Recreation Conference undergoes a transformation

03/10/2026

Less than one semester after celebrating the 75th year diamond jubilee of its national recreation conference with much reflection on past milestones, SUNY Cortland's Recreation, Parks and Leisure Studies Department decided to take the annual event in a whole new direction.

Renamed the Metcalf Summit for Professional Advocacy in Recreation and Tourism, this year the event takes place on Saturday, April 18. Conference registration is now open.

Besides the renaming, changes include:

• The formerly two-day - Thursday and Friday - November conference becomes a one-day summit to be held permanently in the spring semester.
• The Metcalf Summit will no longer be organized as a class project by students enrolled in the department's Corporate Events class. That presents an opportunity for all undergraduates in the major, including first-year students, to participate in organizing the conference.
• The event moves to Moffett Center, departing from its Corey Union venue of several decades.

At the very heart of the redesigned conference is a new focus on participant engagement and advocacy, according to Jason Page, assistant professor of recreation, parks and leisure studies, who has taught the Corporate Events course since 2021.

"Over the last few years, we've been discussing what we want to do and what we're achieving with that event," he said. "And we made the decision as faculty that we wanted something different."

The event's traditional format of individual lectures on a plethora of topics is replaced by action-oriented professional development, interdisciplinary networking and measurable learning outcomes.

"Part of our rationale was that the conference was becoming more and more challenging as an event in terms of getting people to participate and showing value for our students," Page said. "We designed the Metcalf Summit to be much more participatory, much lower cost, and it is structured to get more interaction with both students and professionals."

Participants will engage in facilitated roundtable discussions that generate actionable outcomes and concrete 90-day pilot initiatives. Morning discipline-specific sessions will transition to afternoon interdisciplinary collaboration, fostering cross-sector partnerships.

Participants need not submit presentation proposals or prepare materials - they simply bring their professional expertise and lived experience to the conversations. Students and professionals work together throughout, creating authentic mentorship beyond typical conference interactions. Moderators compile findings into reports distributed within a month of the summit, maintaining momentum and accountability after the event.

Continuing its long tradition of lining up a national-caliber keynote speaker, this year the event begins a concerted effort to align each principal presenter with the summit's stated goal that year.

Bryan P. McCormick, a professor in the recreational therapy program within the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Temple University's Barnett College of Public Health, will discuss his work that directly addresses the upcoming summit's central focus - combating social isolation and loneliness through evidence-based recreation interventions.

Meanwhile, Page plans to update the Corporate Events course over the summer, enhancing its value to students in many different majors, in addition to recreation, parks and leisure studies.

"We want to make it more focused on a variety of different events," he said. "When it was tied to the conference, that was the entire focus for obvious reasons. Now we can expand what that course involves, to try to focus on developing community partnerships so our students can get a sense of what it is to run those kinds of events."

Moving the event to Moffett Center goes beyond the reality of the extensive Corey Union renovation project soon to take the entire building offline.

"We wanted to try a different location, and Moffett Center offers the atrium as a beautiful space," Page said. "It's newly refurbished. And then the classrooms are all there, so it's easy for us to break the groups out and bring them all back together without having to move around a lot of different spaces."

The Metcalf Board, which manages the Metcalf Endowment that funds the annual gathering, embraced the organizers' rapid switch.

"I think it really does reference the spirit of Metcalf, and more so, because it is bringing together leaders in the field and then having conversations with them," Page said of Harlan Goldsbury "Gold" Metcalf, the pioneering SUNY Cortland recreation administrator who established the department in 1947 and taught there for 22 years.

"So, it's not just having professionals present a topic and then they leave," Page said. "They're coming here and they're engaged in guided conversations where they can share ideas. And our students can connect with them in a meaningful way: with a structured conversation rather than just sitting through a presentation.

"That, if anything, encapsulates the idea of "surrounding yourself with excellence, or the best in your field, in a more complete way," said Page, paraphrasing Metcalf's core philosophy.