As the campuses of our schools reopen, many of the students are looking forward most to the recreation involved in campus life. Whether it’s the weight room or tennis court, intramural sports are a mainstay for much of the youth in our country.
One organization begun in the 1950’s has been taking care of college and university students and their aim to play in sporting events that don’t get the same television and news coverage as football or basketball. The National Intramural Recreational Sports Association has its home right here in Corvallis. We sat down with their Executive Director, Pam Watts, to talk about what they offer those interested in the sports life.
TCA: I’m Sally Lehman, and I’m with The Advocate. Today, I’m speaking with Pam Watts from the National Intramural Recreational Sports Association, better known as NIRSA. Thank you for being here today, Pam.
Watts: Thanks for having me.
TCA: How long have you been with NIRSA?
Watts: Oh, gosh, I think it’s been about 16, 17 years now. I joined them in early 2000 for three years and then I left to have a couple of kids for about five years and I came back in 2007.
TCA: What do you do for the organization?
Watts: I’m the Executive Director. In my earlier roles at NIRSA, I was the Controller, Chief Financial Officer, and then served in number two roles – Deputy Executive Director had a whole bunch of titles, but it was really the number two role – through 2011. And then, when the former executive Director stepped down after 14 years and a lot of successes, I assumed the role of Executive Director in early 2012.
TCA: Your organization regulates sports that are not overseen by the National Collegiate Athletic Association – NCAA, or by the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletes – the NAIA. What does that mean to someone who has never heard of you before?
Watts: Yeah. First, I need to clarify we don’t actually oversee sports in the way that the NCAA or the NAIA does. We are really a professional association, a trade association. We are represented by members. We’re a member based organization, and we fulfill the professional development, networking, and resource needs for people who live and work in campus recreation. We represent about 900 campuses across Canada and the U.S., but as members right, we don’t have a license to represent them, it’s not a legal arrangement, etc.
Now, because they work in campus recreation, we are really, really involved in sport. And so the typical campus recreation portfolio includes both club sports and intramural sports. The club sports are formally regulated by a number of different sports specific governing bodies. Some of those are attached to the official like Olympic sanctioned, national governing body in the areas of Olympic sports, and then others just have other non-profit or, sometimes, for-profit organizations that run tournaments for the benefit of university level club sport players.
We do oversee two of those sports for club – well, actually three, soccer, and tennis [which] we do in partnership with the U.S. Tennis Association, and then basketball, we actually oversee the tournament structure for both club and intramural – or extramural when you start playing other schools. So we have a role with sports, but it’s really unsimilar to the NCAA, who acts as a national governing body across many sports. Where in the club and intramural model – well, primarily the club model, there are other governing bodies. We just support the professionals who live and work in those industries.
TCA: The organization began life catering to historically black colleges and universities. What was the goal in doing that?
Watts: So Dr. Watson had gotten a Carnegie Grant to study the impact of intramurals at HBCUs – Historically Black Colleges and Universities. And when he had his findings, he invited 20 intramural directors from 11 HBCUs to convene at Dillard and discuss the findings.
That quickly led to conversations about what was working, what wasn’t working in their intramural programs, which in the 1950’s the dominant non-varsity sport opportunity was intramurals. And so they decided at that first meeting that this was such a good idea to get together with colleagues who were doing something similar to them on their own campuses, to discuss ideas, share best practices, support one another that they began meeting regularly.
They decided several years in that they would expand it beyond HBCUs. So they started inviting intramural directors from non-HBCUs. And really, the goal there was to broaden the size and the scope to broaden the conversation, right? Bring in more professionals, more best practices, etc.
And so again, that was our beginnings. Then it’s grown, like I said, to 900 campuses today in the membership.
TCA: What services does NIRSA offer young athletes or young people?
Watts: We’re really a layer behind for the most part. So our members – campus professionals – serve those students on campus primarily in a face-to-face model, although during the pandemic, a lot of them flipped to virtual offerings. So a contemporary campus [recreational] department offers not just clubs, sports, and intramural sports, but also fitness, aquatics, outdoor, wellness, and wellbeing programming. Sometimes they have dietitians on staff. They run things for the community; they have summer camps; they have employee wellbeing programs. There’s really a breadth and depth of the types of services that they offer.
We support the professionals in that industry who in turn support the students and campus communities across the country.
Now we do have this sport portfolio. We run four national tournaments with a regional national tournament structure, which is probably the primary space that we directly impact young athletes. And what I would say is that I think the statistic is something like 3 – 4%, depending on the size of your school – at a smaller tier school, it’s higher, but at a large school like Oregon or Oregon State, it’s only 2 – 3% of the entire student body that plays varsity athletics. So all the other college-going athletes are playing club and intramural sports. Our data shows that 70 – 80% of the student body participates in campus recreation in a given year.
Now that may be dropping in the weight room or going to a fitness class or working out of the pool, but a large part of that percentage is also those involved in intramural or club sports. So what I would say back to young athletes, and I think I think of young is maybe even like youth athletes, is that when you’re thinking about your college experience, if you’ve been a youth athlete, if you’ve been even a varsity athlete in college, a very small percentage will go on to play for the NAIA or NCAA. But there’s lots of organized sport opportunities in that club and intramural model that can be part of your college experience, and we believe, a really healthy part of a holistic college experience.
We find that youth that maybe played one particular sport, you know, especially as they get to the high school level, have an opportunity to try different sports, try something that may be conflicted with their season before. Or, you know, maybe they’re just done after 10 years of a particular sport and want to try something different. I think especially in intramurals, it’s competitive, but it’s fun. The fun comes first.
TCA: NIRSA has been around for about 70 years. Can you estimate how many young athletes that you’ve helped in that time?
Watts: So I don’t know about through time, but when we run the math on, you know, nine hundred campuses times 70 – 80% of the student body, it’s well over 10 million students a year that are touched through campus recreation programs in North America.
TCA: And you charge for the services that you offer.
Watts: Well, we have membership fees, again, for the professionals who are part of the organization, and with their membership comes professional development resources, networking, access to research, and benchmarking.
If the student teams play in our tournaments, yeah, there’s a tournament fee just like any other tournament. We try to keep it low cost for the extramural tournaments, because there’s less formalized structure there. But they’re competitive with other tournaments.
TCA: And you also encourage people to volunteer. What kind of volunteer opportunities are there?
Watts: NIRSA has about 4,500 individual members, and we have about 2,200 volunteer positions a year. Now, some people serve in more than one position, so this can be anything from maybe you’re a session monitor at an annual conference, or you volunteered at a regional or state sport tournament, right on up to serving on the Board or serving as NIRSA president.
Volunteers really are the engine of the organization, which is fairly common in membership organizations. So because we’re in the business of education, we’re in the business of professional development. We really treat these volunteer positions as a learning opportunity for those professionals.
NIRSA is in need of some services, some manpower, some brainpower right in these volunteer positions. But we also try to just scope them and organize them in such a way that there’s a reciprocity of learning. While they’re giving us their time and talent, sometimes treasure, you know, we’re giving them a learning experience back that helps them grow in their career.
TCA: You talk a lot about continuing education and professional development services. What kind of services do you offer people in that regard?
Watts: We have a big annual conference normally around 2,500 people – and trade show. Throughout the year, we have specialty institutes for certain segments of the membership. There’s an intramural institute, there’s a sport club institute, there’s a facilities institute, there’s a directors institute. And more recently, there’s an ESports institute because that’s an area we’re getting into. So there’s some specialty things.
And then there are things that happen at a regional or local level. Often coming to a large national event – that involves travel, that involves a lot of time, it’s expensive to get on a plane and book a hotel and come to the large events. So there are also regional and local opportunities that are a little more geographically accessible.
And then there’s virtual, which we had done some of before the pandemic, and now we do a lot of right during and after the pandemic. I think one of the gifts of that has been watching our events grow in the virtual space because, again, that time and money barrier that sometimes large national events just inherently carry with them was lowered or eliminated.
So just by way of example, we would get around 2,500 people at our annual conference every year, pretty steadily for the last 10 years. When we had a virtual annual conference in February, we had 4,500 people register. So as we come out of this and as we figure out the mix of virtual and in-person, one of our core tenets we are trying to hang on to is, [that] we all do want to get back to in-person events and there is some value there that’s just really hard to replicate virtually, but we also want to keep a really impactful roster of virtual events because the accessibility there is just very real.
TCA: What do you mean by ESports?
Watts: Oh, so gaming. So there’s gaming and gaming tournaments and in any variety of games. I’m not a gamer myself, but students were coming to campus and they had been gaming before they came to campus and wanted to play in some organized tournaments. The NAIA has a spinoff organization that is organizing some of the varsity level e-sports tournaments, the interscholastic e-sports tournaments, schools are coming along with scholarship programs just like they would for NCAA athletes.
What’s fun about e-sports is you can ladder the competitiveness. So there’s competitive leagues and what have you, but there’s also just the fun intramural space. This is Dorm A playing against Dorm B, or Floor A playing against Floor B.
So we’re still figuring it out. E-sports is the Wild Wild West. There are a lot of organizations and players and ideas and tournaments, and it’s different than other sports. But there’s also a lot that’s the same in terms of organizing sport.
TCA: You also conduct research. What are your current research goals?
Watts: So broadly, we like to do research on anything that demonstrates the value of collegiate recreation.
Generally, the big two in college and university environments is retention graduation rates [and] GPA. The students that come in, are they staying? Are they graduating? Are they graduating in a reasonable amount of time? And then when they leave, are they reaching their career or other goals?
So of course, what they’re doing in the classroom and how they select their major and all that is critical to post-graduation success. But student life and student affairs, campus recreation, the other out-of-classroom experiences they’re having, are also just crucial to lifelong success.
I don’t know if you played sport or participate in any kind of recreation, but you know this is where you learn teamwork. This is where you learn organization skills. This is where you sharpen communication. Often, this is where you get a chance to interact with people who are different than you – and your bridge is sport, your love of a particular sport.
We do research that demonstrates the value of campus [recreation], the impact on graduation rates, on retention rates. As there’s been a better or more present appreciation for well-being and holistic well-being – so not just physical, but social, emotional, mental, even financial, environmental, all those aspects of well-being – we also have research that demonstrates our impact on holistic well-being. So physical health is an easy one. Of course, participating in recreation can have a positive impact on your physical health. But we have other research that shows its positive impact on your mental health and on social engagement.
You know, often people get their sense of belonging, their social interaction, through sport and recreation. Maybe it’s your spin class, maybe it’s your flag football team. Maybe it’s you always work out in the weight room at three o’clock and there’s this other person there, and now you’ve struck up a friendship. So more recently, we’ve been doing more research to promote this idea that it’s not just physical health, but it’s social, emotional, mental health that’s positively impacted through campus recreation.
TCA: What brought NIRSA to Corvallis?
Watts: That’s a great story and fairly typical in the Higher Education Association world.
So, NIRSA was founded in 1950 like we talked about before, and it was all volunteer run right through about, I think, the mid-70’s or so. And when they decided they needed to hire their first employee, which was going to be half-time, the Director of Recreation at Oregon State was most recently in their [NIRSA’s] senior leadership role – I think they called it Executive Secretary at the time. He said, ‘Yeah, I can negotiate with Oregon State and, you know, cut back to like half-time with Oregon State and I can do half-time this paid employee role with NIRSA, but I have kids; we’re part of the community; I don’t want to move.’
And so they said, ‘OK, fine, you know, we’ll hire you, and we’ll locate in Corvallis.’
Then, half-time became full-time, and then you had the second employee, the third employee. You know, now we have about 25 employees. In the mid ‘90’s, they bought a piece of land on Technology Way and built a building and opened it in ‘98.
From time to time, there’s conversation around ‘should NIRSA be in Corvallis? And that seems a little bit strange and lots of associations or other places.’ But as much as it might be like there’s not a strong reason to be in Corvallis per se anymore, there’s not a strong reason to be anywhere, right?
We do a lot of things, but it’s not like we need to be in D.C. to do a bunch of federal legislative advocacy. We do something very different than the NCAA, so we don’t really need to be in Indianapolis down the street from them. So as long as we’re able to hire good talent and be located where the cost of living matches up with our budget, frankly, Corvallis is a good home for us.
And what’s funny is we’re the Association of Campus Recreation. There’s an Association of Campus Housing and there’s an Association of Unions, and all the aspects of higher [education]. They all got started on college campuses and are located in those spots. For example, the Association of College Unions got started at IU in Bloomington. They’re still there. The Association of College and University Housing got started at Ohio State. They’re still there. So in our little sphere, it’s a very typical story. Even though I get this question all the time.
TCA: So how do you feel about the Supreme Court ruling that college athletes can be paid for endorsements?
Watts: I think it’s a really interesting topic. And of course, these are student athletes, right, and so there’s this argument about how do you keep the student first in student athlete. There is a value and benefit to their education, but balancing that off with the reality of what they’re actually doing, what they’re contributing to the university, where their other money is being made, whether they’re putting their bodies and future livelihood at risk through this opportunity, and I think it’s an interesting thing that we’re going to have to figure out.
The Supreme Court ruling that expanded what the NCAA could do in terms of what were “education benefits,” and how they can expand those, I think everyone’s waiting to see if the different types of schools behave differently. Will the Power Five have resources to really go off the charts with what’s under education benefits or not? And then what does that do to the other programs?
What we’re watching for is if these fundamentally affect how the athletic departments operate. You may see more varsity sports cut. And what generally happens is they get spun into club sports. So, just because men’s tennis or women’s gymnastics or co-ed rowing or some of these sports that may get cut, because they need more money for basketball and football – the moneymakers. They just become club sports, right? And there’s still competition. There’s less university support, but there’s other ways to support it.
Interestingly enough, when we do research on the student development that occurs in different types of athletes, like how much are they learning to serve them well in life, the least amount is learned by varsity athletes. And I’m not saying they learn nothing. They learn some good things, but they’re so supported in a structure it actually limits some of the learning.
And so then you go down to club sport players and they learn a little bit more than varsity athletes, because there are a lot more [of them]. They self-govern, they have self-determination, often they have to do fundraising. They have a couple more things that they have to take care of as a team – they’ve got to elect a captain and they’ve got to hire a coach if they want to, all of that’s really self-determined.
But then if you go down even one more layer, there’s research that says the intramural kids, they’re actually developing the most. And so, I don’t think one is worse or better than the other, it’s just understanding what this experience will give you and how it stacks up against other things.
TCA: If I were trying to sell a high school athlete into joining your organization and doing one of your sports, what would I say?
Watts: I think I would tell high school athletes to explore other sports and explore other types of physical activity through campus recreation.
This is your opportunity to continue a sport you love if you’re not going to play at the varsity level, or try a different sport that you haven’t been able to play before, or maybe not do organized sport and participate in a different way. Become a group fitness person, go to the weight room, try swimming, try outdoor adventure.
For college students who may be considering a career in recreation, I would absolutely encourage them to get involved in NIRSA. I talked a lot about our professional members, but we also have student members there, primarily graduate students who are pursuing a master’s degree in recreation management, sport management, higher education, student affairs.
But for high schoolers, your question was about high schoolers, I would just really [say] there’s so much narrative around the NCAA and varsity sports, I feel like with the high schoolers and just generally speaking, that I don’t think high school athletes really fully understand all the other sport opportunities that they have when they get to college.
TCA: Is there anything else that you would like the people in the Corvallis community to know about NIRSA?
Watts: Well, this is a great place to work, and even though we do have remote and virtual employees, we still love having folks in Corvallis. We like to support the local community, through employment in other ways. I worked a number of other places before I got to NIRSA, [and] the membership is wonderful. They are people living out their values, trying to have a positive impact on students. There’s just a really positive energy there to be around. So we know from time to time we have job openings, and I always love to see local people from the community apply.
TCA: Great. Thank you for your time here.
By Sally K Lehman
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