I didn't grow up around anyone who worked in higher education. I was a first-generation college student, which meant most of what I learned about how a university actually worked I learned by watching, asking, and occasionally getting it wrong. I started at UNC Charlotte in pre-pharmacy, which tells you something about what I thought a "real" career was supposed to look like before I'd actually spent much time inside one. It wasn't until I switched into exercise science that I found the thing I'd actually been looking for, not a subject, exactly, but a kind of work: helping people get somewhere they couldn't quite get to on their own.

That phrase has stayed with me throughout my entire career, long enough that it eventually became more of a mission statement than a memory. Take people to a place they can't get on their own. I've said some version of that sentence in group fitness classes, in personal training sessions, in graduate program planning meetings, in conversations with collegiate fitness & recreation directors who were exhausted and trying to figure out if this field still had something left to give them. It's the same idea, applied over and over, in a career that's taken more shapes than I expected it to when I first switched majors at nineteen.

A Career Built From the Inside Out

I've spent time on nearly every side of this profession. I taught group fitness classes before I fully understood what I was doing, learning as much from the students in the room as they learned from me. I worked as a personal trainer, then moved into fitness management, watching the operational side of a facility from close enough to understand what actually makes a program work and what just looks good on paper. I co-authored a book on Fitness Facility Management, because I kept noticing how much practical knowledge in this field lived only in people's heads, passed along informally if it got passed along at all, never written down anywhere a newer professional could actually find it. I presented at the Athletic Business Show, stood in front of rooms full of people doing versions of the same work I was doing, and kept noticing the same thing over and over: a lot of genuinely talented, genuinely dedicated people in this field were doing it almost entirely alone.

That aloneness is the part that eventually became impossible to ignore. Collegiate recreation is full of professionals who, by the nature of their jobs, are often the only people on their campuses who understand the specific pressures of the role. A fitness director might have excellent colleagues in student affairs or athletics, people they respect and genuinely like working with, and still go years without a single conversation with someone who actually understands what it's like to run a recreation and fitness program, manage a budget that never stretches quite far enough, and try to build a genuine culture of belonging for thousands of students with a fraction of the staff that would actually make that manageable. I kept meeting people in exactly that position. Talented. Isolated. Doing important work without anywhere to bring the weight of it.

Small Rooms, Not Big Stages

When I started thinking seriously about what a solution to that isolation might actually look like, I knew almost immediately what I didn't want it to be. I didn't want to build a massive conference where people sat in rows, absorbed information passively, and left with a tote bag and a business card folder but no real relationships. I'd been to enough of those events myself to know exactly what they were good for and exactly what they weren't. What I wanted to build was smaller, and slower, and considerably more intentional, a space where the education mattered, genuinely, but where the actual transformation happened somewhere else entirely: in the conversation between sessions, in the walk to lunch, in the unplanned moment when someone says, almost as an aside, "I'm dealing with that too," and an entire year of feeling alone in a specific professional struggle quietly dissolves.

That's the whole idea underneath Collegiate Fitness, distilled down as simply as I know how to say it. We are not, at our core, an events company, even though events are how most people first encounter us. We are a community, deliberately built for people who spend their careers building community for everyone else and rarely get the chance to receive it themselves. The Collegiate Fitness Directors Summit, the Collegiate Fit Series, continuing education workshops, leadership retreats, the Academy- each of these exists at a different stage of a professional's career. It takes a different shape, but they're all built from the same underlying belief: that people who spend their working lives helping students thrive deserve a place where someone is doing the same thing for them.

Why This Still Feels Like the Beginning

I think about my own path a lot when I think about why this work matters to me specifically. I was a first-generation student who found his way into this field somewhat by accident, through a major switch that had more to do with instinct than any grand plan. I built Globetrotter Wellness Solutions around the same underlying conviction: that organizations, like individuals, do their best work when someone helps them turn well-being into genuine strategy rather than an afterthought. Every part of my career, when looked at together, has revolved around the same question: what does it actually take to help someone, or an entire organization, get somewhere they couldn't have gotten to alone? Collegiate Fitness is my clearest answer to that question so far, built specifically for the professionals in this field who spend every day answering that exact question for their own students and staff, usually without anyone stopping to ask who's answering it for them.

That's why we built this. Not because collegiate recreation needed another conference on the calendar, but because it needed a place, genuinely built for the people in it, where the relationships were never treated as the thing that happened around the education. They were always meant to be the point.

Hey, I’m Steven. 

I’m the founder of CollegiateFitness.com and the Principal of Globetrotter Wellness Solutions.

For most of my career, my work has centered around one simple idea: helping people get somewhere they couldn’t get to on their own.

Collegiate Fitness was created for the professionals who do that every day on their own campuses. The fitness directors, coordinators, instructors, student leaders, and wellness professionals who create places where others belong.

This community is our way of creating that same place for you.

Whether you’re here for an event, a conversation, a resource, or simply a reminder that there are other people navigating this work alongside you, I’m glad you found us.

Welcome to Collegiate Fitness.

— Steven