How Colorado School of Mines Rec Sports became the heartbeat of campus through global programming, intentional student development and strong institutional alignment.
Every student at the Colorado School of Mines (Mines) formally starts and ends their college experience in the Student Recreation Center (SRC).
Before a single class is held, freshmen are welcomed to campus inside Lockridge Arena, the 3,000-seat venue housed within the SRC. When students walk across the stage to collect their diplomas at the end of their college years, they do so in the same building where their Mines experience began.
This framing of the campus rec center as the beginning and end of something larger says a lot about how Recreational Sports (Rec Sports) operates. It’s more than a place students simply pass through.
As one of the largest indoor spaces on campus, the SRC not only serves as a recreation facility but as a central hub for events and engagement across the entire university. Within this space and far beyond it, Mines Rec Sports has built a team and a culture that prioritizes impact, experiences and innovation — all guided by its motto: “Excellence in Everything.”
An Overview of Mines Rec Sports
Over the past two decades, Mines Rec Sports has significantly evolved into a comprehensive, multi-facility operation. What began roughly 25 years ago as a modest offering of intramurals and a handful of club sports teams has expanded into five core program areas: outdoor recreation, intramural sports, club sports, fitness and aquatics.
These programs are supported by a growing network of facilities. The SRC, which opened in 2007, is the anchor of the department. The Motion Lab is a satellite fitness space inside a residence hall, extending recreation’s reach into student housing.
Mine Rec Sports also oversees an esports lab, two outdoor intramural fields and has consistent access to varsity athletics facilities through a strong partnership. And the department’s footprint is about to get significantly larger.
The Lookout Lab, a new fitness facility on the ground floor of an 800-student residence hall currently under construction, is set to open at the start of the fall semester. At around 4,500 square feet, it’s set to nearly double Rec Sport’s current overall gym space and add two new group fitness studios.
Even with that growth, demand continues to outpace space.
Approximately 25% of the student body participates in fitness programs annually, and a typical evening of intramurals engages more than 400 students across eight on-campus locations.
The department continues to navigate challenges common to expanding programs. Court space is limited — particularly during basketball and volleyball seasons when Lockridge Arena is shared with varsity athletics — and the campus still lacks an indoor turf facility. Balancing increasing demand with shared space requires ongoing coordination and strategic planning.
It also requires strong institutional support, something Mines Rec Sports has in abundance.
Support From the Top
The success of Mines Rec Sports starts at the top, according to Rob Thompson, the director of Rec Sports and assistant Athletic Director.
Paul Johnson, the president of Mines, is a regular presence in and around Rec Sports programs and facilities. He swims in the pool in the morning and attends the majority of varsity competitions hosted on campus. He hosts both convocation and commencement, and he meets with student groups housed within Rec Sports multiple times each semester — with events including his well-known Pizza with the President.
Paget Collins, the Rec Sports marketing coordinator, monitors the department’s Instagram account. She explained how recently when the club women’s rugby team won its national championship, Johnson was one of the first to comment on the post celebrating the accomplishment.
“He’s always in the comments after watching our match live streams saying, ‘Great job, Orediggers,’” said Collins when discussing Mine’s leadership’s active involvement. “It’s just another example of how involved they are, at least from the marketing side.”
This level of engagement extends to other administrators who actively support Mines Rec Sports, like David Hansburg, the athletic director, and Braelin Pantel, the vice president of Student Life.
Within months of Pantel starting her position at Mines, Thompson said his team asked her to go on an outdoor rec trip to Costa Rica. She went and had a great experience with alumni and students, building strong relationships from the start.
“All of these individuals have a deep understanding of the value of the experience that Rec Sports provides for the campus community,” explained Thompson. “They go above and beyond to support our students and operations.”
Programs Built to Stand Out
The Mines Rec Sports motto, “Excellence in Everything,” is evident in every program.
Intramurals offer students a wide variety of sports and flagship events, including esports, pickleball, battleship and more. But while most campus rec departments offer intramural basketball, not every school hosts the championship game in an NBA arena.
Each year, intramural basketball men’s, women’s and co-rec championships are held at Ball Arena either before or after a Denver Nuggets home game, providing a signature student experience difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Club sports operates at a similar level. Mines Rec Sports is home to 19 men’s, women’s and co-ed teams spanning lacrosse, rugby, baseball, cycling and more. The club cycling team has won the mountain biking national championship for seven consecutive years. The club women’s rugby team claimed two national titles this past year, and the club women’s volleyball team is a former national champion as well.
The aquatics facilities, shared with the varsity swim and dive teams, are heavily utilized by both students and staff. With several lifeguard instructors on staff, the department routinely offers CPR, First Aid and lifeguard certifications. Club water polo and triathlon teams also call the pool home.
Fitness rounds out the core offerings with more than 30 group exercise classes each week, alongside nutrition consultations, personal training, small group training programs and fitness instructor certifications.
Beyond the Rec Center
While the SRC serves as the physical hub of campus recreation, Mines Rec Sports reaches far beyond campus through the Global Adventures program.
Launched within the last four years, the program was built with the intention of expanding student learning beyond the classroom. The goal is to give every Mines student the opportunity to travel to all seven continents during their time on campus.
The Outdoor Recreation Center (ORC) runs around 80 to 100 local and regional trips and workshops each year, which also includes additional international trips.
Past trips have included climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, snorkeling in the Galápagos Islands and sailing around the Whitsunday Islands in Australia. This summer, the ORC is running a ski trip to Chile, and a group will travel to Antarctica this winter.
“Travel is one of the greatest teachers there is,” said Austin Dyer, the director of the ORC. “It’s been really cool seeing the growth of these students as they challenge themselves to travel in this way.”
The fitness program has woven international experience into its own programming as well in collaboration with the ORC.
Kelly Sorge, the director of Fitness, launched annual international yoga retreats two years ago, beginning with a trip to Costa Rica. This past spring break, participants traveled to Zimbabwe and Botswana, where they spent their time practicing yoga, visiting Victoria Falls and going on safaris.
For some students, these trips represent their first time traveling internationally. For the majority, the impact extends beyond the destination.
“One of the takeaways from these trips is the community we build that you can’t really find anywhere else outside of this environment,” said Sorge. “Something that really stood out to me was I might not have met these students and they might not have met each other without this.”
To support the program’s continued growth, the department partners with third-party providers and local guides to manage logistics, while Mines staff serve as trip leaders to ensure consistency in the student experience. That continuity matters, because the staff leading these trips are more than chaperones.
The Team Behind It All
The 12-person professional staff at Mines Rec Sports brings a depth of experience extending well beyond traditional recreation roles.
Within the team, there’s a wilderness emergency medical technician, a SCUBA-certified rescue diver, a project management professional, multiple nutritionists, and an adaptive and inclusive certified personal trainer. Several staff members operate at the instructor level across disciplines including avalanche education, lifeguarding and First Aid. One holds a master’s degree in engineering from Mines itself.
“At Mines Rec Sports, everyone is immensely passionate about their jobs. People aren’t only doing a job, they’re doing things they love to do,” explained Thompson. “The professional staff who work here each role model an active and engaged lifestyle not because it’s their jobs but because it’s who we are.”
Professional development is treated as an ongoing commitment, not a checkbox.
Dyer described how the university’s tuition benefit allowed him to pursue a Project Management Professional certification. The process led him to discover free online resources through the Mines platform that his managers are now working through as part of project management coursework.
Sorge framed her philosophy around a simple idea: be a lifelong student. “Whether that’s continuing education or learning from your students and your colleagues,” she said. “I have students who teach group fitness formats where they have more experience than me, and I love to go to their classes and develop my own teaching style from them.”
This same investment extends to student employees. Rec Sports provides annual scholarships for student staff to attend trainings and earn certifications, and the team has embedded leadership development into the day-to-day work of its student leaders.
With intramural and club sports programs specifically, student leaders meet weekly with professional staff to work through chapters of “Extreme Ownership” and “The Dichotomy of Leadership.” They discuss how the concepts apply not just to their roles in Rec Sports, but to school and life beyond campus.
The department also emphasizes career readiness competencies across all student staff, helping them see that what they’re building in a campus rec job translates directly into the professional world.
Cross-program collaboration deepens the work of Mines Rec Sports even further. Staff and students regularly participate in each other’s offerings by competing in intramurals, joining nutrition consultations and traveling internationally together. It’s a team that operates less like a collection of separate programs and more like a unified community.
“There’s a lot of mutual respect and support for each other’s programs and services,” said Thompson. “We work daily to leverage each other’s strengths and to improve each other’s areas of growth.”
Relationships as the Foundation
If there’s one lesson Mines Rec Sports could offer to other campus rec departments, it’s that relationships are everything.
Professional and student staff within the department interact with nearly every corner of campus, from athletics to HR. And within the team itself, those relationships are built deliberately through shared experiences, open communication and a willingness to bring people into what Rec Sports is doing.
“Without strong relationships across campus, Mines Rec Sports wouldn’t be successful,” said Thompson. “We rely heavily on so many people throughout the entire campus. Without all of them working together with us, we wouldn’t be able to provide the high-level facilities, programs and services the Mines community expects.”
This web of relationships combined with genuine institutional support from the university’s top leadership, a staff that leads from passion and expertise, and a student body that expects nothing less than excellence is what makes Mines Rec Sports what it is.
Every freshman who walks into Lockridge Arena for the first time and every graduate who crosses that same stage years later have all passed through a department that believed their experience outside the classroom was just as important as anything inside it.
That’s what “Excellence in Everything” actually looks like.
