Ex-Baldwin AD hired for same job at Dallastown, will replace retiring Tory Harvey

• Vince Sortino has been hired as the new athletic director at Dallastown High School.
• Sortino will replace the retiring Tory Harvey with the Wildcats.
• Sortino was the AD at Baldwin in western Pennsylvania, but his position was recently eliminated.

It’s not uncommon for someone to feel a little uneasy when discovering that his job is being eliminated.

Vince Sortino found himself in just that situation recently.

The longtime athletic director at Baldwin High School in western Pennsylvania, however, remained confident that he would find a new job after his former district announced that it was eliminating his $125,000 position on June 13 in a controversial cost-cutting move.

Sure enough, the 54 year old didn’t find himself out of work too long.

Thursday, Sortino was officially named to take over for the retiring Tory Harvey as the new AD at Dallastown High School, with a listed salary of $98,000.

The Wildcats are a large-school program, competing at the Class 6-A level in sports such as football and basketball. They've traditionally fielded one of the stronger athletic programs in York County.

“I felt comfortable in being able to find something,” Sortino said during a phone interview Sunday. “So, it just came down to a matter of where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to go out of state, and I didn’t really want to go all the way to Philly, so when Dallastown opened up I was really happy to have an opportunity to talk to them about the position.”

It only took a month between losing his position at Baldwin before he accepted his new job at Dallastown, which will officially begin the first full week of August.

“I’m excited to get started,” Sortino said. “I’ve always loved the area. I have a friend that lives in Hanover and I have some other family that live over in Lancaster. So I’ve been around the area before and me and my wife are just so excited to become a part of the Dallastown community.”

"The right fit:" Sortino was a special education teacher for 28 years in the Baldwin School District as well as the school’s AD the past 12 years.

The decision to take the Dallastown job came down to one thing — being the right fit.

“The last interview I had was really just to get to know each other and find out if it’s the right fit,” he said. “And that’s not only for the school district but for myself. And I really liked that they expressed that. They told to me to ask any questions so that they knew that I would feel comfortable coming here. So they did their due diligence of what they needed to do.”

Lots of experience: Sortino brings a wealth of experience with him from his time at Baldwin. In addition to his district duties as the AD, Sortino was also on the board of directors for District 7 (Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League) as well as the chair of softball and hall-of-fame committees for that district.

Sortino’s hard work did not go unnoticed by his peers. They voted him as the 2015 Regional Athletic Director of the Year.

“I was really honored by that,” he said. “Because that’s voted on directly by your peers who are fellow athletic directors.”

Sortino will take over the reins from Harvey, who has been a mainstay at Dallastown for more than 20 years. Sortino's initial impressions of both Harvey and the district as a whole were quite positive.

“Tory is a great guy with a great reputation across the state,” Sortino said. “And the school district has a great reputation and I was just so impressed with the administrative leadership team there. All of them … the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the principals and the human resources director, and their reputations, all go a long way.”

Reach Ryan Vandersloot at sports@yorkdispatch.com.