New Principal Finds “Great Joy” in Taking Helm at T.L. Hanna
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Friday nights in the fall, when the lights come to life in football stadium at T.L. Hanna High School and the drumline begins its metallic heartbeat, Ryan Roberts still feels it—the familiar tightening in the chest, the almost electric flutter that arrives just before kickoff, at last, begins. He is no longer on the sideline, no longer barking out coverages or scanning the line of scrimmage, but the body remembers what it was like to stand there with a headset on, one voice among many in a tight little democracy of coaches and players trying to move the ball ten yards at a time.
Roberts, who will take over as principal of T.L. Hanna this fall, talks about school as if it were the biggest team sport there is.
“It’s not about the me, it’s about the we,” he likes to say, a line that he repeats often enough that colleagues can probably hear it in his voice even when he isn’t in the room. The work, as he describes it, is relentlessly collective: teachers, coaches, office staff, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, parents, students—an unwieldy huddle that somehow has to snap the ball in the same direction.
His route to that huddle began far from Anderson, in the flat, humid expanse of central Florida. Roberts was born in Jacksonville and grew up in Oviedo, then a modest suburb outside Orlando, where he played high-school football long enough to know that he wasn’t going to be a star, but couldn’t quite imagine not playing at all. Florida is not kind to middling prospects; the state produces so many Division I recruits that Division II and III programs are thin on the ground, so Roberts looked north, to a small liberal-arts college in East Tennessee that would let him keep suiting up on Saturdays.
He arrived at Maryville College in 2001, a self-described “kid who just wanted to play ball, have fun, and keep going to school,” and left four years later with something more complicated: a conviction that his life ought to be spent in school buildings. It was not an abstract revelation. He had watched, up close, what his coaches and teachers had done for him, how they had nudged him toward work and away from drift, and he decided that he wanted, in his words, “to do that too for somebody else.”
He went back home first, to Oviedo, teaching and coaching in the same world that had produced him. Then life, as he puts it, “had a funny way of working itself out.”
A job opened at a small private school, Thomas Sumter Academy, in the center of South Carolina; he took it, then moved on to Camden High School, in Kershaw County, for a brief stint that felt more like a way station than a destination. His wife is from Greenville, and the gravitational pull of the Upstate eventually did what it usually does. By 2014, Roberts had landed in Anderson School District Five, teaching civics and freshman courses at T.L. Hanna and coaching for the Yellow Jackets, just another young educator pulling long days between the classroom and the field.
Anderson Five, he says, has a way of spotting people who might have more to give. The district nudged him toward graduate study, then toward administration. Someone told him, plainly, that he had “the personality and the knack for it,” and he responded the way he says he always has: by walking through the next open door. In 2018, he became an assistant principal at Robert Anderson Middle School, in charge of the eighth grade under principal Harold Galloway. It was his first experience being the person students sought out when the problem was bigger than a missed assignment or a botched quiz, and he discovered he liked the strange mix of authority and service the job required.
Two years later, Hanna came calling again. The principal, Walter Mayfield, invited Roberts back as director of the Ninth Grade Academy, the portal through which a wave of adolescents—some eager, some terrified, most both at once—enter the sprawling ecosystem of a big high school. Roberts spent four years in that role, learning what it meant to shepherd students across the awkward gap between middle school and the more polished, perilous business of high school. Then he was asked to leave again, this time for his first principalship, at Glenview Middle School, where he has spent the past three years trying to tame what he calls “a funky age, eleven to thirteen.”
Middle school, he insists, is where the real work happens. High schoolers arrive with edges already sanded down; they have habits, identities, a sense—however provisional—of who they are. In middle school, by contrast, everything is in flux.
“You’re in the thick of it,” Roberts said. The job is to help them build habits and characteristics that will not only get them through algebra but through their early twenties. At Glenview, he came to admire the teachers who chose to spend their careers in that liminal space, refereeing conflicts that begin as misunderstandings and end as life lessons, and he talks about them with a kind of pastoral awe: “Some of the very best I’ve ever been around in twenty-plus years in education.”
Still, when the opportunity to lead Hanna came, he did not hesitate. In South Carolina, T.L. Hanna is more than a school; it is, as Roberts puts it, “an iconic brand,” a place whose reputation in academics, arts, and athletics extends well beyond Anderson County. He can rattle off the rankings—top five in the Upstate, easily argued into the top 15 in the state—though he is quick to point out that metrics are only part of the story. For him, the job is a “dream,” a “bucket-list” role that comes with the paradoxical task of stewarding an institution that is both familiar and, increasingly, under competitive pressure.
Public schools, he notes, are no longer “the only game in town.” In the past decade, families have acquired a menu of alternatives: charter schools, online programs, hybrids, private academies. The old assumption—that a child would simply attend the neighborhood high school—no longer holds. “We’ve got to make sure we’re creating a product that’s worth consuming,” Roberts says, borrowing the language of the marketplace without apology. The phrase is jarring, but the stakes behind it are not; if Hanna does not remain relevant, he knows, students will go elsewhere.
Relevance, in his telling, is not faddish new technologies, but the clarity of the path a school offers. He talks about “college and career readiness” as if it were a kind of covenant: if a student walks across the graduation stage at Hanna, that student should be genuinely prepared for whatever comes next—the military, a four-year college, a technical program, a job in the community. That means not only solid coursework but “a la carte” experiences that give students the sense that they are building a customized life: dual-enrollment classes at Tri-County Technical College, Clemson University, or Anderson University; internships and work-based learning; exposure to industries that exist beyond the fenced-in perimeter of campus. District Five, he believes, has been unusually nimble in marrying “brick and mortar” schools with such flexible offerings, and he intends to keep pushing on that front.
If school is the ultimate team sport, then athletics and the arts are, in Roberts’s phrase, “the front porch.” They are what the community sees first—the Friday-night crowd under the lights, the marching band’s sharp turns, the color guard’s flags, the chorus on the risers in the auditorium. He worries less about winning records and more about how many students find their way into those worlds.
“It gives them a voice, it gives them a place, it gives them a home,” said Roberts. Take an 1,800-student building and carve it into smaller “ecospheres” of belonging—ROTC here, band there, robotics in another corner—and the result, he argues, is better academic performance, simply because more adults know more kids by name.
For all his talk of teams and products, Roberts insists that his own role is less heroic than custodial.
“I’m just a guy,” he said. “Somebody has to have the gavel, and they’ve chosen me to have it.” What he wants, more than anything, is to be remembered as the person who “left it better than I found it”—Glenview, now Hanna. The phrase is boy-scout simple, but he returns to it often. He imagines, a couple of decades from now, someone looking back on his tenure and saying not that he was charismatic or visionary, but that he worked hard for students and teachers and was “a good steward” of what he was given.
That modesty has a lineage. Roberts is acutely aware that he is stepping into a job defined, for nearly four decades, by someone else. Mayfield, his predecessor, has spent his entire professional life in Anderson Five—teaching, coaching, and leading in the same district where he once was a student. In an era when teachers and administrators move every few years, the idea of forty years in one system feels almost antique, like a pension plan or a gold watch. Roberts calls Mayfield his mentor and speaks of him with a mixture of affection and wariness.
“He empowered me, he encouraged me,” Roberts said, remembering long conversations across Mayfield’s desk. But there were also the harder moments, when the older man would say, “Hey, Roberts, I need a little better. I need more. I’m expecting you to deliver here.” That kind of honesty, Roberts believes, was formative — “priceless,” even. He is keenly aware that he would not be the next principal of Hanna without Mayfield’s prodding, and he talks about his mentor’s career as if it were a kind of scaffolding he now has the responsibility not to dismantle.
Mayfield, who opened Glenview as its founding principal in 2011 and later moved to Hanna, has, in a sense, bracketed Roberts’s professional life in Anderson. Roberts followed him into Glenview and will now follow him into the principal’s office at Hanna.
“It’s one of the great joys of my professional life,” said Roberts, to be trusted with both places. He still calls Mayfield when he needs counsel. “There’s not many people that know what it’s like to sit in these seats.”
For now, those seats are still in two different buildings. At Glenview, Roberts is finishing his third year as principal, walking the hallways with their odd mix of childhood and adolescence, saying goodbye to teachers he describes as “tremendous,” and to students whose voices are still changing. At Hanna, he is preparing to inherit a school that already thinks of itself as a small city—with its own rituals, politics, hierarchies, and ghosts. Somewhere between the two, on a stretch of road that has become familiar, he is thinking about how to turn his coach’s vocabulary—teams, huddles, leaving it better than you found it—into a working philosophy for a place that will be, at least for a while, his to run.
