When Steps to Leaps launched in 2019, we had a goal to make Steps to Leaps and the five pillars a concept known by staff and students. Through years two and three, we have endeavored to help students understand how learning within the five pillars would help their success at Purdue as well as help staff and faculty members understand how to leverage Steps to Leaps in their efforts to educate students. It is the idea of leveraging Steps to Leaps that is difficult for some.
Nathan Walker, director of rowing programs and facilities and head men’s coach for Purdue Crew, was presented with this conundrum last year at a staff training presentation with Purdue Recreation & Wellness. He had known about Steps to Leaps but this presentation challenged him to brainstorm ways to integrate the concepts in the work he does to support and educate members of the Purdue Crew team. Crew is a large community, with 100 active members as well as an active and connected alumni base.
Students in this organization are spending an average of two hours per day, six days a week, working to develop their skills and build a team. They also travel across the country competing and having success in national events. These accolades extend to their alumni which include Amanda Elmore, who joined Crew in 2009 and was a gold medalist at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Crew's engaged alumni also financially supported the building of a multi-million-dollar boat house.
It was within this backdrop of student education and engagement with alumni that Walker let the concepts and pillars of Steps to Leaps percolate. He saw in Steps to Leaps a useful framework for what students could learn at Purdue.
“Many coaches give lip service to what sports can provide, these lessons,” Walker says. “It’s just often passed over. There’s no proactive planning.”
Steps to Leaps, he decided, could be that plan.
“What I appreciated about it,” he said, “was that it was very purposeful to list the experiential education that student life can impart outside of the classroom.”
Walker was also drawn to Simon Sinek’s concept of understanding your “why.” He began to reflect on how Crew could deliberately impart this experience within the framework of Steps to Leaps. As a result, he took the core values of Crew, aligned them with the Steps to Leaps pillars and wrapped them in the concept of understanding your “why.” Out of this was born the updated mission, vision and core values of Purdue Crew.
The Purdue Crew vision reads, “We believe in the power of competitive rowing to foster a growth mindset, and our vision is to develop Purdue Crew members' five Purdue Steps to Leaps pillars of grit/persistence, impact, leadership, well-being and networks throughout their competitive rowing experience, in order to better prepare them for life after college.”
Crew’s core values are aligned with the Steps to Leaps pillars and identify why they focus on that area, how they will achieve success and what they will do to align their own work within the pillar area.
In their welcome email to the 2022-23 academic year students were introduced to the new focus areas. They were told that their primary focus was not just on rowing faster. Their belief as coaches and as a system was that persistent adherence to their core values, aligned with Steps to Leaps, would produce faster rowers. Crew team members are seeing how their growth within the Steps to Leaps pillars will help them thrive at Purdue.
It didn’t take an overhaul of their organizational purpose. According to Walker, it didn’t take a great deal of time. What it did take was an intentional effort to use the framework of Steps to Leaps and the pillars to align the way they would educate students. In doing so, Crew has helped its students connect what they are learning in Crew with what they are learning in other opportunities at Purdue.