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...
Most new student employees in collegiate recreation can recall almost nothing specific about their first week on the job. Ask them to describe it a year later, and you'll get vague fragments: a stack of paperwork, a tour of the building, maybe a name tag handed over without much ceremony. This isn't...
Exit interviews in collegiate recreation tend to produce the same short, unsatisfying list of reasons a student employee is walking away: schedule conflicts, a heavier course load, a job off campus that pays better. Supervisors write the reason down, file the paperwork, and post the position again, ...
There's an uncomfortable admission that surfaces whenever collegiate recreation professionals talk honestly about their social media strategy, and it usually comes from someone who has spent real time and real budget trying to keep a department's Instagram feeling current: if you didn't grow up post...
Somewhere on a college campus this semester, a cycling instructor is about to run a karaoke-themed spin class, and the student conduct office has set up a mocktail bar at the back of the room. It's an alcohol awareness event, technically, filed under wellness education in whatever spreadsheet tracks...
A recreation center's floor plan makes a hundred small arguments before a single class ever starts, and almost none of them are written down anywhere. The placement of the mirrors. Which room gets the glass wall facing the hallway and which one gets a solid door. Whether the free weights sit in an o...
Somewhere in the middle of this year's Summit, walking to lunch with a small group of fitness directors I'd only just met that morning, I realized none of us were talking about anything on the agenda. We were talking about a staffing situation one of them was navigating back home, and someone else w...
We kicked off September the way these calls tend to go: a little bit of catching up, a lot of real problems on the table, and way more good material than an hour can hold.
This time we skipped the go-around-the-room introductions and just dropped names, schools, and roles into the chat, which freed...
Somewhere in Texas, a campus recreation department figured out something that a decade of bodybuilding trophies never quite managed: if you want people to run a mile, tell them there's a donut hole waiting at the finish line. It sounds almost too simple to matter, the kind of gimmick that shouldn't ...
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a campus recreation center around 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. The 6 a.m. spin class is a distant memory. The dinner rush of lifters has thinned out. What's left is a scattering of students on foam rollers, a couple of freshmen figuring out the assisted ...
Ask a collegiate recreation leader with twenty years in the field to sketch their career on paper, a straight line from entry-level position to their current role, and most will laugh before they even pick up the pen. The actual path rarely looks like a line at all. It looks more like a scatter plot...
We kicked off the fall semester the way we like to start these things: casually, a little chaotically, and with way more good material than an hour can hold.
Friday's Fitness Directors Monthly Meetup was the first of the season, and about fifteen fitness pros from across the country jumped on at so...
