As another academic year begins, campus recreation departments around the country are doing their best to ensure that students — and staff — start strong.
“This is our favorite time of year. Students are so excited to be here, and so are we,” says Veronica Ballinger, assistant director for communications and engagement for RecSports at the University of Notre Dame, where annual Welcome Weekend activities in August strive to introduce new students to campus resources and opportunities for engagement and growth throughout the academic year. “We spend a lot of time during Welcome Weekend in program orientations, talking to groups about our services and giving them the opportunity to ask questions. Because once you get past the first two weeks of the semester, things get so busy that students won’t ask us questions.”
A new highlight of this year’s Welcome Weekend at Notre Dame included a RecSports open-house at the Smith Center for Recreational Sports in the Duncan Student Center (one of three main recreation facilities on campus). In previous years, RecSports staff participated in a Saturday afternoon, university-wide resource fair held on the concourse of Notre Dame Stadium.
“Now, we’re putting students and their families in our space, giving them tours and sharing with them how they can be involved with RecSports,” Ballinger says. “It’s a great opportunity for us to walk them around the space and not have everything be just theoretical. They also get a sneak peek at what everything looks like before the facility gets busy. We understand that this can sometimes be a really intimidating environment. Hopefully, we’re removing some of that barrier, so kids can be more comfortable right off the bat.”
Following Welcome Weekend, all group fitness classes on the Notre Dame campus are free for one week to give students an opportunity to try new activities and determine which ones best fit their schedules and interests. Those early weeks also are a good time to begin recruiting student employees, according to Ballinger. “A lot of our focus is on creating safe and welcoming spaces,” she says. “We want to get students integrated pretty quickly.”
Creating opportunities
The University of Utah promotes a fast and smooth transition to college life, too.
“One of the biggest priorities here is creating opportunities for students to build community from the moment they arrive on campus,” says Kira Seprish, manager of marketing and communications for Utah’s Campus Recreation Services. “That focus has become even more important in recent years, as we’ve seen students place a greater value on social connection and meaningful engagement.”
On the final day of a weeklong welcome celebration, Campus Recreation’s Student Life Center Kickoff at Utah features free food, opportunities to register for intramural sports programs and drop-in pickup games, and it serves as an icebreaker to help students feel comfortable spending time at the George S. Eccles Student Life Center.
Incoming freshmen also are offered opportunities to participate in one of three Wilderness Welcome trips. Launched in 2025, the six-day adventures are led by campus rec student staff members trained in outdoor leadership, wilderness medicine and technical sports, and they are intended to help incoming students “challenge themselves, develop a community before starting college and learn about what it means to be a Ute,” according to the program’s website. This year’s trips took place from Aug. 15-20, with options that included backpacking in the Uinta Mountains, rafting on the Green River and exploring the outdoor mecca Moab. Slots for all trips fill up fast, according to Seprish, adding that trip fees include early move-in opportunities.
“We see a lot of students in these groups really connecting and finding their place here at the U,” she says. “A lot of the anxiety of starting the fall semester is eased, because they’ve already made some friends, they’ve already spent time with them and they’ve already moved in early. We even have students who went on these trips last year who became trip leaders themselves this year.”
Campuswide collaboration
When Seprish arrived at Utah four years ago, Campus Recreation Services was not nearly as involved in welcoming activities as it is now.
“We would just show up to events with a table and hand out things,” she says. “Now, we’re actively involved in the planning process of these events with departments such as student affairs, health and wellness, and student engagement teams. We’re serving on welcome committees and not just tabling. We’re actually creating engaging activities for students.”
Those activities include an all-campus fair that encourages students to get involved in student programs and activities. For its part, Campus Recreation Services sets up a ping-pong table and some slacklining gear.
Because Seprish’s early years on campus were marked by the tail end of the COVID shutdown, her initial efforts to bring students back to the recreation center involved tracking student, staff and faculty meetings via online campus calendars and simply showing up.
“I started self-inviting myself and asking how we could be involved in their events and activities,” she says. “Sometimes I was told, ‘Hey, we’re just too far along in the planning phases,’ but most people were pretty receptive to at least letting us hop in and have a table for a day — even if we didn’t have enough time to plan an official activity. After that first year, I didn’t have to self-invite myself anymore. Other departments and groups started reaching out to us, asking if we wanted to be involved.”
Ballinger agrees that cross-campus partnerships are among the best ways for campus recreation to integrate with incoming students. At Notre Dame, RecSports staff members team up with residence life to help during the student move-in process — directing traffic, helping unload vehicles and answering questions about how to navigate campus.
“Last year, we had a new staff member who had never seen move-in before, and she had so many opportunities to build relationships and get to know people outside of our office. Those relationships ended up being super helpful later in the year,” Ballinger says. “There is no challenge we’re not afraid to tackle that week, and there’s nothing we’re not willing to help with. There are some things that happen over Welcome Weekend that are really big lifts, so it’s about how we can best be of service to our professional peers across campus while also letting students know that we aren’t only resources — we’re also people.”
