As a student, Clauss took an interest in sports, enjoying playing baseball and football. Despite being unsure of a career path right away, he recalls having an interest in coaching early on, recalling looking up to his seventh grade gym teacher and thinking that he could see himself in a similar role. However, it took some time in between for Clauss to arrive back at North Penn. Originally, Clauss couldn’t have imagined himself a teacher, noting that he hadn’t particularly enjoyed sitting down in classrooms.

“I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I was the first one in my family in college, so I didn’t really know much about college. I went to Montco, got some classes, took a few years off. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I played baseball locally, and worked crappy, dead end jobs that didn’t pay very well, which was the other thing that convinced me to move on,” said Clauss.

It took travelling across the world for Mr. Keith Clauss, an alum of North Penn High School, to find his way back as a teacher. In the graduating class of 1981, Clauss walked the halls as a student, spending his time as a member of the baseball and football teams. Later down the line, Clauss found himself in Sicily as a youth sports director and then a physical education teacher in Virginia Beach. Eventually walking the halls as a teacher, Clauss found his way back to North Penn teaching health and physical education. This year marks his last of 26 years of teaching at North Penn, and the beginning of his next journey in retirement.

It was his wife, Betty, who brought up the subject of possible career options, and Clauss noted he had taken an interest in coaching.

“There’s one good way to do that,” she had said, and that began Clauss’s path to teaching.

Before working his way back into North Penn as a teacher, Clauss spent time overseas in Sicily with his wife, who was stationed there as a part of her Navy career.

“They have to do one overseas tour in their career. We could have gone to Greenland, Iceland, Hawaii or Sicily. I was all for Hawaii to begin, but we would have been stationed on the West Coast. We went to Sicily, which was through the station on the East Coast where we had family,” Clauss explained.

Working as a youth sports director, Clauss was running all of the intramural sports for American children on the Navy base with their families—about 400 kids, he recalls.

“We had basketball, cheerleading, baseball, and soccer. Funniest part was, I was able to get local kids’ teams to come down, things that had never been done before. I’m a lot more in tune to the foreign students here, coming from other countries who can’t really speak the language,” Clauss noted.

When they arrived back on the East Coast after their time in Sicily, Clauss eventually ended back up where he very first began, right at North Penn High School. Outside of teaching health and physical education, Clauss also served as an assistant baseball coach for eighteen years of his career, back on the same fields where he originally played.

“I was here [playing] when we got in the state playoffs, and we won the league two out of three years. It was a lot of fun,” Clauss recalled from his time as a player.

“In 2009, we won our first state championship, and I had an undefeated season when I was coaching the JV team. They stayed almost tied this year, but lost a game. I gotta shove that in their face a little bit,” Clauss joked. “It was a lot of work; folks don’t realize how difficult it is.”

However, outside of his accomplishments in his baseball career at North Penn, Clauss says that his biggest accomplishment is in a different sport: basketball. More specifically, Clauss is proud of “perfecting the backwards half-court shot. Two years ago they had a bunch of kids who would try to shoot half-court shots, and I said, this is how I make a half-court shot,” Clauss shared.

Over the changes he has seen at North Penn, Clauss especially notes the massive growth in the student population, as well as the up and coming renovations that are to come soon. “A lot of things just keep getting better, and they’re trying to expand,” Clauss said.

Clauss hoped to show his students the importance of physical education and exercise, noting the importance of participating in such activities.

“Every statistic in the world tells you that you have got to keep moving and exercise throughout your life. It’s hard to convince young people that,” Clauss said.

For his plans for retirement, Clauss hopes to further his travels, hoping to see the parts of the country he still hasn’t.

“I’ve seen the whole East Coast, I’ve seen the whole West Coast. I haven’t seen the middle of the country; I haven’t been to Las Vegas, I haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, or Arizona. I haven’t been to North Dakota, not that there’s anything to see there, but I’ve just never been there. I’d like to travel a little bit more,” Clauss said.

Over his years of teaching students, the biggest lesson that students have taught Clauss is “lots of patience.”

Clauss will look back especially fondly on his fellow teachers in physical education and health, calling them “some of the greatest people in the world.”

I enjoyed my time, and I enjoy all of the people I’ve met,” Clauss reflected.