Promoting the power of sport

Tim Lampe, Ed.D., senior associate athletic director of facilities and adjunct professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Sport Leadership, likes to joke that he’s “just an ex-jock running a gym.”

But, in truth, the former college basketball player is a member of an ambitious team of CSL educators working to exemplify VCU’s pride in innovation. For the past nine years, this work has included the successful Sport and Entertainment Event Development (SEED) class, a two-semester course focused on empowering CSL graduate students to plan and manage community-based sporting events.

Established in 1999, the School of Education's nontraditional sport leadership graduate program  emphasizes experiential learning through hands-on experiences. Within the program, the SEED class functions as a laboratory where students directly apply the program’s general sport-leadership curriculum in a minimally controlled environment, acting as the primary decision-makers for every aspect of the events they organize: sponsorship, timelines, logistics and equipment, liability insurance, risk management, food and beverage operations, and transportation and parking.

Competitively capped at 35 graduate students, this year’s CSL cohort divided into leadership groups to assume responsibility for five SEED events. Their work came to fruition this spring:

- On March 9, about 200 runners participated in the Second Annual RVA Run for FRIENDS 5K and raised $10,000 for the FRIENDS Association for Children, the 144-year-old social services agency dedicated to the educational and emotional development of children in Jackson Ward and Church Hill.

- On March 24, 55 children participated in Champions Day, a new SEED event created in partnership with The First Tee of Richmond to introduce the game of golf to elementary school kids.

- On April 1, the Second Annual Big Feet Meet featured high-school-age special-needs athletes receiving assistance and support from their schools’ varsity student-athletes. For this track and field event, CSL collaborated with Special Olympics Virginia and Henrico County Public Schools.

- On April 13, the Fourth Annual Paralympic Experience Day not only allowed people with disabilities to sample the offerings of Sportable, the event’s sponsor, it also gave those without disabilities the experience of being an adaptive-sport athlete. What’s more, participants helped raise $2,500 for Sportable.

The fifth and final SEED event took place Thursday, April 23, when 320 middle-school students from Henrico County Public Schools participated in the Third Annual Richmond International Raceway (RIR) STEM Education Day, a successful and evolving response to a question Lampe first posed in his dissertation: How can we use sport to get kids interested in science, technology, engineering and math?

Great ideas have a way of starting small, and this one was no different, beginning as a poolside conversation between Lampe and Ricky Dennis, founder and CEO of ArenaRacingUSA. Dennis wondered how to get kids interested in a sport that isn’t just about watching cars go around a track. This got Lampe thinking: What if students could take what they’re learning in their math and science classes and actually see, firsthand, how it applied to auto racing?

In its most recent iteration, the RIR STEM Education Day featured a “scavenger hunt” activity outside on the three-quarter-mile track, followed by 20 stations set up inside where students learned about the viscosity of fuels, aerodynamics, the weights and speeds of cars banking on the track, and the various safety aspects of racing, including the SAFER (steel and foam energy reduction) barriers, fireproof clothing and safety helmets.

While five faculty members each serve as an adviser on a SEED event, Carrie LeCrom, Ph.D., CSL’s executive director, said, “the students do everything. On the day of the event, we show up to support them, but our role is really minimal. We try to make it as completely student-run as we can.”

Last August, Jenna Taylor, an M.Ed. student, graduate assistant to VCU Student-Athlete Academic Support Services and one of the organizers of this year’s RIR STEM Education Day, and her team were charged with putting their own spin on this evolving event.

Among the many logistical details, this included organizing the variety of subject experts who presented at each of the 20 stations and enlisting the help of their fellow graduate students to guide groups of approximately 16 kids through all of the day’s activities.

"All of the SEED events are great opportunities for everyone at CSL to participate in something bigger than themselves,” said Gene Daniels, an M.Ed./MBA dual-degree student and graduate assistant to VCU Athletics Development.

“This is great,” Daniels said, “seeing their faces light up when they get to be out there on the track, and then coming back in and doing more of the learning portion, seeing how interesting this STEM stuff can be.”

Participating teachers from nearby schools expressed enthusiasm as well. Harry Rosmarin, a technology teacher at Tuckahoe Middle School, said the event laid the groundwork for his students’ next project: designing, building and racing dragsters with carbon dioxide cartridges as their propulsion system. Missy Day and Jay Brockman, VCU alumni who both teach at Elko Middle School, were impressed by their students’ engagement with the event’s content. And with their CSL representative.

“Our guide’s awesome! Nick’s the man!” Day said, referring to Nick Stemkowski, an M.Ed. student and graduate assistant to the Richmond Strikers Soccer Club.

Day, an art teacher who also advises Elko’s chapter of the Technology Student Association, points out that, in school, most educators can only manage to prepare and present one of these stations at a time, so it’s an extraordinary opportunity for students to receive multiple 15-minute blocks of interactive, hands-on instruction in a single day.

Brockman’s vocational education students are currently building cars in class.

“I think it’s advantageous for them to come and see a real-world correlation to what we’re learning in class,” he said. “They can put their hands on the tires; they can actually see the car and its parts. It’s not just theory; it’s a little bit of application, too.”

In February, 200 middle and high-school students from Richmond Public Schools attended a similar STEM event held at the Richmond Coliseum, a collaboration between the CSL, ArenaRacingUSA and the MathScience Innovation Center.

Lampe credits the MathScience Innovation Center as the driving force helping CSL graduate students bridge the gap between the physical elements of sports and the content of math and science classrooms. He described the center as phenomenal, proudly emphasizing how it had developed curricula for SEED events that are today used in both Richmond and Henrico schools.“That’s cool,” Lampe said.

While the SEED class empowers CSL students to acquire invaluable hands-on experience they can leverage as they launch their careers in sport, it also has an arguably larger goal.

“The whole point of this,” Lampe said, “is to teach the power of sport and what it can do for our communities.”

By Vincent Simone

University Public Affairs

For videos of SEED events, visit https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjJpDMRGM0JEhEpG6V46sYHLYf2sTVaJN.