or down a conference based on their performance on the field. It took a few years for Chandler, Centennial and Saguaro to all land in the 6A football conference.

Over the last few years, under Hines' leadership, the AIA accepted the coaches' proposal to hold a 32-team Open for boys and girls basketball. Track and field has also started its version of the Open state championships in recent years.

Then, this school year, there was an Open for boys and girls soccer.

Throughout his tenure, Hines would field calls and respond to emails regarding the numerous challenges facing the AIA. It's an impossible task to please everybody.

"It is unique," Hines said. "There are only 51 in the United States. The 50 states and the District of Columbia all have a director."

He acknowledged that his job involved making "decisions that aren't popular sometimes."

"But if we're going to follow a set of rules and game situations where the rule exists, then it has to be followed,'' he said. "If you don't follow those, then there's chaos. You can't have an all-comers meet. Or, 'I just showed up and I'm ready to go.' It has to be organized if you're going to run it successfully with the number of kids involved."

Controversy right to the end

The 2024-25 academic year and all of the sports that go with it are wrapped up, but Hines remains AIA director until July 1, when Jim Dean will succeed him. Still, controversy was there right up until the end of the school year that Hines had to deal with.

The association took flak over the handling of the divisional track and field meets in May , where certain athletes were disqualified, including one having a medal taken away, over check-in procedures. The AIA received conflicting reports. There was an admitted error in communication, Hines said.

It was not a good look for the AIA, which tried to fix it for the state (Open) championships the following week by allowing all of those disqualified athletes to be allowed to compete.

"There are a lot of things that go on that people are trying to make sure we do appropriately and follow suit," Hines said. "It doesn't matter. In any sport, in anything we do, something is going to come up, and we've got to jump in and try to make it as right as we can."

Hines hopes to spend his retirement traveling to as many college stadiums as he's always wanted to see for football games. He will also still be around the Valley to see the progress that he helped start, from the ever-changing Open, to the sanctioning of girls wrestling and girls flag football and now boys beach volleyball.

It's been a bumpy, yet exhilarating ride, one Hines won't forget.

"A lot of the information and requests came from the member schools, frustrations of the same teams in the championships year after year after year," Hines said. "How can we look things different? I think with the Open, it certainly helped football.

"The games at the Open level are extremely competitive. But now at every conference level, they're extremely competitive. When the basketball coaches said, 'We'd like to do an Open, but different,' we were like, 'Great.' It's coming directly from them. I think it's been an absolute success with basketball."