Mary Beth Caudill was appointed as the new program director of the New Concord Area Arts and Recreation District (NCAARD) in February.
Caudill, who retired from her position as the womens soccer head coach at Muskingum University in 2019, began her new position as NCAARD Director Feb. 10. She said this position couldn’t have been a better choice for her.
“For the last 24 years at Muskingum being the soccer coach, you do all these programs, these different motivational events for your team and I thought ‘Wow, I enjoy doing that part’. So, to bring it to the entire community, I thought ‘There couldn’t be a better position for me,’” said Caudill.
Caudill soon began to focus on after-school activities.
“We brought in six after-school programs. I think there was a big transformation in the schools. There were a lot of transitions [within NCAARD] over the past few years, so I wanted to bring some stability into it. So, I went around all the school districts and got after-school programming going,” said Caudill.
Along with continuing programs that have been NCAARD staples such as POUND, yoga, martial arts classes, and volleyball, Caudill has been working on adding more programming to the schedule. Due to the current COVID-19 orders, Caudill is working to make up those planned events later in the year.
“I added a Makers on Main, with the sign painting class. We got one of those in, we had two scheduled. We’ll postpone and we will make that up another time. It’s kind of funny, we did all this planning and now we’re re-planning,” said Caudill.
Caudill also talked about the individualized event running from April 4-12 in the village. “Hop Around the Block” is an individualized Easter egg hunt to urge families to get out and be active. Businesses have received coloring pages of eggs to color and hang in their windows to replace the tradition egg hunt.
Residents can also color and hang the eggs. Printouts are available on the NCAARD webpage on the Village of New Concord’s website, newconcord-oh.gov.
This event is not a social gathering event, so Caudill is asking residents to search for the eggs while keeping their distance from others. Families can take photos of eggs and tag NCAARD in social media posts.
NCAARD has also started other initiatives to connect residents in the village together. NCAARD-io is a fitness routine that can be found on the NCAARD Facebook page. This is a set of workouts, released on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to encourage residents to do fitness routines while staying home. These routines included picture tutorials and videos on how to complete the routine.
NCAARD will continue individualized activities in the village throughout the stay-at-home order.
Caudill said she is happy she can be involved with NCAARD.
“I’m grateful to be in the position and to have the support from the community,” said Caudill
For information about upcoming events and updates, visit NCAARD’s webpage or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
