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...

There's a particular kind of coordinator or assistant director who becomes, almost by accident, the most generous mentor in their entire department, the one every student staff member wants supervising them, the one whose one-on-ones somehow always run long because the conversation kept being worth ...