Category: Faculty Profiles

“When you are a student in the PRTM Master’s program, you have me for life.”

Over the past 40 years, Tom O’Rourke has spent every day of his working career in the management or administration of parks, recreation and tourism in the Charleston, South Carolina region. Between directing two large park systems and his service as a Board Member of the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau, he’s seen and managed it all.

Tom applies that on-the-ground knowledge and expertise to two classes in the Clemson University Master of Science in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management (PRTM) program: Innovative and Creative Funding Strategies in PRTM (PRTM 8210) and Enterprise Development in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors (PRTM 8240). He also provides strategic planning support to the department.

Tom recently answered a few questions for us about the program, his experiences in the community recreation field and the future of the profession.

Tell us a bit about what you see as your most significant contribution to the online MS program.

As Executive Director of the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission I oversaw the agency through its most significant growth. What separated CCPRC’s growth from most others is that we accomplished this with very little reliance on tax subsidies. As our profession advances into the future, it is clear that we will need to create entrepreneurial opportunities and business management principles that will ensure its sustainability. My contribution to the master’s degree program is to work with the students and other faculty members to institute programs and services that can financially sustain themselves into the future.

What knowledge and skills do you feel are most important for our MS students to have in order to advance in the field?

The skills necessary to advance the field of parks, recreation and tourism into the future will be grounded in creativity. A department’s end goal of making communities and the people in them better doesn’t change. What will be completely different is how we do it. Graduates should leave our program understanding how to fund their parks and programs without relying on the government to fund their operations.

The future leaders in parks and recreation will be managing more than doing. Our students learn the contractual skills necessary to protect their community, while controlling the activities that take place in their department.

Our program also focuses on innovation. Government is changing, parks and recreation is changing, and so are people and society. Our students will learn through innovation the skills necessary to lead our profession into the future.

What do you enjoy most about teaching in the MS online program? 

What I enjoy most is my relationship with the students. Most of our MS students are currently working in the field. The personal relationship I have with the students extends far beyond the learning outcomes of each class.

I want to be the type of professor that is always there for the students not only in class, but beyond the class and even after they graduate. Education does not stop after the student leaves Clemson. When they contact me, I don’t want to give answers, I want to ask questions so that the student can reach the answers themselves. When you are a student in the PRTM Master’s program, you have me for life.

What advice do you have for potential students who will be taking this program while working full-time?

I actually think it is better to enroll in the program while working full-time. The advantage is that you have faculty resources for the problems that you are undertaking at your immediate disposal.

Our current method of teaching is designed to consist of discussion topics and group work. This forces students to get to know each other. The other students provide a professional network that will last well beyond graduation. When we discuss current issues, students that are currently working full-time always offer the best and most current examples.

How is this program a good value for students? Or who do you think would benefit most from this credential in your field of expertise?

The knowledge gained in the MS program will benefit a student even if they choose to switch fields. Gaining knowledge in strategic planning, funding and working in political environments is essential, whatever you are doing. Most advanced senior management positions currently require a master’s degree. Having one with an emphasis in innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship separates our program from any other.

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About the Master of Science in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management

Clemson University is among the nation’s top universities in graduate education in the fields of parks, recreation, tourism and related disciplines. Research shows that the average annual salary of a person holding a M.S. in the PRTM field is $16,000 more annually or $480,000 more over a 30-year career. The top 25% of people in the field with a M.S. make $88,000 or more annually.

Students learn from a mix of leading university faculty and world-class practitioners and take 10 classes over two years (one class at a time), meeting online in the evening once a week with faculty and fellow graduate students – making sure you can continue to work full-time while earning your Master’s degree.

Visit Clemson Online to learn more about the MS Online (non-thesis) program in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, including how to apply for either a spring or fall program start.

Emily Whitaker Poetz, a mother of three in Clemson, South Carolina, is among millions of parents dusting off their lawn chairs and preparing to enroll their children in sports programs in their community this spring.

About 71.8% of youth between the ages of 6 and 12 participated in youth sports programs in 2018. Poetz says she’s had only positive experiences with the programs in her area, which allow her kids to explore different athletic options.

“We don’t let even my sport-crazy kid specialize in just one sport,” she says. “Instead, we make sure he takes breaks so he isn’t playing something continuously all year.”

Poetz also looks for other ways for her children to channel their energy throughout the year, such as enrolling one of her sons in a private training program to teach him how to work out safely with the experts.

Although Poetz’s experiences have been largely positive, other parents may find themselves navigating other issues on the sidelines, such as dealing with overbearing parents or preventing sports overuse injuries.

Dr. Skye Arthur-Banning of Clemson University’s Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management department wrote a book to help parents navigate some of these challenges. Called Youth Sports in America: The Most Important Issues in Youth Sports Today, it provides an expert’s perspective on 37 different issues parents may face in a sporting environment.

Because some of the issues in the book fall outside his area of expertise, Arthur-Banning assembled a team of academics and practitioners throughout the country to write about specific topics. An M.D., for example, wrote a chapter on concussions. References are provided at the end of each chapter for further reading.

“The book was written for parents, coaches and administrators and tries to address questions each may have, such as the benefits of playing on an organized team, pay to play, and how to prevent or protect a child from being pressured into playing with an injury,” he says. “This is a guidebook that can help them whether they’re on the sidelines or volunteering as a parent-coach.”

Banning brings a unique perspective to these issues. He researches and teaches amateur sport by day, officiates soccer games on his evening and weekends, and watches his two young daughters play community athletics on weekday evenings.

His advice to parents with concerns about how team sports are being managed is to pay attention to what your child tells you about their experience, and to talk to your local parks and recreation department when issues start to feel out of control.

“Community recreation is there to help children explore healthy activity and encourage teamwork and cooperation,” he says. “Parks and recreation managers want to make sure that children are playing in a safe and supportive environment, so don’t be afraid to talk through concerns with them.”

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Clemson youth development researcher and Associate Professor Dr. Ed Bowers has always had a natural curiosity about other people and cultures, particularly why people do what they do.

“I’ve always been interested in how people think and act in different environments and situations, and how the cultural context they live in can influence their beliefs and behaviors,” he says.

That curiosity is taking him all over the world. Over the course of his career so far, he’s visited more a dozen countries and taught in Dublin as part of an international service program, experiencing different cultures and perspectives wherever he goes.

When he visits a new place, he pays close attention to things most travelers are not likely to typically consider, such as what strengths young people need to develop in order to succeed, and how they may differ from what success may look like at home.

“It’s a habit at this point. People and our motivations are more complex than you might think,” he says. “For example, if you’re living in a remote area without ready access to core services such as education, health care or transportation, you’re going to see different measures of success than someone who is living in a major urban center.”

Dr. Bowers carries that curiosity to his research, which asks similar questions, but through a focus on positive youth development, and how youth-adult relationships can influence what goes right in the lives of children and adolescents. His work helps us figure out what every parent asks themselves at some point – why did my child do that? And do they have the characteristics and support they need to be successful in life?

His research also focuses on the strengths of youth, instead of negative behaviors. Bowers says this is because even though there is a widespread belief that the teen years are marked by ‘storm and stress,’ most teenagers are actually doing relatively well.

“Youth do make bad decisions, and there are reasons for that, but they also give to charities, care about people, and have sympathy and empathy for others,” he says. “Teenagers can contribute in positive ways to their communities. Building on these youth strengths rather than focusing on their deficits is a more effective way to promote thriving in young people.”

In 2015, Dr. Bowers and several of his academic colleagues explored measures that can help define positive skills and growth in a book they edited together about promoting positive youth development. The book shares a model that people working in positive youth development commonly use to measure a child’s strengths, called the Five Cs – competence, confidence, caring, compassion and character.

Dr. Bowers helped contribute to that model by examining youth responses from across the country to create a measure focused on what a thriving teenager looks like in a community, asking questions about skills or things that they do that demonstrate success.

Character, for example, can be measured by doing the right thing, having integrity and valuing diversity. Caring, on the other hand, is assessed by whether or not the teenager is bothered by seeing bad things happen to people, or if they want to step in and help.

Dr. Bowers is now working with colleagues in other universities and community organizations to apply that model to youth in other countries and environments, so they can determine how measures of success may need to be adjusted, depending on where and how youth live.

“For example, when measuring competence, a First Nations teenager living in a remote area in Canada’s Northwest Territories needs to have certain skills to succeed that would make no sense to a suburban kid in Boston,” he says. “We’re drilling deeper into the measures to find out exactly what skills are necessary in their specific contexts, to ensure the model can adapt to reflect their unique situations.”

How does one find out what measures work for certain groups of people? According to Dr. Bowers, the first step is asking them. Right now, he’s working with Maasai Mara University in Kenya, Oregon State University, and the University of South Carolina on a Templeton World Charity Foundation funded project to develop a new tool that youth workers will be able use to assess character strengths among Kenyan youth. The project is one of only 14 funded from over 150 applications spanning 55 countries around the globe, and involves interviews with 60 youth and 15 adults to get a sense of what measures are most important for youth living in different environments.

“Within Nairobi, there are teenagers living more traditional lives and street kids who are working towards very different ideas of success,” he says. “The challenge is to develop a model that can be tailored to specifically measure what skills and supports they need to be successful in their specific context of their shared community.”

The instrument they develop will be tested on a sample of 450 youths to establish its validity, relevance and ease of use. Dr. Bowers says the impact of this new tool will be far-reaching.

“This project is not just building a tool for one community,” he says. “It’s also building capacity for youth workers and scholars to conduct high quality research and become a hub for youth development in that area of the African continent.”

Dr. Bowers is also using other opportunities to identify new avenues for applied research to benefit young people. In June he traveled to Senegal with a group of Clemson student-athletes and staff on a school construction project organized by buildOn, a non-profit organization that constructs a new school every two days in some of the economically poorest countries around the world. Now he’s working with YDL program graduate and buildOn Community Engagement Manager Aled Hollingworth to apply their experiences to the development of innovative service-learning opportunities. Next fall, Dr. Bowers also plans to co-teach an international virtual exchange course with a colleague in Vietnam. The course will bring together students from Clemson with students at Ho Chi Minh City Open University to explore the role of digital media in the lives of young people from different cultures.

He says that projects like the Kenyan initiative, service-learning study abroad experiences like the Senegal trip, and virtual exchanges are key to gathering the input needed to tailor youth development measurement tools for global communities. These experiences are equally important for students looking to enter the youth development field.

“Finding ways to get students out in these different cultures conducting field work is the best way to build their skills to see development from a systems perspective, extend our reach, and continue to build capacity in communities they visit,” he says. “Exchanges can also make a big difference, by connecting youth development students from other countries with our students to engage in discussions about best practices, and then identify ways to best promote thriving in diverse communities. Our goal is to encourage positive youth development in a global society.”