Message from Department Head Dr. Carla Santos

Dear alumni and friends,

This has been an exciting semester for the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism. First and foremost, we are back on campus, teaching and taking classes in person after more than a year of being nearly fully online. Once again, the halls of Huff ring with the excited chatter of students, such a welcome sound. It’s true, we are not yet completely out of the woods with COVID. But with the measures being taken by the campus regarding vaccinations, testing, building access, and masks, the positivity rate is well below one percent.

We recently celebrated Homecoming with the traditional College of Applied Health Sciences’ recognition of outstanding alumni on October 8 and our Homecoming tent party on October 9. This year’s recipient of the AHS Distinguished Alumni Award was Dr. J. Robert Rossman, who completed master’s and doctoral degrees in RST. Bob traveled from Arizona to be with us for the celebration, and it was a delight to see him. He studied in what was then the Department of Leisure Studies with some of the giants in our discipline, including Joe Bannon and Allen Sapora, and went on to become a scholar of renown himself in the area of programming and delivering leisure experiences. Bob retired as the dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology at Illinois State University.

Another outstanding alumna of our department is Joan Braswell, a 1967 graduate of what was then the Department of Recreation. Joan recently established an undergraduate scholarship in RST. She also made a donation in support of classroom needs in Huff Hall, where she took classes more than 50 years ago. You’ll meet Bob and Joan in this newsletter.

This year’s Sapora Symposium gets underway on October 28 with a hybrid live/Zoom panel discussion of asset integration by agents with Excel Sports Management, which was named the 2019 Best Employer in Sports by Front Office Sports. Subsequent panels will take place on Zoom each Thursday except Thanksgiving through December 9. You can find more details below.

We’ll also tell you what our Office of Recreation and Park Resources (ORPR) has been doing around the state, and you’ll meet undergraduate student Alo Pulido, who completed a fascinating internship in southern Illinois with ORPR’s director, Dr. Laura Payne. Internships are critical to our undergraduate students’ growth as RST professionals. We’ll share more about our internship program in this issue of RST E-News.

One of our assistant professors, Dr. Miki Sato, gained a lot of attention when his research on the Impact of mass sporting events on public health was highlighted by the University of Illinois News Bureau. We’ll share his research, as well as profiles of RST senior Diego Acosta and graduate student Guangzhou Chen.

We have so much to be proud of as members of the RST family. We are consistently ranked in the top three programs in the United States. Our faculty is internationally renowned for its scholarship, and our students go on to leadership positions in academia, industry, nonprofit organizations, and leisure-related businesses. Our alumni stay engaged with the department and its students, serving on our advisory board, participating as guest speakers in classes and special events, and providing our students with professional development opportunities and internships. I could not be more proud to have the privilege of leading this exceptional department, to work with a truly phenomenal group of educators and students, and to be continually impressed by what our alumni achieve. I wish you all a wonderful and very safe fall and look forward to reaching out to you again in the spring.