In the 2022-2023 school year, HBHA said farewell to Austin Benton, Athletics Director and PE teacher, and Lisa Ryan, PE teacher. In their absence, HBHA was left without a fitness educator. Enter Scott Hinkle, a PE and health instructor who has coached his entire career. Mr. Hinkle was born in the 1960s, and raised in El Dorado, Kan.. He went to college at Friends University to get his bachelor’s degree in business administration, where he also played basketball. After getting his undergrad at Friends, Hinkle’s next stop was Kansas University, in Lawrence, Kan. where he got his Master’s Degree in education. 

Hinkle has always loved sports. He said, “I love all sports, but basketball was my first love. I played it growing up, in college, and continued to coach it after college.” 

After college, he has worked in education his entire career. Some of the jobs that Hinkle had over that time included being a vice principal, a high-school business teacher, head boys’ basketball coach, athletic director, and an assistant coach at Seward County Community College in Kansas, all of which eventually led him to HBHA.

 “I had been in education long enough that I could retire from the state of Kansas, at that point I was the assistant principal at Louisburg Kansas, at the middle school, and I was looking for something different, and I had been a PE teacher before, and coach, and I saw HBHA was looking for a PE teacher, and I applied and interviewed, and here I am.” said Hinkle. 

This is also Hinkle’s first year of teaching younger, elementary school students, “You have to have a lot of patience, and you just have to go with the flow, it has to be organized, but you better have a lot of activities planned, but yeah, getting them to all go in the same direction is a challenge. But yeah, they’re fun, they keep me young.” 

Lastly, Hinkle had a few remarks on what it is like to be a new teacher in a Jewish school, as a non-Jew, “It’s been very interesting, just to see the culture, the traditions, and then now with the war in Israel, it’s brought us all closer together, made us more a close-knit community that there is at HBHA, and the Jewish community all together. So it’s been very interesting, it’s been very educational.” Hinkle feels welcomed by the school and community, and he says the people have been very friendly, helpful, and patient to him.