Dornbusches honored for their service to the community

Press Sports Editor
sports@presspublications.com

In the most pleasant of surprises, Jim and JoAnn Dornbusch, long-time residents of Oak Harbor and steadfast supporters of the student-athletes of the Benton-Carroll-Salem School District, were recently awarded the Jill Mincheff Sportsmanship Award at the school’s fall sports banquet, an honor fitting for a variety of reasons, most especially because the namesake of the award is their late daughter.
Mincheff, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 49, was, like her parents – a community staple and someone that just about everyone in Oak Harbor knew. She worked as a medical assistant at the R.W. Minick Medical Center in Oak Harbor, and later at Magruder Hospital, for 30 years. Mincheff was also a member of St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Oak Harbor and was very active in the Oak Harbor Athletic Boosters.
Her husband, Carlos, also an Oak Harbor alum, was a two-time state champion in wrestling and also played football, and her son, Kyle, and daughter, Katie, graduated from Oak Harbor, too. Jill and Carlos were married for 24 years.
Oak Harbor athletic director Dan Hoover, who has worked for the school system for over three decades, described Mincheff as a “great lady” who cared about Oak Harbor.
“Jill was known for working at the doctor’s office, and she was an avid supporter of the boosters,” he said. “She was a great lady – very positive, always had good things to say, and found the good in people. What she did with the boosters was awesome.”
Hoover said the Dornbusches have been “awesome about supporting Oak Harbor athletes.”
“Because of Jill and their son Jeff, they’ve been around sports, whether they have any direct involvement with the athletes or not, and in multiple sports – not just the ones where their kids have been involved.
“We thought it was important to honor them with the award. It was a heartfelt moment to have that. They were very appreciative. You could visibly see it on their face that they were touched by it. It was very cool to see,” Hoover said.
“I had called Jeff Dornbusch a week prior to that to let him know that that was the case,” Hoover said. “He didn’t tell his parents that they won (the award), but he said that they might want to be there.”
Hoover and assistant athletic director Doug Slagle oversaw the award selection process.
“We get emails. If they send me a name, they’ll say why (the person) is deserving, and they’ll write something up, and these are the ways that they help us,” Hoover said. “We weigh those each season and decide who we’re going to give it to.
“It was somebody else that mentioned to one of our coaches about the Dornbusches; one of the other coaches brought it to me and gave me the nomination,” he said. “Coach Slagle and I sit down and go through the nominations and weigh the merits based on the criteria. I don’t want to say that it’s vague, but it’s loose enough that it can be a student or a community member. It can apply to a lot of people that we feel have been good to our athletic program.”