COLLEGIATE FITNESS FIELD GUIDE
Every student employee you hire arrives with a graduation date.
You get four semesters. Maybe six. The Student Staff Experience Playbook is about what you build in the time between.
Get the playbook
31
pages, written to be used and not just read
10
worksheets your department is licensed to copy
8
stages, from first application to graduation
$0
and yours to share with your whole team
If you supervise student staff, this was written for you.
Fitness coordinators. Assistant directors. Anyone who has spent August rebuilding a team from scratch, again, and wondered whether it has to work this way.
Turnover in this job is not a failure of management. Students graduate. That is the entire point of the place they work. What separates departments is not whether people leave, it is what those people become before they do, and how much of it survives after.
Nothing in here requires a bigger budget than you already have. It requires something harder to schedule: intentional attention, applied consistently.
Certifications establish a floor. Power skills determine the ceiling.
Part V, Developing Power Skills
What's inside
Ten parts, following a student employee from the first time they hear about an open position to the day they walk across the stage.
- Part I
Understanding today's student employee, and the myths that keep costing departments good people - Part II
The eight-stage lifecycle, from Recruit to Graduate - Part III
Hiring for character, with interview questions that require a real story - Part IV
Onboarding people actually remember, including rotation models and culture before competency - Part V
Power skills, and why certifications set the floor while these set the ceiling
- Part VI
Belonging, and what actually makes people stay - Part VII
Building the pathway from student employee to student supervisor - Part VIII
Recognition that costs nothing - Part IX
Sending students off prepared for what comes next - Part X
An honest department self-assessment
Ten tools you can use this week
Every worksheet in this playbook is yours to copy. Print them, adapt them, hand them to your supervisors, work through them as a team. The license inside says so explicitly.
- Interview scorecard for evaluating character, not just skills
- 30-day onboarding checklist, from before day one through the day-30 conversation
- Power skills self-assessment
- Staff belonging audit
- Leadership readiness checklist
- Recognition planning grid
- Graduation send-off checklist
- Department self-assessment, four sections
- One-on-one conversation guide
- Sample staff meeting agenda
Above: the interview scorecard, the 30-day onboarding checklist, and the department self-assessment.
How it was built
This didn't come out of a literature review. It came out of rooms full of people doing the work.
Most of it was drawn from conversations at the Collegiate Fitness Directors Summit, where directors and coordinators spend their time comparing notes on the parts of the job nobody writes manuals for. Why good student staff leave early. What onboarding actually has to accomplish. How recognition works when there is no budget line for it.
Every practice in the playbook has been de-identified. No individuals named, no institutions named.
Send me the playbook
Free, 31 pages, and yours to share with your team. We ask where you work so we can tell you when we are running something near you.
Get the playbook