The Student Staff Experience Playbook: A Free Field Guide for Collegiate Fitness Teams

Every semester, some of your strongest student staff walk across a stage and out of your building. That isn't a retention failure. That's the job.

The real question is what stays when they go: the member relationships they built, the way they trained the new hire, the facility quirks only they knew. Departments that hold onto those things aren't lucky. They've built a system for handing them off.

That's what the Student Staff Experience Playbook is for.

Tools, Not Theory

The Playbook is a field guide for fitness coordinators and fitness directors. It's built from what coordinators and directors shared at the 2026 Collegiate Fitness Directors Summit, plus our own years of hiring, onboarding, and getting it wrong. Nothing in it requires a bigger budget than you already have. Most of it requires a worksheet and a conversation.

Here's what's inside:

A 30-day onboarding checklist. From the welcome message before day one to the formal 30-day conversation, mapped week by week. It includes the hopper model, where new hires rotate through several areas before final placement, and peer mentors from day one.

Four department self-assessments. Score your own onboarding, belonging, power skills, and overall intentionality. Then pick your lowest score and one action to take this semester. The Playbook's advice: treat low scores as a map, not a verdict.

A hiring scorecard and interview question bank. Rate reliability, coachability, warmth, self-awareness, and initiative, then ask the questions that surface a real story. Hire for character, then teach the technical skills.

And there's more. You'll find recognition practices that cost nothing, a visible pathway from student staff to student supervisor, and a graduation send-off checklist, so the students who leave are sent off well and invited to stay connected.

Built to Be Used

The worksheets are yours to copy, print, and adapt inside your department. No permission request needed.

The Playbook is also honest about what it is: practitioner knowledge, not peer-reviewed research. Every example is de-identified, so no individual or institution is named. Written and edited by Steven A. Trotter and Jessica H. Maurer.

Your best student staff will graduate. Make sure what they built stays.