May 15, 2026 | Ethan Simmons
In this capstone course, recreation, sport and tourism undergrads plan events from start to finish. The class has created several community highlights
Tournaments for pickleball, spike ball and wheelchair basketball, a “yappy” hour at a local brewery with dogs invited, a fairy tale ball at a local library: Each spring, students in Recreation, Sport and Tourism help organize some of the semester’s most memorable events on and off campus.
And it all comes back to one class: Event Implementation in RST, which is required coursework for undergraduates in the RST major, and Sarah Agate’s “favorite class to teach.”
“In recreation, sport and tourism, regardless of what your job is, you’ll probably be involved in helping plan and facilitate events,” said Agate, teaching associate professor in the Department of RST in the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “I get emails from students even a few months later who have graduated and are working in their grown-up job, saying, ‘I hadn’t planned on doing events, but now that’s part of my job, and I feel so prepared and ready because of what we did.’”
Technically, Agate teaches two events courses—RST 460: Event Management in Recreation, Sport and Tourism and RST 465: Event Implementation in RST take place across the fall and spring semesters. The two-course sequence was an appealing feature for Agate before she was hired at the University of Illinois; it offered a more rewarding experience than the one-semester event classes she had taught at previous stops.
In fall, students group together, decide the event they want to support, then spend the next few months partnering with local agencies, finding sponsors and sharpening their event plans, including emergency and risk management.
Spring is all about promotion, execution and evaluation. This year, RST students in her class helped put on 11 events, starting with the Illinois Wheelchair Basketball Tournament on Feb. 13–14 and ending with a kids’ football camp on April 26.
After facilitating the events, the final project is the evaluation report. Students gather survey data from attendees and compile suggestions for their partnering agency of what went well and how the event could run even better next time.
The event planning process can feel “overwhelming” to undergraduates who are partnering to host big local events with lots of moving pieces. Agate planned a phase of her course to answer the question: how can we be ready if something goes wrong?
This year, Agate expanded the risk management section. She took students to a local crisis management training, including first aid demonstration and an active threat training with campus police officers.
Students are assigned a “venue risk assessment” for each event, where they check for first aid kits and defibrillator locations, whether exits were clearly marked and determine sheltering plans spots if severe weather were to come around.
“The saying that I have heard numerous times is something along the lines of, ‘Hopefully we don’t have any problems, but in the case that we do, we will be prepared for them,’” said RST senior Drew Erickson, who organized a “Yappy Hour” at the Riggs Beer Co. with seven of his classmates.
The group planned a rain date just in case of April showers. Of course, the event went smoothly on a sunny Urbana spring day, bringing together townies, their pups and local vendors over brews.
Many of the events have become community mainstays, like the annual Fairy Tale Ball at the Urbana Free Library, or the Illini Get Pickled pickleball tournament, now three years running.
RST junior Michael Evans has helped run the tournament since its inception, an event in Huff Gym first created by RST students Carson Bounds and Gavin Christopherson. The past two years, it raised more than $11,000 for Cunningham Children’s Home, a child welfare agency based in Urbana.
This year’s event had a recreational bracket with lots of student and faculty sign-ups and a second tourney with a new spin: a Greek house bracket for fraternity and sorority members to duke it out on the pickleball courts. This year, more than 50 teams signed on.
Though Evans had experienced behind-the-scenes event organizing through his work at Illinois Athletics, Agate’s courses gave Evans the “why” behind every step of the process.
“Compared to an Illini football game, our event is a blip on a map,” Evans said. “To see how much it takes for just this small pickleball tournament and the number of people from so many different places who have their hands in it—whether it be, ‘Oh hey, I know this person,’ or the people we talked to rent Huff Gym out, the sponsors … there’s a ton of people who just want to see this go well, and they want to support Cunningham.”
The events courses are designed as a capstone experience for students in the recreation, sport and tourism program, and Agate gets an extended front-row seat, as a rare instructor to see the same students for two semesters.
“I feel like I really get to know them,” Agate said. “It’s fun to see their skills develop over those eight months we have together, where they’re nervous at the beginning, then they get into the process with their professional. By spring, they’re event facilitators … it’s fun to watch their confidence grow.”
Editor’s note:
To contact Sarah Agate, email stagate@illinois.edu
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