ROCKPORT – Dave Cook is in store for a bit of culture shock this fall.

Since his first day of kindergarten while growing up in the St. Louis suburbs, September has meant a return to school – including the last 37 years as an educator and an administrator.

But Cook is retiring next month as athletic administrator at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport.

“Sometimes you start thinking about how much time you have to spend on this job in order to do it right,” said the 60-year-old Cook. “And then you start thinking about how much time you have left. I think the biggest thing for me was that I wanted to be more in control of my time, even though I’ve always liked the time I spent with the coaches and at the games.”

Cook, a 1969 graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkdelphia, Ark., came to Maine through family connections in the early 1980s after teaching and coaching in his native Missouri and in Delaware.

He taught and coached at Rockland District High School for a decade, including six years as the Tigers’ boys varsity basketball coach. That coaching tenure included one of the more remarkable games in Maine schoolboy basketball history, the 1986 Eastern Maine Class B championship game in which Dexter outlasted Rockland in five overtimes.

Cook, who has lived in Camden throughout his Midcoast career in education, has been the athletic administrator at Camden-Rockport/Camden Hills for the past 16 years.

During that span he has witnessed the growth of the school’s athletic program to include boys and girls lacrosse, ice hockey, junior varsity tennis and freshman boys soccer – and he expects football to come to Camden Hills in the not-too-distant future.

He also played a key role in the transition from the old Camden-Rockport facility to the new Camden Hills Regional High School on Route 90 in Rockport.

“When you build a new school, you do it with the understanding that you’re not going to get another one for a generation,” said Cook, who earned his master’s degree from Springfield (Mass.) College. “But when the opportunity came here, the people here really stepped up with a lot of extra dollars to make sure we did it right.”

That includes providing for top-notch athletic facilities.

“We have outstanding fields,” Cook said. “That they drain so very well and are easily maintained is just wonderful.”

Throughout Cook’s tenure, Camden-Rockport and Camden Hills have won regional and state championships in a variety of sports, among them wrestling, skiing, boys and girls basketball and tennis.

For that, he credits his coaching staff.

“We’ve been fortunate to have coaches who have stayed around,” Cook said. “My experience is that if you get them through some of the hard spots early and are able to keep them, and they become as dedicated to the program as our coaches are, there’s going to be success.”