Running Club Reflection

The artifact I chose to present on was my experience with the running club at the
Platteville Middle School that involved Platteville elementary and middle school students. I
worked with this program in October of 2014. The object of the program was to get the students
up and moving after the school day, instead of just going home and not being active. The
program was held four days a week, Monday through Thursday, for an hour each time after
school. The club was run by volunteers who wanted to help out todays youth. The artifact along
with this reflection is the flyer for our final run, which was on Halloween this year. The children
were encouraged to wear costumes and invite their parents to come and watch. The run was
equal to a 5K. The point of this Halloween run was not only to have parents come watch their
kids, but also to show the results of the childrens hard work that they put during their time with
us. The kids worked hard every day and it really showed during the final run.
This artifact best aligns with Health Promotion Standard number two, which is
Collaboration. This standard reads The health promoter fosters relationships with professional
colleagues, clients, and agencies in the larger community to client learning and well-being. I
had to make connections with a few people to be able to volunteer my time towards helping
these students who wanted to better themselves physically.
Firstly, I met with a fellow student who was directly associated with the running club.
She told me that it was okay if I wanted to come help out, and that I should come meet the
faculty from the middle school that ran the program. Next, I met with Kelly Erickson, who was
the head of the program. She was glad to have me helping out and introduced me to Mr.
Temperly, who also volunteered his time after school. Both of the teachers that helped with

running club have backgrounds in health and wellness. Ive known Kelly for a few years before
this, as she was a teacher during my first semester at UW-Platteville, but it had been a while
since we had spoken. Lastly, there were more of my classmates who volunteered their time, so
we collaborated each day to figure out what the activities planned for the day.
The KSD that this best aligns with I believe is KSD.2.d. This is entitled Manages
Student Behavior. When volunteering at running club, there was about 15 to 25 students each
day that participated with the group I was involved in. I had to deal with a lot of different
personalities, ranging from incredibly talkative to shy and introverted. There were some students
that didnt always like to listen to what the coordinators had to say. Some students would go off
and do whatever they wanted until a coordinator stepped in and guided them in the right
direction. There were some kids who were very respectful and competed as hard as they could
everyday also. A lot of student behavior depended on the encouragement they were given. As a
coordinator, I tried to be as positive as possible to every single child that attended. Children
respond to how they are treated in different ways, so it was important for me to show respect and
encouragement to them.
One of the things I learned during this experience was that to be able to organize a group
of people in a fitness setting, especially children, one must work with others who are trying to
achieve the same goal. With the numbers that we had every day, it would have been impossible
for a single person to coordinate it. It was a team effort to make sure these kids were active and
enjoyed it at the same time, and I was glad to be a part of that team.
The thing that I will take most from this experience is that no one individual learns or
responds at the same rate as another individual. The children involved in our program needed
much explanation of the games or drills we were going to do that day. After the initial

explanation, there were still some individuals who had trouble comprehending the task. This
goes for anything in life though I believe because there will be situations when Ill have to repeat
myself multiple times to either a client or a group who Im working with.
During this experience, I believe I realized that it will take patience to be able to
effectively run a group training session. It will take more than just myself to become proficient in
this area. I will need to collaborate with multiple professionals in the area of focus to gather
information and possibly obtain help to work with the classes, depending on the number of
participants.