50 | JULY 27 • 2023 

SPORTS

F

rankel Jewish Academy 
has a new athletic 
director. But he isn’t 
new to one of the area’s only 
Jewish high schools.
Robert Walker has replaced 
Rick Dorn, who was Frankel’s 
AD for nine years. Dorn is the 
new AD at Dearborn Fordson 
High School.
Walker started his new job 
this month after Joe Bernstein, 
a Frankel coach, served as a 
fill-in AD from May 19 to July 
12.
This is Walker’s second 
stint at Frankel. He was the 
director of student services, a 
social studies teacher, and the 
boys and girls tennis coach for 
three seasons from 2009-12.
“I’ve had some of the 
best moments in my career 
teaching, coaching and 
doing administrative work at 
Frankel, so I’m excited to be 
back,” he said.
“I wrote my doctoral 
dissertation about coaching in 
high school. Now I’ll have a 
chance to put that experience 
to good use.”
The title of Walker’s 
dissertation was “Lived 
Experiences of Female 

High School Tennis 
Coaches Who Coach Male 
Players: A Descriptive, 
Phenomenological Study.”
Walker said he can also 
draw on his experience as a 
de facto part-time athletic 
director at the small schools 
where he’s worked.
Creating Frankel’s sports 
schedules around Shabbat and 
Jewish holidays won’t be a new 
experience for Walker because 
of his stint as the Frankel boys 
and girls tennis coach.
“I’m used to it,” he said. 
“I remember hoping tennis 
matches ended by 6 o’clock on 
a Friday. One went right down 
to the wire: 5:56 p.m.” 
Walker said he found out 
about the open Frankel AD 
job while doing a job search. 
He was relocating to the 
Detroit area and looking for a 
job in athletics, and he came 
across the job posting on the 
Indeed job search website.

That was in early May. By 
the middle of the month, the 
42-year-old Rochester resident 
was hired by Frankel.
A perfect storm of 
opportunities provided by the 
Fordson job opened the door 

for Dorn to leave Frankel.
He’ll now have a much 
shorter job commute. Fordson 
is 20 minutes from Dorn’s 
home in Woodhaven. His job 
commute to Oakland County 
the last 17 years took him 
more than an hour.
Dorn was the athletic 
director at Waterford Mott 
High School for two years and 
the Waterford School District 
for six years before coming to 
Frankel, which is based at the 
Jewish Community Center of 
Metropolitan Detroit in West 
Bloomfield.
The Fordson job also is 
an opportunity for Dorn 
to return to a public school 
with his retirement and state 
pension not too many years 
away.
“I never would have left 
Frankel unless an opportunity 
like this came up,” he said. 
“I had an incredible time 
at Frankel. I built fantastic 
relationships with students, 
faculty and staff that I will 
have forever. It was a now-or-
never decision to leave.”
Dorn said he’s happy that 
Frankel athletes achieved a 
level of success they had never 

reached during his tenure as 
AD, but he’s most proud of the 
strong relationship he built 
for Frankel with the Michigan 
High School Athletic 
Association.
The MHSAA routinely 
makes state competition 
accommodations for Frankel 
athletes because of scheduling 
conflicts with Shabbat and 
Jewish holidays, “which 
provides great experiences for 
our athletes,” Dorn said.
Walker was the 
superintendent and head of 
school of the middle school 
at the Greenspire School 
in Traverse City since 2020 
before coming to Frankel.
He previously was head of 
the middle school at Sycamore 
School in Indianapolis in 
2019-20, principal and 
director of the Herberger 
Young Scholars Academy of 
Arizona State University from 
2012-19, and an elementary 
and middle school teacher 
at Japhet School in Clawson 
from 2007-09 prior to his first 
stint at Frankel.
He also has college 
teaching experience at Grand 
Canyon University and 

Robert Walker replaces Rick Dorn, 
who ‘had an incredible time’ during 
his nine years at the high school.

Meet the New 
Frankel Jewish 
Academy 
Athletic Director

STEVE STEIN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

ROBERT JOHNSON

New Frankel athletic director Robert 
Walker was the school’s boys and 
girls tennis coach from 2009-12.

