Balatonfüred
Saint Benedict
Secondary School and Dormitory

An institution's training profile cannot be changed while assuming that everything else can remain unchanged.

The previous teaching staff worked successfully within a training system, several elements of which were strong nationally for a long time. However, when the training portfolio changed, different professional competencies, different experiences, and partly new colleagues became necessary.

As a leader, this was one of the most difficult parts of the transformation.

Experience Gained from Sports

In a team, the question isn't whether someone is generally a “good” or “bad” player. The question is what knowledge is needed for the given game system, task, and moment.

A school, of course, is not a sports team. It's about people, professional life paths, livelihoods, and communities, which makes leadership responsibility far more complex. But the dilemma is similar: if the task changes, the appropriate competencies must also be created to match it.

This partly meant the development of existing colleagues and the creation of new roles, and partly the involvement of new staff members.

As the school's professional reputation grew, we were able to attract specialists from an ever-wider geographical area. Colleagues arrived in Balatonfüred from Komárom, Debrecen, Győr, Budapest, and other settlements.

In my opinion, the attractiveness of an institution is not only shown by where students come from, but also by where good specialists are willing to join it.

There were decisions that were professionally necessary, yet humanly not easy. For me, leadership responsibility also meant trying to implement the necessary changes in a way that the dignity of the people involved would not become a collateral loss of the change.

The goal was not simply to recruit new people. A community had to be built that was capable of understanding, shaping, and ultimately adopting the new directions as its own goals.

I never saw a contradiction between the educational mission and business thinking.

A non-profit school does not operate to generate profit for owners. However, it still needs to understand who it creates value for, how it finances its operations, what capacity it can maintain, where it is worth investing, and which decisions will make it stronger in the long term.

Due to the normative financing system for church institutions, unused training capacity had direct economic consequences. Therefore, pedagogical, social, and economic decisions could not be made independently of each other.

From the for-profit world, I didn't want to bring profit maximization into the school, but rather its discipline: value proposition, cost and revenue logic, efficiency, investment, positioning, measurement, and long-term viability.

Stable financial management later became one of the fundamental conditions for development; I particularly highlighted this in the jubilee speech.

The new training structure gradually found its place.

For the English language preparatory grammar school program and the law enforcement program, we later achieved seven times the oversubscription, and for the sports technician program, which had just started, we already had 2.5 times the oversubscription.

The initial value of 0.5 and the later value of 7 times are not the same metrics for the same program, so for me, the essence is not a simple “0.5 → 7” success graph.

The more important message is that the institution was once again able to create educational offerings for which families began to compete.

This was no longer just a communication result.Marketing could only amplify what truly came into being behind it.

The new training portfolio alone did not change the school's perception. It was necessary to show families, young people, and the region what new choices Saint Benedict offered.

Here too, I did not treat marketing as a separate communication task. The educational offerings, the institutional experience, the community, local connections, sports, and communication together built the school's brand.

Ultimately, one of its most powerful tools became sports.

In this process, sports played a special role.

The formation of Saint Benedict's volleyball team, and subsequently the Volleyball Academy, did not simply mean a new sports program. We found a very narrow, but extremely strong national breakthrough point for the school.

The names “Saint Benedict” and “Balatonfüred” entered national sports awareness. Sports results, matches, players, and later national and international connections provided a level of visibility that would have been very difficult to achieve with traditional school marketing.

But the strongest marketing effect was not the media.It was the people.

Volleyball players arriving from different parts of the country spread the word to their families, friends, former schools, and sports communities:

The performance, community, emotion, and national visibility created through sports gradually radiated onto the school's brand as well.

Meanwhile, the Academy did not detach from the school: its stated goal was to support school education and to scout and enroll talented individuals nationwide who could later compete at a high level.

Thus, sports simultaneously became a community-building, talent-attracting, enrollment-driving, and brand-building force.

The strengthening of the institution became truly valuable to me when the school increasingly became an integral part of the community of Balatonfüred and Balatonarács.

A school is not only responsible for those who enter its gates in the morning. It impacts its environment, and in turn draws from the community that surrounds it.

Therefore, we consciously sought opportunities for how the institution, using its own resources, could give back what it received from the town and the local community. We launched our social responsibility program, which connected the school community with its environment through five sub-programs. As part of this, our students and colleagues helped local seniors and people with disabilities, while also collaborating with foundations, civil organizations, and other local communities.

I didn't want to create isolated CSR actions. I considered it much more important for social responsibility to become part of the school's operation and educational culture.

An educational institution is in a unique position: it not only provides a service to the present but also shapes the generation that, in a few years, will be the decision-makers, employees, entrepreneurs, parents, or leaders of this very same community.

Uncle Géza Kaiser and my other predecessors had decades to build and shape different eras of the school. The country's best viticulture and winemaking training center, the strong horticultural and vocational training programs, the institution's professional culture, and its local embeddedness were all legacies upon which we could build.

As early as the 1985 school yearbook, the vision appeared that the institution would need additional classrooms, an assembly hall, and significantly larger dormitory capacity. Decades later, we were working in the next phase of the same developmental story.

And this work was not done by one person either. It brought together the efforts of deputy directors, heads of work groups, teachers, economic and technical staff, coaches, students, parents, the maintainer, the city, and numerous partners. In my jubilee speech, I also emphasized this point: the teaching staff remained united even during difficult times, and amidst the changes, the children's interests remained the common reference point.

Perhaps a leader's task is not to identify an institution's history with their own era. Their task, when it's their turn, is to recognize what needs to be preserved, what needs to be changed, and what needs to be prepared for those who follow.

When I later began to delve deeper into the professional framework of sustainability and ESG, many things seemed familiar.

Not because we would have developed an ESG strategy in 2017.We didn't.

The head of a school never owns the institution. They receive a period from its history.

They receive a community they can join; buildings, traditions, opportunities, problems, relationships, and decision-making responsibility. Some of these come from their predecessors, some they build upon with their own community, and then one day they pass everything on to someone else.

In my jubilee speech, even after listing the achievements of ten years, I did not speak of closure. On the contrary: I spoke about how the results achieved had created new development needs, and the institution had already outgrown its physical capacities at the time.

Perhaps this best demonstrates what a living system means to me.

Every problem solved creates new opportunities, every growth brings new responsibilities, and every leadership era is just one phase in a much longer story.