May 15, 2026 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo
A sponsored partnership serves as an experiential learning opportunity for Recreation, Sport and Tourism students
On any given weekend, the parking lots around the Wintrust Sports Complex fill with minivans and team buses, their passengers streaming through the doors with duffel bags and folding chairs in tow. Inside, basketballs thud against hardwood, volleyballs whistle across nets and tournament brackets inch toward championships. Over the course of a busy stretch, as many as 2,000 athletes, coaches and family members can pass through the facility.
What most of them never see is the intricate choreography required to keep that many people safe, and the multiyear partnership quietly reshaping how that work gets done.
Over the past three years, the Village of Bedford Park, Wintrust and students and faculty from the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism in the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have built a model for emergency preparedness that doubles as a proving ground for experiential learning. What began as a consulting-style project in faculty member Mike Raycraft’s course has evolved into a collaborative, partner-supported initiative central to the department’s engaged scholarship.
At its core, the collaboration reflects RST’s broader strategy: strengthening its national leadership in experiential education through a growing network of community, industry and governmental partnerships that give students high-impact, hands-on training opportunities while addressing real-world challenges.
One prominent example is the funded contract with Bedford Park and the Wintrust Sports Complex led by co-principal investigators Carla Santos—RST’s department head—and RST faculty members Mike Raycraft and Toni Liechty. Through that work, faculty and students are not only developing applied learning opportunities, but also assisting their sponsor in tackling pressing issues tied to community development and facility and operational readiness.
“Our sponsored partnership with Bedford Park and the Wintrust Sports Complex enables us to translate research into practice while providing students with direct, hands-on experience in the field,” Santos said. “Through engagement with practitioners and meaningful service to communities, our students develop the professional competencies, leadership skills and applied judgment that employers increasingly demand. This investment in experiential learning strengthens course relevance, deepens community impact and reinforces RST’s national reputation for preparing career-ready graduates.”
The practical engine behind much of that work is RST 441, a course led by Adjunct Instructor Robyn Deterding. In the class, graduate students function less like traditional students and more like consultants embedded in a working sports venue.
When the partnership began, Deterding said, the first task was to assess the complex’s existing safety infrastructure.
“Wintrust didn’t have much in the way of plans and emergency practices when we started,” she said. “So first we had to find out what they had, what they did and when they did it.”
Students evaluated routine facility checks, reviewed staff training frequency and examined equipment inspection practices. They presented recommendations to venue leadership, who were responsible for implementation. In the second year, the focus sharpened on evacuation planning—a critical need for a multicourt complex hosting youth tournaments, adult leagues, corporate events and special competitions, often simultaneously.
“You know you can’t prevent accidents and incidents from occurring,” Deterding said. “But you can plan and train for them. If they don’t happen, excellent. If they do, you have a plan to work from.”
The partnership has since expanded to include coordination with the Chicago Office of Emergency Management, Homeland Security and other public safety agencies. This year, students in RST 441 are partnering with the complex, the village and Chicago emergency officials to plan and deliver the Safe Chicago training program, an initiative designed to train up to 100 community and agency participants in CPR/AED, Narcan administration and Stop the Bleed techniques.
The Safe Chicago program represents the next phase of the “living lab” concept: moving beyond internal planning to outward-facing community resilience. By training coaches, staff, volunteers and local collaborators, the effort extends preparedness beyond the building’s walls.
For Bedford Park officials, the collaboration has provided both practical benefits and a long-term talent base.
“Our goal is to be able to develop a pipeline to give students an experience and give them an internship where they’re actually going to learn something and be in charge of the task with a project as opposed to going to an already established relationship,” said Joe Ronovsky, the village’s chief business officer. “We view this as like the lab in the Chicagoland area.”
That lab connects students with a broader ecosystem of sports and corporate partners, including the Chicago Sky, the Chicago White Sox, Wintrust Financial and Special Olympics Illinois.
“We really wanted to create kind of this lab that gave them real-life experience as opposed to just an internship where you’re cold calling or doing mailing,” Ronovsky said. “A real-life lab.”
For students, the difference is tangible. Rather than drafting hypothetical plans for a classroom grade, they are producing emergency guides, training protocols and communication strategies that can be adopted and implemented immediately.
“Any students working on these projects with us can actually go into a job interview and talk about things that have actually been done and implemented versus a hypothetical project that they did in grad school,” Ronovsky said.
The arrangement also acts as an external audit for the village and complex.
“The return on it for us is that we get third-party validation of changes or things that we need to implement,” Ronovsky said. “They’re the brightest minds, and one day all those students are going to be in leadership positions. The best thing you can do is just open up the opinions of the room and let all the brighter people talk and contribute to what we want to do. The return for us is just to be able to create this incubator.”
Co-investigator Raycraft said the “leadership of Dave Brady and Chief Business Officer Joe Ronovsky has been transformative for the Village of Bedford Park.
“Their forward-thinking vision has accelerated economic development, strengthened tourism and elevated the village’s profile as a hub for sport, business and community engagement. Importantly, this collaborative environment has created a unique living laboratory for our students and faculty and provided opportunities to explore innovative ideas, conduct impactful research and contribute meaningfully to community-based service initiatives.”
Deterding emphasizes that emergency planning hinges on the principle of reasonable care, the obligation to take appropriate precautions to protect patrons. In a venue that can host thousands of visitors in a weekend, many of them minors, the stakes are high.
“Making sure everyone is receiving the same information and coordinating the work each is doing is difficult,” she said. “There are a lot of moving parts, but that’s what we do, and we do it well.”
Risk management can easily fade from attention in the absence of crisis, she acknowledged. Part of her role is ensuring that safety remains integrated into daily operations rather than relegated to a binder on a shelf.
The broader lesson, Santos said, is that experiential learning is most powerful when it serves both students and communities. The Bedford Park partnership complements a wider array of industry-engaged projects across RST, each designed to blur the line between classroom and field.
As whistles blow and crowds cheer inside the Wintrust Sports Complex, much of that work remains invisible. Yet embedded in updated evacuation guides, coordinated agency protocols and community-wide trainings is a model for how universities and municipalities can collaborate—strengthening public safety while preparing graduates ready to lead from day one.
In Bedford Park, the game plan now extends well beyond the court.
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