As a girl growing up in rural Shasta County, California, a scrappy Lynne Roberts had to earn her first points in basketball by shooting high-arcing jumpers over her father and two older, taller brothers. She recalls dejectedly watching her shot attempts being blocked into a nearby cow pasture. A girl on a street full of boys who let her humbly hike the ball during pickup football games, she used the omnipresent good-natured sibling ribbing—that she wasn’t big, strong, or fast enough—as motivation to relentlessly work on her many games, earning 12 varsity letters in high school sports. Those countless hours of two-on-two in the family’s driveway and always playing “catch-up” with the boys in her life were the seeds of a competitive streak that grew and has propelled her through the arc of her personal and professional trajectory.

Now Roberts, 40, stands in her office as the newly minted head coach of the University of Utah’s women’s basketball team, marveling at how the space is bigger—more than 900 square feet—than her first home as an adult. Her office—like men’s basketball head coach Larry Krystkowiak’s—is in the new 101,000-square-foot Jon M. & Karen Huntsman Basketball Facility, with views of the Wasatch Mountains to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains out west across the Utah campus and Salt Lake Valley. They both have a fireplace, a 60-inch retractable television, and a private bathroom with a shower. Each space is equally impressive and a reminder to Roberts, despite her past successes as a coach in college basketball, that she still needs to earn some respect as a head coach in the Pac-12, where the Utes women’s team so far hasn’t made a lot of noise since joining the conference in 2011. Roberts started making her own noise at Enterprise High School in Redding, California, excelling in tennis, volleyball, softball, track, soccer— “I did them all”—and, of course, basketball. She earned a scholarship to play basketball at Seattle Pacific University, where she admits she cared at first more about sports and socializing. As a senior, she was named to the NCAA West Regional all-tournament team, and by that time she had settled down academically to finish in 1997 with a degree in history, following in the foot-steps of a mother who taught history at a junior high. (Her father was a vice president for berry grower Driscoll’s.) She stayed at Seattle Pacific to get a master’s in athletic administration in 2000. “It was the first time in my life that I was passionate about school,” Roberts says. Her coach, Gordy Presnell (now head coach of the women’s team at Boise State), told Roberts she would be good at coaching, and she became his assistant in Seattle from 1997- 2001, advancing each season to the NCAA Division II tournament.

On her own as a head coach, the 2014-15 West Coast Conference Co-Coach of the Year has proven her mettle, racking up an 86-33 record while head coach at California State University, Chico, from 2002-06, and becoming the California Collegiate Athletic Association Coach of the Year for two years in a row (as well as the 2004-05 WBCA West Region Coach of the Year). From 2006-15, she turned around a losing University of Pacific team in Stockton, Calif., taking it into the first round of the WNIT the past two years, and was also named the conference coach of the year in 2012-13.

Photo by Stephen Speckman

Utah Athletics Director Chris Hill MEd’74 PhD’82 is hopeful that Roberts, who signed a six-year, $1.65 million deal, will be the change the Utes need after releasing coach Anthony Levrets last spring. “I think we have a high expectation for our women’s basketball team,” says Hill. “We have a great history, and we weren’t attaining what we thought we could. We’re fortunate enough to have hired someone who we think is going to be really, really good—and we’re excited about it.” He describes Roberts as “smart, personable, and someone who has a lot of connections with recruiting.” Now that his department has set up Roberts in a new basketball facility, which Hill notes is a “tremendous recruiting tool,” he says it’s time to stand aside and let her build the team into a perennial top contender. “It’s going to take a while, because it’s a rebuilding process, just like it was with Coach Krystkowiak on the men’s side,” Hill says. “We anticipate that in five years we will be the type of team that’s in the NCAA tournament quite a bit and having a chance to advance in certain years and get to the Sweet 16 and be a major post-season player. But that’s going to take a couple of years.”

Hill says Utah Athletics has given the financial backing Roberts needs to build her staff. She wasted no time assembling her coaching staff after she was hired last April, bringing on board former Utah State player and coach Danyelle Snelgro, who also coached at Fresno State University and Texas Christian University, and Wesley Brooks, who coached at four schools including the University of North Texas, where he was the past four seasons. She has also brought on new marketing and video production hires to help her amp up excitement. But her first acquisition was Assistant Coach Gavin Petersen, who for the past two seasons had been an assistant to Roberts at Pacific. Petersen says it was an “easy” decision to join Roberts at Utah. “We work really well together,” he says. “We complement each other.”

Photo by Stephen Speckman

Petersen calls Roberts a “competitor,” someone who “prepares hard” and uses humor to maintain a balance and a kind of “family” atmosphere. Illustrative of the effects of that balance, he points to a game toward the end of last season, with Pacific going into hostile territory on Gonzaga’s home court, on Senior Night, in front of a sold-out audience. The perennial West Coast Conference champions earlier in the season had beat the Tigers on Pacific’s own court and had already sealed a top seed in the playoffs, and Pacific was vying for a second or third seed. “We ended up winning—it was awesome,” Petersen says. “She’s tough, passionate, those type of things we want our kids to take on…. It happens slowly, but it will happen.”

Emily Potter, the talented 6’6” forward from Winnipeg, Canada, who redshirted last season with a knee injury under Levrets, comes back eligible for three more seasons under new coach Roberts. “It’s definitely been an adjustment—I think for all of us,” Potter says. “None of us have gone through anything like this before—so, it’s kind of like uncharted waters. But it’s been going well so far.” Potter says she likes that Roberts was “honest” with her from the start and asked for her trust with regard to the direction she wants to take the team. Potter also describes the team as a family playing in a conference where they haven’t yet gained respect. “It really motivates us all,” she says. “We have a little bit of a chip on our shoulders.”

That “chip” is partly what drew Roberts to Utah. “As a competitor, I want to have a chance to win at the highest level,” she says. “This job just fit my personality. There’s kind of a blue-collar, underdog, chip-on-your-shoulder mentality here with the team that resonates with me. I love coaching that. We’re the new guys in the conference, and people kind of pat you on the head and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’ll get there someday.’ I love that. That motivates me like nothing else.” Utah Senior Associate Athletics Director Nona Richardson oversaw the search for a new head coach and likes Roberts’ intensity, “basketball savvy,” the respect she gained at Pacific and Chico State, and that she knows how to surround herself with the right people. “You can’t do it alone,” Richardson says. Roberts, she adds, has her “pedal to the metal; she’s still working her way upward,” and is poised to bring “relevance” back to a program that through 2014 has the 14th best all-time winning percentage in Division 1 women’s college basketball. Comparisons by Richardson and others, of course, lead to former Utes head coach Elaine Elliott, who in 27 seasons at Utah amassed a 582-234 record (Elliott retired from the U and is now an assistant coach at Salt Lake Community College). Their style of play, Richardson says, is more upbeat, faster tempo, and their approach to the game is to recruit the right kids, be disciplined, run hard, and “approach every day as if it’s your last.”

“What she did here is so cool,” says Roberts, who mentions the long line of proud former players who still feel like it’s “their program.” She talks about how the game has changed and how, ironically, the players these days are bigger, stronger, and faster—traits her brothers teased her about as a child. “Recruiting is everything,” she says, pointing to assistants with strong ties to deep reservoirs of talent in Texas and California. “It’s a great time to be at Utah,” she adds, referring in part to the new basketball facility that she calls the best in the country. “All of those things add up,” Roberts says. “That said, we’re going to have to work our tails off as coaches to get some street cred out there.”

Photo by Stephen Speckman

By the end of this past summer, Roberts was settling nicely into Utah. “I’ve been so impressed with the people here. There’s like a familial feel to it.” And with the mountain ranges out both directions from her office, “I’m still blown away by the beauty,” she says. She might even find time in her office to kick back on the new furniture and read a book. Roberts prefers reading about great leaders—not necessarily in sports—like President Harry S. Truman, who she points out faced the difficult task of how to end a world war. “I think his story is a great story of leadership.”

Instead of following her brothers into medicine to become a doctor, her father into the berry business, or her mother into teaching, Roberts has herself become a leader on and off the court, mentoring her players to also focus on academics. In 13 years as a head coach, she’s never had a player be ineligible because of grades, and 100 percent of her players have graduated from college. “I feel like I have a pretty good balance with the academic piece,” she says. “Even if any of these guys go on to play professionally, they’re not going to sign a $90 million contract with Nike. They’re going to have to, at some point, hang up the high tops and do something else to pay the bills. As a coach, I do take that responsibility very seriously.”

One of Roberts’ most important messages to players? “Find something you love, that you’re interested in and think you might want to do, and pursue it—and let basketball be a way that you can really enhance your collegiate experience, and get it paid for. But at the end of the day, get your degree in something you care about.”

—Stephen Speckman is a Salt Lake City-based writer and photographer and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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To reach the Colorado River from Ken Sleight’s Pack Creek Ranch south of Moab, you first take a right off of the dirt and gravel Abbey Road, named after Sleight’s longtime friend Edward Abbey, the author who tapped away at a typewriter for a few years in a tiny cabin at Sleight’s ranch.

Pack Creek Ranch is a peaceful place, nestled in the foothills of the La Sal Mountains and surrounded by cottonwood, oak, and evergreen trees. A creek near the sprawling cabin that is Sleight’s home winds its way down the expanse of high desert below the ranch, flowing toward the Colorado River and its network of side canyons that Sleight explored for nearly 30 years as a pioneering river guide. He and Abbey became friends after meeting in July 1967, when Abbey, then a ranger with the U.S. National Park Service, offered to help him put in at Lees Ferry on the Colorado.

The roads and trails through the desert around the river have multiplied over the years. On a recent drive down State Route 128 for a stroll along the banks of the Colorado, Sleight was taken aback by all of the heavy equipment along the river where workers were putting in a paved trail and building two more footbridges to connect the two shores. It’s a scene that in the old days would have moved him to action, the kind that compelled Abbey to use him as the model for the character Seldom Seen Smith in the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

“They keep coming and coming. You can’t stop it,” Sleight says.

Ken Sleight, who majored in business at the University of Utah, enjoys a cup of coffee at the Moab Diner. (Photo by Stephen Speckman)

The wild vastness of Utah’s red rock canyons and the Colorado first beckoned to him in the 1950s, when he began his river-running business and started steering his path away from his accounting department job at Firestone Tire and Rubber in Salt Lake City and toward the desert, which he would eventually wage fierce fights for as an environmental activist.

Sleight BS’55 landed the job at Firestone soon after graduating in business from the University of Utah. Born in Paris, Idaho, he and his five siblings had grown up on farms in Idaho and northern Utah, hanging around in general stores run by their father and uncles. He headed to the U after high school, on track to become a businessman like his father.

Sleight recollects that he was timid when he first came to the University. Stuttering didn’t help. “I was very shy all the time,” he says. “That was an albatross. It hurt, because you can’t speak out when you want to.” He credits speech classes at the U with helping him to gain confidence and overcome not only his stuttering but his shyness. “I had some great teachers at the University,” he says.

But even during college, the outdoors beckoned him away from the classroom. “I kept sloughing,” Sleight recollects. “I always wanted to go hiking and so forth, and I did that.” He also took his first river trip, in 1951 with guide and friend Malcom “Moki Mac” Ellingson. The trip was through Lodore Canyon on the Green River, and Sleight loved all of it—the desert, the water, the time in the rafts.

The Korean War interrupted college for him. He was drafted in 1951 and served in Korea with the U.S. Army’s 48th Field Artillery Battalion, 7th Infantry Division, from June 1952 until September 1953, including a month on the front line near Chuncheon firing Howitzer rounds. He served another year in the Army Reserves after his discharge. Sleight, who reached the rank of sergeant, remembers that even during the war, he and a friend somehow managed to make an impromptu trip on a raft they fashioned out of a tree trunk, branches, and “derelict” boards, using a few of those boards for oars. The two Army buddies floated for an hour or so on the Bukhan River, in the northern Gangwon Province.

When he came back to Utah, he had changed. “I was getting damn good grades,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t get a good job without going to school.” Firestone recruited him as he graduated. He would occasionally attend John Birch Society meetings, though he never officially joined. Sometimes he’d wear a bowtie to work.

But the outdoors kept calling him. So he began turning his daydreams into plans, and saved money from his Firestone job to purchase eight neoprene Army surplus rafts for $35 to $50 each. He wanted to start a business that would allow him to guide people on the adventure of running rivers through canyons, and on horseback trips through the mountains. Back then, he recollects, you didn’t need the “rigmarole” of dealing with permits and approval from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management or the National Forest Service before you could embark on such endeavors. You just went. He began with guiding Boy Scouts down the Green and Colorado rivers. “I didn’t want to sell tires all my life,” Sleight says. “I saw more of a future in the river business than I did with Firestone.”

Officers escort Ken Sleight, second from left, away during a protest near Moab in the early 1990s. (Photo courtesy The Canyon Country Zephyr, www.canyoncountryzephyr.com)

He used a mimeograph machine to churn out brochures to promote his new line of work, and after a few years of guiding river trips, he quit his Firestone job in 1957, took on odd jobs, and began substitute teaching to help finance his new river-running business. Eventually he moved with his first wife and children to southern Utah, living in Escalante and then Green River. His Wonderland Expeditions, incorporated on April 1, 1957, soon became Ken Sleight Expeditions as he gained a stellar reputation.

“Dad thought I gave up all that schooling to be on the river,” Sleight says now. “But it was seventh heaven, and I made the right decision. I did what I wanted—I’ve always done that. It was an adventure. It was freedom. It was not only the places you’d go, it was the people—people with great ideas. I enjoyed that.”

Sleight guided epic river trips throughout the Colorado River system, through Cataract, Grand, Desolation, and Glen canyons, for three decades. In 1990, he began dismantling his business, transferring operations in Grand and Glen canyons to his son Mark. He sold the Cataract, Lodore, and Desolation canyon operations to separate buyers. “My last commercial river trip was down the Grand Canyon,” he says. So storied was his career that last year, Sleight was inducted into the River Runners Hall of Fame at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah.

Glen Canyon was Sleight’s favorite place as a river runner, and he loved the stops along the way, such as Music Temple and Rainbow Bridge. Construction on the Glen Canyon Dam began in late 1956, much to his dismay. But he continued to take passengers on float trips through the canyon, from 1957 to 1963, when the floodgates of the dam were closed and Lake Powell began to form.

In The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975, Abbey wrote that the character Seldom Seen Smith, a lapsed Mormon and river runner, called the newly created Lake Powell “the blue death.” In the book, Smith kneels atop the dam and prays “for a little pre-cision earthquake right here.” He also helps a friend drive a road grader off a cliff and into the reservoir, and helps dynamite a coal train, among other exploits.

Sleight today still demurs on how much of the monkey-wrenching in the book was based on reality. “Your conscience tells you what you can do if you feel like paying the price, but don’t tell others what you did—that’s where you get them into the picture [as a witness in court],” Sleight says. “So, you do things on your own, but you don’t tell anyone about it.”

At one point, Sleight and others started a Sierra Club chapter in Moab, hopeful it would help push the agenda of one day getting rid of the Glen Canyon Dam and what he still calls “Lake Foul,” instead of Lake Powell. But they didn’t get the backing they needed, so Sleight and others quit, calling the Sierra Club back then a “milquetoast” operation.

The rivers, Sleight says, had talked the timidity out of him as he told stories to his clients along the way. And the more time he spent outdoors, exploring Utah’s red rock country, the more he and his political views shifted from the conservatism of his youth. He eventually served for eight years as chairman of the local Democratic Party Club in San Juan County. He protested and marched for various causes alongside Navajo and Ute Indians and environmental groups.

Dams. Roads. Overgrazing. Bridges. Drilling for oil in wilderness areas. Sleight had the “guts,” as he puts it, to speak up over the years. After the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in the late 1960s, he helped fight a proposed highway that would have bridged across the Escalante River near Stevens Arch, and won. “That effort was my greatest environmental accomplishment,” he says now.

Sometimes he lost. He and David Brower, then head of the Sierra Club, sued the federal government in order to preserve Rainbow Bridge National Monument, which was being flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam, and won the battle in federal district court, but were overruled in the federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

In the early 1990s, Sleight, then in his early 60s, saddled his horse Knothead and rode to Amasa Back Mesa near Moab, standing down bulldozers before they began to take down several hundred acres of juniper forest. The Caterpillar advanced right up to him and his horse, but Sleight didn’t back down, and his audacity helped prompt a moratorium on the forest’s destruction, according to the local bimonthly newspaper, The Canyon Country Zephyr. He made a similar stand against a road grader in another nearby area, but there, the people and machines won. He and Jim Stiles, publisher of the Zephyr, also more formally protested a proposed highway through the Book Cliffs region of Utah, and prevailed.

From left, Ken Sleight, tourist Carol Grohe, and author Edward Abbey pause for a photo during a 1988 horseback trip through Grand Gulch in Utah. Abbey died the following year, in Arizona. (Photo courtesy Ken Sleight)

Stiles says Sleight has waged plenty of quixotic crusades over the years, and yet played a real role in preserving some key areas and raising awareness about the need for conservation. “A lot of us see overwhelming odds and give up,” Stiles says. “Ken seems to thrive on fighting those kinds of odds. I think that’s something missing these days and a lesson from Ken that’s so important. It’s the integrity that you bring to the fight that counts.”

Sleight in 1999 received the David R. Brower Conservation Award, which honors individuals for their “dramatic, positive impact on conservation efforts in the Colorado Plateau region.” Sleight’s love of Utah’s rivers also has moved him to help others who were similarly enamored, including SPLORE founder Martha Ham MS’77 MSW’90. Sleight mentored her more than 30 years ago, to help her start her own river-running business, with its own unique twist of taking people of all abilities, notably the disabled, on river trips.

Most recently, Sleight has been a supporter of activist and fellow U alum Tim DeChristopher BS’09, who served a two-year prison term until this past April for monkey-wrenching a 2008 federal oil and gas lease auction in Salt Lake City by offering fake bids, which resulted in the auction being called off. Sleight met DeChristopher at a rally in Salt Lake to show his support and visited with the younger man before, during, and after the trial and prison term. “I think he’s done great,” Sleight says. “He’s got guts.”

DeChristopher says he read Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang when he was 17 or 18 years old, long before he learned the model for Seldom Seen was very real and living in Utah. “I think he is an example of principled courage,” says DeChristopher, who has been working in recent months at a bookstore in Salt Lake City.

These days, Sleight spends most of his time at the Pack Creek Ranch, raising horses and tending alfalfa with his second wife, Jane, whom he married in 1983. Jane recalls that when they first met—on a river trip, of course—Sleight had a quart of milk, a Slim Jim sausage, and a dictionary in the front of his pickup. “I said, ‘So, what’s with the dictionary,’ ” she says with a laugh. “He said, ‘I’m writing a book.’ So, he’s been writing a book for as long as I’ve known him, and for about 20 years before that.”

Sleight admits he’s still writing that book, inside his office on the ranch. Instead of sipping Jim Beam from his omnipresent coffee mug, he’s switched to actual coffee these days. He and Jane have also been busy in recent months with packing boxes, preparing to move out of the sprawling cabin on the ranch that they’ve long called home and into a trailer near Sleight’s office.

At the kitchen table in the cabin, Sleight produces a box of old photographs, many depicting in black and white a man gripping oars on a wild river or the reins of a horse as he rides through the mountains. The plan is maybe to finish that book, take Spot and Apache for rides on dirt roads and trails, and to give presentations inside a large room inside the old cabin—the same room where Abbey once spoke to a group as part of Ken and Jane’s “Conversation at Pack Creek Ranch” reading program. Sleight now wants to use that room to show people slides and movies from the old days—times spent running rivers, guiding horse trips, tilting at windmills.

—Stephen Speckman is a journalist and photographer based in Salt Lake City and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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University of Utah recycling coordinator and waste management supervisor Josh James last fall watched a man walk up to a recycling station in a tailgate lot at a U football game. The man proclaimed, “Recycling, that’s awesome,” and then proceeded to throw away his own recyclables in a nearby trash can.

The man’s garbage contributed that day to what James estimated is about six tons of trash generated before, during, and after each U football game. That adds up to about 36 tons of trash generated during the six home football games in 2011. About one quarter of that was diverted from landfills and recycled.

People power—or sometimes the lack of it—is the biggest reason those who are champions of improved recycling efforts at U athletic events aren’t ready yet to give an A grade for the University’s efforts to achieve greener games. The U often makes it easy for people to recycle at U football games, and yet it seems difficult for many people to take the critical next step, James says. “It’s really amazing.”

Still, James can at least feel comfortable giving a B+ these days to recycling work during U football games at Rice-Eccles Stadium and at gymnastics meets and basketball games at the Huntsman Center. “It’s catching on,” he says. That B+ is an improvement from the C that James would have issued just a few years ago. Since then, student volunteers have worked with U Facilities Management to take recycling to a whole new level at University athletics events.

Fans watch a basketball game at the Huntsman Center, and put their garbage on the floor.

Football, gymnastics, and men’s basketball are the three sports that generate the most waste out of all University athletics events; hence they are the three areas getting the most attention so far with the recycling efforts. Since 2007, the U has purchased two cardboard balers (think hay balers, only for boxes) for use campuswide, a battalion of bins for placing under desks, bins on wheels, and flatbed trailers to haul the bigger bins. Those changes have had a spillover effect on athletics events, but it was only minimal without a more collective endeavor on the part of students.

Winning ever more ground in the bin game, students came up with the idea of using three bikes with more bins on the backs. Previously, the bikes had been used elsewhere around campus but not at athletics events. Last football season, student volunteers rode the bikes around tailgate lots, mainly along Guardsman Way, spreading the green word and collecting recyclables.

Last year, U student Seth Crossley, who this past year has been associate director of sustainability for the Associated Students of the University of Utah, changed the game even more. Crossley showed what can happen when one person is able to mobilize more students than ever with the shared interest of reducing waste at athletic events. “He did a lot to get us where we’re at now,” James says.

Students in prior years had begun a “Recycle Rice-Eccles” petition drive to obtain signatures of people
who supported the idea of having paid facilities workers separate garbage from recyclables, as well as encouraging more people to be recycling volunteers, but the effort gained little traction.

As Crossley looked for ways to improve the U’s recycling efforts, particularly at athletics events, he researched what other Pac-12 schools were doing. And it turns out many are doing more than the U on that count. So to help bolster the work at the U, Crossley set out to find sponsors who could help incentivize recycling support by giving T-shirts to students who volunteer to help reduce waste at U games. The students help by standing at recycling stations, encouraging others to recycle, and sorting through garbage. Crossley found support from the U Athletics Department, the Office of Sustainability, ASUU, Coca-Cola, The MUSS (the U’s esteemed student cheer section for sports events), and alumni. Fans who participate in the recycling efforts are now issued Frequent Recycler cards and awarded prizes for their efforts. And the “Recycle Rice-Eccles” movement has evolved into an annual initiative complete with its own brand and logo.

Josh James, the University of Utah’s recycling coordinator and waste management supervisor, sits at a gymnastics event in the Huntsman Center.

“If you give T-shirts to volunteers, it unites them,” says Crossley, who was scheduled to graduate from the U this past spring with degrees in political science and environmental and sustainability studies. He has used social media, email, and old-fashioned word of mouth to find students to help out. Volunteers dubbed “green police” began to feel like they’re part of something “bigger,” Crossley says. “Branding and marketing were the biggest thing for me.”

Back in 2010, before his efforts, often only 15 or so volunteers would show up at an athletics event, and it wasn’t enough to make a dent in the mountains of garbage generated. Some games now draw 50 volunteers who collect and sort recyclables and help with getting the word out during the events. The volunteers often stand at bins and urge people to deposit their plastic, paper, and aluminum in the recycling cans. Students also stick around after games to sift through garbage in the stands for recyclables before paid crews move in to sweep up.

Student volunteers help break down boxes for recycling at an athletics event at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center.

It’s that kind of people power that compels Crossley to raise the recycling grade at Rice-Eccles from what he thinks was a lowly D to a B+ and to a B at the Huntsman Center, where he says the older, indoor crowd isn’t as messy as football’s younger, outdoors audience and generates less garbage. The reason for the slightly lower grade at Huntsman, he notes, is because fewer student volunteers show up at events where the team (such as men’s basketball this past season) does poorly. “There’s a lot of work to do, but we’ve made up a lot of ground,” says Crossley.

The Sierra Club in 2011 ranked the U at 97 out of 118 colleges and universities that replied to a questionnaire looking at environmental issues such as energy use, transportation, and waste management. U Sustainability Coordinator Jen Colby answered in the questionnaire that 32 percent of the campus’ waste is being diverted from landfills. Vital to that percentage is what students have been able to help accomplish at football games, where volunteers helped divert an estimated 19,000 pounds of recyclables from landfills last season.

Ashley Patterson, the U Sustainability Office’s outreach and education coordinator, attributes last year’s success to Crossley and others including ASUU student volunteers Allison Boyer, a stalwart at the Guardsman Way tailgate lot, and Alec Van Huele, who was at every game and organized meetings to coordinate the efforts of the masses of green-minded student volunteers. “[Crossley] did a really good job of turning this into a collaborative effort,” says Patterson, who uses her office’s Facebook page (and its 830 or so followers) to help get the word out to rally volunteers. “Students say they want to do something, but they don’t know what to do or how to do it. Seth fully grasps all of that.”

Crossley pointed out in a presentation earlier this year to volunteers, “Fans’ views of recycling need to be influenced rather than forced—they have to want to recycle!” Even on a bad day at Rice-Eccles. James says that when the Utes have a big loss, fans are much less enthused about recycling. “Everyone says, ‘Leave me alone—I want to go home,’ ” he says. Happy fans are more apt to recycle.

Student volunteers pick up trash in the stands at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center after a gymnastics meet.

Despite the U’s great strides with recycling at athletics events during the past few years, other Pac-12 schools get higher praise for their efforts, including the University of Washington, Arizona State University, and most notably, the University of Colorado at Boulder, which on its Web site lists 1976 as the year it officially began an on-campus recycling program. In 1991, University of Colorado student government leaders and campus administration officials became partners in recycling with the signing of a memorandum of understanding. Today, the students’ fingerprints on recycling are all over campus, not just at sports events. “Students here have a rich history of speaking up and putting their money where their mouth is,” says Ed von Bleichert, Colorado’s environmental operations manager for Facilities Management. “It really comes from our student body, and it has permeated up.”
From the first minute students hit the Colorado campus in the fall, they are met by “zero-waste ambassadors” at residence halls, where students are educated then and throughout the semester about how to recycle. Between 25 and 30 ambassadors, also known as “goalies,” are also at each football game at zero-waste stations, and each volunteer receives a shirt, hat, meal ticket, and entry to the game. In order to get fans to use recycling services at games, von Bleichert says, “you’ve got to make it easy.” The university also touts a $470,000 facility built in 1992 near the football stadium, Folsom Field, to help with campuswide recycling. And Colorado collects a small fee each semester from its 30,000 students to support education and outreach about recycling at the university.

The recycling facility today employs about 25 students to help divert recyclables from landfills, which accounts for the university’s overall 42 percent diversion rate. “We’re shooting for 90 percent,” says von Bleichert. The current diversion rate puts Colorado in the middle of the pack among other colleges and universities, he says.

A big key to the recycling success at Colorado, von Bleichert says, is the full support recycling efforts receive from the university’s athletics department. Planning goes into what type of packaging will be used at concessions during football games, and garbage cans inside the stadium have been eliminated. All waste from inside the stadium, even while a game is still being played, is sorted by students at the nearby recycling facility.

Other institutions, including the University of Utah, over the years have sought to emulate what’s happening in Boulder. “They definitely get the most attention,” James says. “They have a very well-designed program.” Students from other places in the nation tell James that Utah as a state is behind the times on recycling, and they’re upset that more people are not doing it. James says it will take continued student support to sustain and improve the U’s current recycling efforts at athletics events.

U student Seth Crossley, associate director of sustainability for ASUU, drives student volunteers through a football tailgate area last fall to encourage people to recycle. The student efforts have had good results.

Steve Pyne BS’11, director of events and facilities for the U Athletics Department, says he supports the work of James and the student volunteers to improve recycling at athletics venues. “Whatever they recommend, every football game, I support them,” Pyne says. As part of those efforts, Pyne notes, vendors for games are now making sure boxes they use for supplies are being broken down and recycled instead of simply thrown away. “In my mind, I think we’re doing everything within the resources we have that we can do,” he says.

Universities including Colorado and the U have seen a spike in recycling at football games when sponsors such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the ESPN television network create a competition among institutions to see who can recycle the most. Crossley said earlier this year in a report to student volunteers that an ESPN game-day challenge at the U motivated the crowd to get involved without feeling forced, and volunteers were excited to be working alongside ESPN employees. “Much more fun than Dumpster diving,” Crossley says.

With the U as a new member of the Pac-12, James predicts audiences—and their trash—will increase at all U sporting events, requiring an even more expanded recycling effort on campus. When crowds again roar inside Rice-Eccles and Huntsman Center for the 2012-13 season, James and Crossley are planning on more outreach and more student volunteers. But success will depend once again on two words: people power. “People complain there are not enough bins, but at some point you’ve got to take responsibility for yourself and your purchase,” James says. “You are the consumer; you bought the product.”

—Stephen Speckman is a Salt Lake City-based writer and photographer and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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