Grace Parks
Dr. Frank Tracz looks out towards the scoreboard during the Sunflower Showdown football game against Kansas on October 26, 2024.
The 2025-26 school year at Kansas State will be the last time Dr. Frank Tracz serves as the professor of music and director of bands. Tracz dedicated 33 years of what colleagues describe as energy and passion for not only music but also teaching students. However, Tracz said it’s not only time to retire but also to repurpose.
“I’ve done the best job I possibly think I can do here,” Tracz said. “I gave it my all, and it’s time for a young person to come in.”
Tracz accepted the position of director of bands at K-State in 1993, though he said he believed not many applied for the position.
“The word on the street, from my colleagues and confidants around the country and other universities, was that this was not a good job,” Tracz said. “There was nothing going to happen here. It’s a mess. But it was a Big Eight. I was coming from Morehead State in Kentucky and thought this would be a cool challenge. I really thought I’d just come for a couple of years and then go back home.”
Despite his initial thought process on deciding to stay for a few years before looking for what Tracz believed was a “better job” in his home state of Ohio, Tracz said he got a sip of “the purple Kool-Aid.”
“[I] got here and hit the ground running and realized that there was a lot of good things here and tremendous potential,” Tracz said. “The thing that kept me here was the people. Look back at this — Jon Wefald was president. Pat Bosco was vice president. A.B. Reynolds was the head of the Alumni Association. Bill Snyder was the football coach. You can’t match that anywhere.”
Tracz said the potential for growth and improvement didn’t just lie in the band program, but also in K-State as a whole. This change was spurred on by leadership in the university that “wanted to put Kansas State on the map.”
“There were lots of needs and stuff, but there were good people here that said we have a plan,” Tracz said. “Stick to it. Keep your nose to the grindstone, and we’ll punch away at this and make a difference. I jumped on that bandwagon and [rode] those coattails. Things changed. We started winning football games. We started going to bowl games. The city changed. The community changed. The university changed. The whole attitude and atmosphere here went skyrocketing. It was a cool thing.”
For Tracz, there was a perception change after the Copper Bowl in Arizona against Wyoming in 1993 — the first K-State bowl win in history. He said the win served as a catalyst for the college, getting “the ball rolling” and leading to an increase in enrollment.
Looking back, Tracz said some moments with the band that stuck out to him were being invited to the College Band Directors National Association, winning the Southern Trophy for the Marching Band and playing in Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.
“These are world-class venues,” Tracz said. “Here we are, nobodies from the middle of Kansas playing in the big time. These are impactful.”
Despite the massive success, Tracz’s draw to stay in Manhattan wasn’t isolated to the university.
“Manhattan is a great place to raise a family,” he said. “It’s a fantastic place. That became job number one: to raise a family. This is a good place to do it. I honestly didn’t think I’d stay here very long. But as they say, I drank purple Kool-Aid and I’m still drinking it. I’ll always be drinking it. This is in my blood. This is in my soul.”
Tracz said he often thinks back to his younger years while he was an undergraduate at Ohio State and often empathizes with his students.
“If you limit yourself … you’re going to be stuck,” Tracz said. “I had no idea. If you had asked me when I was [college] age, sitting in Ohio State, doing what I was doing, if I was going to end up as director of bands for 33 years at Kansas State University, I would have laughed.”
Caleb Roark, senior in music education who is currently student teaching, spent four years in the marching band and two years in Tracz’s wind ensemble. He said Tracz was a consistent role-model during his time at K-State.
“There were definitely times where I kind of needed a kick in the ass,” Roark said. “He always provided that — there were times where I needed tough love, there were times where I needed to be pushed. He was definitely there to bring the best out of me and the best out of everybody.”
K-State professor and director of the wind symphony, Dr. Alex Wimmer, said he got to know Tracz during his 13 years at the university — five spent as a graduate student and eight as a faculty member.
“I taught public school in Nebraska and I wanted to get my master’s, and I heard about K-State’s master’s program, and it checked all the boxes that I wanted to be able to get out of a master’s program — great experiences, but also learning from Dr. Tracz, who at that time I did not know of aside from he was director of bands at Kansas State, and he had a really phenomenal band program,” Wimmer said. “He had a great reputation as not only a teacher, but just being a really good human being, and that’s originally what drew me here, and then well, I’ve been here ever since, and all that 100% rings true.”
Descriptions of Tracz’s character by those who know him remain consistent, with words like passionate, excellent and hard-nosed used to describe him. Roark said his character shines through even the hard moments.
“During the snow game two years ago, November of 2023, there were students in the student section throwing throwing snowballs at the band and Dr. Tracz ran up to them from his podium and yelled at them and got security to kick him out, which I think is really funny, but also it’s just a testament to how much he cares about the band,” Roark said. “He didn’t just send one of his grad assistants up there. He went up there, all 1 million years of age, and yelled at them.”
Wimmer said a common quote used by Tracz is for people to “leave it better than you found it.”
“Everything that he does, everything that happens in front of him, is not only to get the task done at hand, but it’s also to set someone else up to be successful in the future,” Wimmer said. “Him leaving it better than he found it, him doing this one thing, he’s going to leave it better than he found it for somebody else. That’s really who he is. He gets a lot of accolades and he gets a lot of praise, but he’s really just trying to leave it better than he found it and make it easier and even better for somebody else.”
For Roark, when he thinks of Tracz, he’s reminded of the quote, “punch back.”
“He would always say in terms of like, life is going to knock you down, life is going to throw things at you, and the only thing you can do is punch back,” Roark said. “You got to … practice your instrument harder. You have to stay up a little later to study for a test, always just punch back.”
True to character, Tracz said when he officially goes into retirement, he doesn’t plan to stay stationary.
“As the baker says, the cookies are done, I’m tired,” he said. “It won’t be at K-State, but I’ll be working somewhere else, doing some other things. I’m not a retirement, sitting on the porch, or a golfing type of guy at all. My wife is worried about that, because she goes, ‘You’re going to be home all the time.’ No, I can’t do that. It’s just time. It’s just the right time.”