welcome to the secrets of college plenty on the host anthony and today we're going to try to get some insight on colleges and what they do for student activities so my guest today is kevin george and he's the the assistant director of the student recreation center for rowan university and welcome to the show thank you yeah no problem so kevin i usually start my guess with a with the college so would you go to school i went to college at robert morris college back in the days now robert morris university in pittsburgh pennsylvania it was a great fit for me about an hour and a half away from my hometown but they had a program that i was looking for and i also was taking a play called college athletics a really so  what was the process what did you take to go to that school well i was first researching in high school that i love playing sports i played five high school sports i was a rural town where there's many opportunities to make the team and not really a lot of cutting i knew i wanted to be  dolphin sports if athletics didn't work out for me so i was speaking of sports management majors and i thought some colleges university of dayton robert morris university slippery rock ones within probably you know three to five hour a d s and i thought robert morris had a really great fit with pittsburgh having a bunch of sports teams around so when i went to robert morris had a great sports management program i also wanted to speak in trying to walk on as a kicker for the football team and play on the soccer team wow so what  fab i meant as a walk on i wasn't highly richard i got a lot of letters from division three and of into programs and and didn't get too much from the ones i did some of the you know went to some of the highlighted camps and stuff but realizing from the area they came from the level there was other opportunities for involvement on campus so my friends that actually did not make the soccer team actually join this paternity on campus and i got us involved in campus activities in a brotherhood and joining with a group another group affiliation as well as it didn't read i first kind of one of the seek the highlighted sports teams with the n f l n b a and one of the look at the limelight and i actually did an internship at the pittsburgh steelers with the marketing department so the great opportunity for me to see the back end of the marketing for the pittsburgh steelers awesome opportunity to meet bill cowards and celebrities but i also got some other opportunities to intern for parks and recreation and working with community youth and sports and i kind of fell in love with that a little bit more and so my junior year i had a class on campus recreation programming and i found out about there's opportunities to work in sports outside of athletics and professional sports so my junior year and going into my senior year i thought going to a conference call had three a graduate assistant chip opportunities pay for my grad school and pay me a stipend to help us supplement the campus recreation programs and i went to university of florida for two years where they paid for my graduate degree i also chose florida because my parents  easier to access weed my grandmother had a winter home there so they knew that they'd come visit and but a university of florida was a great experience robert morris only had about three to three thousand students on campus and university of florida has about fifty thousand so getting that big time college environment was great  yeah so tell me a little bit more about the convention is it something that a lot of kids out there can go and see yeah i think what i realized like in years instead of going on spring break and spending eight hundred thousand dollars hanging out with my fraternity brothers or some other people i invested about eight or nine hundred dollars going to a conference in san antonio texas and it's kind of scary for me at robert morris university we were a nurse the institution member but we weren't real active utilizing the resources or go in there conferences so i found out about the association and the conference through my academic class and i pursued it and i actually asked for some funding from the university and it wasn't really made available also realize you know what sometimes you just gotta go and try things out invest money is very scary there are about two thousand attendees at the conference professionals and students and i actually found out through the association how i could room with some people and supplement the cost for the three or four days i stay in a hotel food down really challenge the networking on you don't know anybody but it was a great opportunity for me to kind of see the world of collegiate recreation how it impacts students in colleges outside of the classroom and how could really impact them positively with with creating them and really think about what colleges sonal you talk about a lot of ways of calling up the places in finding out what they could do for you and what kind of money you can get from the did you do that also for the for robert morris did you find any kind of scholarships yeah actually i was fortunate that you know i as robert morris is a private institution there definitely pertains for scholarships to supplement and so i did see some of those as well as through my hometown we had some scholarships to apply for so great that i was fortunate my parents pay for my undergraduate degree as well as my three siblings and i you know i was very blessed to not have to come out of college with that i married in debt but i as you know but am i realize that sometimes door daudet when you're a married couple can be a very big financial challenge so i was very fortunate i realize now too is that i didn't take it for granted i know some college students at rowan and other institutions that their parents pay for school in the student don't realize that that's an investment in them and they just kind of you know just maybe not in teh glasses their g p a is not that great and then they realize maybe after the fact of their parents let them know that you know we're investing in your future but i got very good grades at robert morris and i did very well and getting my graduate assistant ship in grad school paid for i was kind of ready to go to get a job so narrow that it's a long process to get to roe and so tell me a little bit of that when you went down to florida is that of the culture changed through absolutely we were fortunate that we had a community of graduate assistance that work for the rec sports department university of florida i believe we had about private out twenty to twenty five graduate assistance all working in different areas of campus recreation my specialty was its programming but we had other than fitness and wellness facilities operations outdoor experiences and so we had a group and i would say about seventy percent of them came from different institutions so we all came to a new place and transitions and we also formed friendships worked together in classes because a lot of us had the same class it is and it was a great experience for me to kind of be independent as much as you should learn to be independent in college this was eighteen hours away from my parents hometown and i could just drive an hour and a half to be back and get my laundry done or if some good food it was a great experience for me to challenge myself again personally and professionally and those are my lifelong friends i go to weddings and we do reunions that will go down the university of florida and watch a football game so there's a great experience for me too to really just see what you can do personally and professionally so is this something that a lot of kids out there can get into the part of like the student rect yeah actually a lot of students find through accident so they'll apply for maybe an on campus job and realize a campus recreation is sometimes one of the largest employers on campus there and just florida alone i think we might have had four or five hundred students that refereed our sports and all those students employees that start working as an undergraduate change their viewpoint on applying for professional positions whether it's y m c a route whether it's parts recreation or cleve's or recreation and they realize that you know what this is something i'm good at this is something that  between collegiate athletics club sports and intramural sports and trying to educate them that you know if your student is interested in collegiate athletics but they don't make the team or they just don't the time command is just not for them clubs force is a great option the club sports programs are student run some of them choose to use their budget allocated to to pay for a coach a lot of them maybe just the club president schedules prizes and coordinate schedules with other schools a lot of them are part of the league so the league would actually schedule them from local schools within probably six to eight hour radius but they they buy uniforms they practice they they're part of the league so they and they have standings and playoffs and national championships so that's a you know right between collegiate athletics and instr force is really a great opportunity just you know playing something they be you love grew up or we love to push that even if you didn't play the sport come out and play it's all about having fun you know seeing if you can score you may not be the best you can have some fun and those opportunities  didn't on campus play and other students so little how did you end up at rowan university florida that's really the story actually when i went to university of florida as a second year graduate assistant finishing up my second year a first year graduate assistant came in his name is nick freydon he was a fitness guy but he was all time points later as a kicker around university they played for the football team and he just raved about how great your own university was and this was thirteen fourteen years ago and he just talked spoke very highly of the professional staff there that was very family oriented and they had people feel welcome made people feel part of the team kind of that family atmosphere in a work environment always about having fun but also working hard and getting the rewards from  when i talked to him about that i found out that they had a full time interim role director position assistant director of i'm sure all the facilities and when i met them at the conference two years later in albuquerque new york i immediately just gravitated towards them just very easy to talk to and my director at the time also once i got the job offer said hey you know i know you bring an area of expertise and i let you take our program and run with it and it was a great opportunity to see where they were but see how it progressed and they had a great program so there's a branch of the budget director or is is something that's separate from the lead exposure to actually a great question and through our association a lot of a collegiate athletic programs in the northeast still house internal sports and some sport clubs in their umbrella but a lot of schools are getting away from that because they realize that athletics and recreation are completely different and a lot of times you'll see that maybe a full time coach their secondary job is to oversee this real sports program but that kind of  doesn't make that the focus and you'll see a lot of programs expressly in the midwest south and they actually are falling under student life or student affairs where they realize it's those outside the classroom experiences for those students can kind of make make their day you know that something they're looking forward to and so forth where i am at rowan university we are following on their student life and we have a different philosophy i guess you would say in the student learning outcomes and and what college is about not to say some athletics programs are wonderful i know university of connecticut they fall into athletics but athletics pretty much supports them and says here's a budget you do what you do well and we're going to keep our hands off will coordinate maybe spaces and facilities and you know but other athletic programs if you if you look look into them you'll see that they're not really promoting instrumental sports they're not getting students to come in they given very little time on the course of the fields whereas recreation kind of the fall in the student they'll have their own field they never have to share it's their facility because i didn't realize you know what roan was about of being in the three institution and that back then when i was young i thought wow you know it's a great starter place and i'll be there for a few years and want to jump to bigger and better things and i realized i fell in love you know the first couple of years transforming the program relations letting our students know what professionalism as i was kind of lost in on the program where people were in backwards hadn't referee shirts on tucked in and then we wondered why the students didn't respect the referees and try to change the philosophy that you want to look the part and i've seen it grow and develop and then been changing so fast and growing it's been awesome to be part of that and then i got you know found found somebody in the philadelphia area got married in stablished and now you know i don't want to leave i'm fortunate to be at rowan university yeah that's great so they'll tell us a little bit about rowan university what is the school atmosphere like what's what's it like being at the school rohan is very progressive and it's interesting talking to my parents as in western pennsylvania there's some you know state colleges in the area and they're actually they're in roman numbers are going down they're cutting programs and and runs kind of the opposite they're forward thinking and transformational and we know where we stand in  the state but we also you know the president who still has a go from going to book from about thirteen to fourteen thousand finished about twenty to twenty five thousand within a five to ten year time frame and we're actually kind of meeting those goals each year in our roman numbers and and you know just the reputation of rowing we've we have the two medical schools now we have cooper cooper medical school as well as the what was it the school of osteopathic medicine called roan medicine now so having those two were only the second institution in the country with a d o and m d program and i really highlights our university as well as we have a very well established engineering program henry rowan gave one hundred million dollars row in class for us stayed at that time and our engineering program is doing so well we're actually building a new so what what are some of the duties that you have that's a good question and i would say it has changed significantly that's one of the reasons why i love being a real universities i'm not doing the exact same thing i was doing in two thousand and four there are still components but we also i'm realizing that transferable skills that we can teach our students is very important so i've i've actually had support from our director to create student leadership positions under interest boards where i'm not doing the day to day scheduling teams i'm teaching students how to do that so when they want to seek being a y m c a director athletic director or consider campus recreation they are skilled enough that they can go on to be a graduate assistant secondly the probably the last five or six years  my involved in a facility has increased significantly our director had left and our previous director wasn't a vice president roh she came back but she didn't come back as a full time director for campus track she oversaw the student center student activities and recreation so she had a lot on our plate which empowered our assistant directors to say you know what we need to step up and and oversee our area very well by keeping peace keeping her in tune but with the with the position i about five or six years ago i started over seeing the two full time because the audience which was which is a great experience to oversee two full time professionals in building management in custody duties as well as overseeing our highest good staff called building managers we entrust our students some people or are baffled that we give our students that are twenty one this one in two years they've been working a couple of years we give them keys or building they open up the building we have outside community members in faculty staff that are like knocking out the door at five fifty nine to get in and they get in a five fifteen five thirty check to make sure everything is clean and safe and a great welcoming environment and they close the give us a little bit of what each one is entailed with the most important thing i think for our like mission and vision of campus recreation is we want people to know that we're not a place where the door says only for the fit and athletic and some people get the perception we're called the gym but we also want people to think that sometimes gym in gym class has a negative association like the last kid picked in dodgeball and he and we want that perception that be nothing part of who we are now we do want to cater to the athletic and people that play sports a bunch of athletes still like to use our facilities the coaches like to bring them over because ours is a nice newer facility but our philosophy is it's we just want people to come in and find something in the facilities that could be coming in just playing ping pong shooting some hoops on sports we always try to think before thinking any new sport we can try to incorporate we have a game called spike ball it's a little trampoline that you play two versus two and kind of like playing volleyball hybrid and you know we introduced battleship where you put canoes in our poll and you throw buckets of water into each other and see if you can survive and so that's been very popular we started with sixteen teams i think three or four homecomings ago were up to thirty teams a common day and just you know a lot of greek organizations a lot of just random groups athletes and it's a great way to just kind of celebrate homecoming league so is it is it a spot where a lot of the the students from the school they come up with ideas for the different types of clubs and say hey kevin you know this is something that we can do you know the someone just come up with something like skydiving had a i want to do a skydiving pad so how do you how does one start something like that we have kind of two different opportunities with intramural sports we usually do a survey to our participants to see how everything went with the sport they they were part of we also explore outside opportunities so you know we've had in the past arm wrestling to feel go contests to the n f l combine it with our club sports our club sorts has grown significantly i think when i first got there we had about four or five club sports we were up to close to forty now and you know a new one i think that came on as bass fishing and then was in recently on a park or with a climb and jump over things and just and the thing we like to tell our students is that as long as you have a group of students interested and you can sustain they be a year as a provisional club where you can operate without any funding and then you continue that interest each year with your executive board and getting people in every year you know something it's we're experience that would be positive and if it's a group of students that say hey how come we don't have a record ball club or why don't we have some schools play quidditch from harry potter sure we don't have a quidditch club but if there's an interest there and there's a ligand teams in maryland  delaware have but it's clubs you know we can we can look at those opportunities really so it's wide open to anything whatever is considered recreation because there's so many different definitions of what is a sport and what is in but we  cheer and dance teams that go to all the athletic events they're not house on their athletic their house and their sport clubs but they are the ones that you see at the games you know performing at halftime and cheering cheering the athletes on so no role in universities close to the shoreline of new jersey isn't it it's about forty minutes richard dawson university is closer to the shore down by like atlantics and it's i think them to mona and then we are probably closer to like cherry hello and like the camden like where twenty minutes away southeast from that sometimes students realize that the place isn't for them maybe they look to transfer and and we'll sell ourselves but you know as long as they they find it a great experience wherever they go and to get into the right program do a lot of kids go to school for sports management there or is it as any anything that they are actually is a sport management program run usa they have a strong health and exercise science program so some students want to do health promotion and fitness management and some of them want to be says that teachers but we don't have a sport management program which people ask about but we don't have that program but you know for us we also pay hourly we don't hire just federal work study students that that have funding from the state we want to hire the best and if that means that we pay out of our own operating budget that we hire we've hired engineers and biological sciences and we have pretty much if you look at our hundred thirty eastern employees we have about every major available and we want to make sure that they get transferable skills because one of the clubs arises recently just graduate he got a good job at lockheed martin and he said that eighty percent of his interview was based on the transferable skills he learned at the sports clubs or rather with conflict resolution or working as a team or problem solving as really good for us to hear because you would think i was an engineer major working at the food and recreation center and i really told us of the things we're doing well we need to continue doing well but also think outside the box the cheered the millennial generation and how they learn may be different than thirty forty years ago so we always want to think outside the box and make it a good experience for them that supplement their education and their degree so how do you find the students to come there and work at the rec center or is it just walking around campus and just as can get we actually don't have to advertise too much we do have some challenges in certain positions such as interest course officials like why would you want to sign up for a position where you might get yelled at and have to make tough decisions but a lot of our positions  have a ton of people from freshman orientation through just a year they walk in and say i'm looking for a job and you know we have the applications forms available at our front desk or online so we usually don't have a lot of trouble recruiting except for certain positions lifeguards can be a challenge because they have to come with a certification and support sufficient just can be a challenge i'm actually doing a prof talk tonight rowan university which is kind of like the ted talks and tonight's topic sports leadership on the talk about sports officiating and the challenges that come with the violence in the areas that people just scream and yell at like i don't i wouldn't come near ready to start screaming and yelling and criticizing your work but people see innately with a culture of just competitiveness and sports and yelling at officials of is kind of an accepted culture and i'm excited tonight we're going to do attend and tell to them about sports officiating great well call it at the end of our show usually what i ask my guests is what advice you want to give to the parents out there that their sons or daughters are going on to college they want to get involved with the student activity center they want to get involved at the college level what advice you want to give those paths i think the vice is going to be different per parent and the student and i think the most important thing is regardless of where they come from so they could be from community college maybe they have a did already has a job and has a lot of time invested is just always find time for recreation and it could be mind body spirit it could be stress management it could be a social interaction but you know there's many studies that say you know just getting some activities health wise is beneficial the long run they want to be in their parents years and maybe they choose to have kids they want to be there for their their kids as well as just you know immersing yourself into the institution or university can have that connection that you know it's all about  muscular and you played high school sports it's for anybody anybody to feel comfortable coming in and we hope that we want to answer questions during orientation and open houses and let them know that something is for them in the rec center or in student life