Adam Puckett enters his eighth year at the helm of Bruin athletics and most recently led the department to its third consecutive season with seven Northwest Conference championships, the most in the conference. Under his leadership, the Bruins' department has continually improved its academic efforts, competitive excellence, and have benefited from numerous capital projects and facility upgrades.
As a 2004 graduate of the university and a former member of its board of trustees since 2011, Puckett assumed the role of director of athletics in the summer of 2017 following the retirement of longtime employee Craig Taylor. Puckett arrived from Delap, a Portland-based accounting and advisory firm where he was a partner and worked for 13 years as a Certified Public Accountant. During his tenure, the department has expanded to include 23 teams (12 women's, 11 men's) that participate in intercollegiate athletics through the NCAA and NECC. Currently, about 670 undergraduate student-athletes compete at George Fox.
With Puckett at the helm of the department, the Bruins have captured two NCAA national championships: the women's outdoor track team in 2018, and the women's golf team in 2023. Over the past five seasons, the Bruins have become a dominant force in the NWC, capturing 28 conference championships — 17 more than their nearest conference foe. In 2021-22, Fox captured the McIlroy-Lewis Cup as the top university in the Northwest Conference for the first time in history before becoming repeat champions in 2022-23.
The indoor and outdoor track teams have combined to produce seven national individual national champions since Puckett came on board as the Athletic Director, while two women's golf athletes have won individual national championships. In that same span, the department added men's and women's swimming, sent its first individual swimmer to the NCAA National Championships, saw the women's lacrosse program make its NCAA postseason debut in 2019, and the men's tennis make the deepest run in program history with an Elite Eight appearance in 2021.
Under Puckett, the Bruins have expanded beyond NCAA-sponsored events, adding emerging sports in esports and STUNT. The esports team, introduced in 2021-22, has quickly become a national presence, capturing several NECC Championships across various game titles. The STUNT program, meanwhile, became the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest; in their first season in 2023-24, they reached the Division III semifinals, finishing third.
Puckett was an athlete himself at George Fox in the early 2000s, and he remains in the top 10 on the school's all-time list in the triple jump. He capped his collegiate career by earning All-American honors his senior year after placing seventh in the long jump at the NCAA Division III National Outdoor Track and Field Championships. He has remained active at the university since graduating with bachelor's degrees in business administration and accounting. In addition to serving on the school's board of trustees, he also taught corporate tax classes at the university on an adjunct basis.
A native of Longview, Washington, who grew up in Bend, Oregon, Puckett now lives in Newberg with his wife, Brook, and their two children, Michaela and Josiah.
