The Recreation and Sport Management program (RSM) is designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge to plan, facilitate, and manage a wide variety of leisure services focused on fostering healthy lifestyles, effective management of organizations, and the social and economic development of communities.
The recreation and sport industry generates billions of dollars each year. The success or failure of any recreation and sport organization isn’t just related to what happens on the field—there is a cohort of people working behind the scenes who make it all materialize. Our alumni are those people.
Students in the RSM program learn the science behind our consumption of sport and our need for recreation. They learn the skills to plan and facilitate a wide variety of events and programs to engage participants, fans, and the community. Our students learn the business side of sport and leisure by creating marketing campaigns and risk management plans while also learning how to generate revenue through sales strategies and sponsorship proposals and finally how to supervise, lead and manage both paid and volunteer staff.
The RSM curriculum is designed to expose students to all facets of the sport and leisure industry, with the emphasis on developing critical leaders in an ever-changing global industry. The core curriculum provides a strong foundation for developing transferrable skills to support students’ individual career aspirations. To further support student goals, students choose from one of three emphases to complement the RSM core courses.
Sport and Athletics Administration – Focuses on the leadership, management, and governance of organized sport
Health & Wellness – Focuses on fostering healthy lifestyles and includes the option to earn a wellness coaching certification.
Experience Management – Focuses on designing engaging and challenging experiences to improve individual quality of life.
While the RSM program can diligently prepare students through classroom discourse and applied experiential learning, the best complement to academic education in the sport and leisure Industry is through appropriately designed internship experiences that provide exposure to “real-world” situations and working environments. These experiences are meant to allow the student to grow professionally, to identify strengths and weaknesses, to apply learned theory to practical situations, to network with practitioners, and to gain greater appreciation and understanding for their chosen career path.
The RSM program requires students to complete a 135-hour practicum and a 400-hour internship. The practicum is meant to be completed early in the academic progression while the internship is meant to be completed near the end of the academic journey and serve as a capstone experience for the RSM program.
Internship Guidebook
Practicum Guidebook
Minors and certificates allow students to explore secondary fields of study beyond their major. This broadens their education and encourages interdisciplinary thinking by helping them make connections across different areas of knowledge. Minors and certificates also help students diversify their skill set, making them more adaptable and marketable in the RSM industry.
The RSM program offers three minors: Sport Coaching, Nonprofit Management, and Sports Communication. The RSM program also offers one certificate in Recreation Management. Outside of the program, common minors RSM majors pursue include marketing, communication, management, photography, and digital media. Common certificates include: photography and digital imaging, data analytics, entrepreneurship, and multimedia journalism.
The RSM program is committed to active learning in the classroom and outside the classroom. Many of the RSM courses include partnerships with community organizations where students will complete a project or event on behalf of the organization. In addition, our students are actively involved in student skill competitions against other universities and volunteering in the community through an array of events and leisure programs. Students also have the opportunity for global exploration through study abroad trips to Europe to engage with international sport and leisure organizations.
There are multiple scholarships available to students majoring in Recreation and Sport Management. The most common scholarships are the Dr. Ahn Family Future Leaders in RSM Scholarship and the Watkins Charitable Foundation Health Science Scholarship. These and other scholarships can be found through scholarship universe. (Will you hyperlink scholarship universe?). In addition, as members of the Utah Recreation and Park Association, RSM students are eligible for the URPA Student Scholarship
Email: Joseph.Lovell@utahtech.edu
Phone: 435.879.4631
Office: HPC 305
Email: Rodrigo.Feller@utahtech.edu
Phone: (435) 879-4753
Office: HPC 338
Email: Karen.Davis@utahtech.edu
Phone: 435-879-4627
Office: HPC 342
