SMERF Fund – Ashley Auld (1 of the 3 co-founders)

For the past 50 years, Recreational Sports has strived to find novel ways to benefit the student. Take for example the Jack Canfield Student Medical Emergency Relief Fund (SMERF), which started in part after a Recreational Sports employee (Ina Christensen) died in 1991 from leukemia since she was unable to pay for medical care. Shortly after, friends and family pitched in to form a fund that would help serve to help students who needed help paying for their medical bills in emergency situations. SMERF was formally started in 2005 by Recreational Sports in attempt to find a way to sustain the money earned as well as form a committee that would be in charge of determining how best the money should be used. One of the founders of SMERF was Ashley Auld, an exceptional leader of Recreational Sports since her sophomore year.

Ashley Auld enrolled in UCSB in 2002 and graduated in 2006. During this time, Ashley became very involved in Recreational Sports and by her junior year emerged as one of the student leaders. It was only natural for Ashley to be attracted to Recreational Sports as a part-time job opportunity since she played soccer since she was very young and was an Exercise Sports Studies major. Little did she know that starting as a gym field supervisor her sophomore year would mark the beginning of one of the most rewarding experiences of her life. She quickly was promoted to outdoor soccer coordinator and later to night supervisor- a position that looks over the gym field supervisors. As if this wasn’t impressive enough, her junior year she became the RecSports representative on the Events Center governing board, which voted on how the Events Center should be used and scheduled. She proceeded to become a chairman of the board her senior year. Due to her obvious commitment toward RecSports and her strong capacity for leadership, Paul Lee, the director of RecSports approached her in her senior year in regards to starting a new project: the SMERF.

Ashley was immediately attracted to the idea behind SMERF as she strongly felt that having a huge medical fee should not deter one from being able to get a degree. One of Ashley’s main responsibilities was figuring out how to make the SMERF appealing to UCSB students so that they would vote for the measure to pass in the annual spring elections. Ashley, as well as her two fellow student co-founders, Shaun Hicks and Janet Sevilla struggled to come up with an amount that would be large enough so that it would actually be helpful but not too large that it would deter the students from voting for the measure. In the end, 89 cents per quarter was the decided amount and the measure passed. This allowed for around 50,000 dollars annually to be raised for the students- an amount that would be able to accumulate sufficient interest as well as benefit a maximum amount of people per quarter.

Ashley happily served the SMERF committee her senior year, which met once a week in order to hear out students that wished to obtain money from the SMERF and to deliberate to decide who it should be given to. It was crucial to only give money to those that would truly appreciate it and who understood how it will help them and that they would need to pay back the fees eventually. Being able to help so many students with their medical bills was an uplifting and truly rewarding experience for Ashley. She says that one of the best parts of working on the SMERF was the fact that she felt like she was, “working on something that I knew would have a lasting impact on the university. People would continue to talk about it and benefit from it in the future, even after we were gone.” SMERF continues to help students struggling to pay their medical bills today, and so Ashley’s legacy lives on. It is unbelievably satisfying to Ashley as a part of the Recreational Sports team that helped put the SMERF into place “to feel like we were making an impact on the school.”

Ashley was part of the founding team for the SMERF and dedicated a lot of time and passion into ensuring the project’s success, as with all the projects that she undertook as an employee at RecSports. Therefore, at this year’s 5^th Annual Hall of Fame, Ashley Auld, along with her two fellow founders, Shaun Hicks and Janet Sevilla, will be presented with the Pioneer Award for their spectacular hard work.

Ashley continues to stay in contact with a lot of the people that she worked with at RecSports and continues to live by the principles that she learned at RecSports. For example, she believes that giving back and helping others is invaluable, and only one of the many ways that she continues to do so is by participating in a marathon recently that raised money for the leukemia/lymphoma society. She also still strongly believes in finding time for recreation and play, even though it’s harder to do so after graduation. One outlet she has for recreation is to ref girl’s soccer, which she manages to squeeze in-between balancing working as a marketing support representative for a wireless internet company, Clear and getting her master’s degree in sports management at the University of the Pacific.

Rod Sears

In 1966, when cottage houses still lined Del Playa, rent was $90 a month, and UCSB boasted a football team, a twenty-something Rod Sears stepped onto the scene as an assistant football coach and physical education teacher.  As a former varsity football and rugby player at Stanford University, Sears easily collected a team of students, some former football players, who were interested in playing rugby. Within the first three years, the start up program was champion of the 1967 and 1968 Catalina Rugby Tournament. And the following year they hosted the first ever Southern California Championships, what originally started at 16 invitational teams grew to a massive 32 by 1970. It was the largest tournament in the United States and Sears led UCSB to place 4th.

Sears describes his time working at UCSB as “some of the better years of his life”.  It’s easy to see why.  In addition to founding the team, he along with a few colleagues managed to open a bar off of Hollister and Fairview.  Dubbed “The Strapp” it was the only local sports bar and served as a hangout for all rugby parties where they hosted many visiting teams from Northern California, New Zealand and Australia.  In 1971, Sears was selected as co-coach of the All-California University Rugby Team to tour Australia for 7 weeks.  He and four UCSB players were honored by the team in what Sears describes as “the best high class rugby tour ever”.  The tour record was 8-1-1, which still ranks as the greatest record for any U.S. provincial and university competition. Following the tour, he was offered a position in Australia, which he readily accepted, “I was young, I had no obligations. I thought why not?”

Sears made founding rugby clubs something of a hobby; in 1972 he created the Snake River Rugby Club, 1977 the Napa Valley Rugby Club.  The College ofIdaho hired Sears as the head football coach from 1972-1970. In the late 70s and 80s he went on to coach for the Nor Cal Pelicans, Pacific Coast Grizzlies, Stanford University, and assistant coached U.S.A. national team from 1980-1983.  Sears served on the Stanford Rugby Endowment Board of Directors from 1995-2006, was the Physical Education Division Chairmen of Napa Valley College from 1977-2003, and managed the Pacific Coast Grizzlies.

Rod Sears is still active in the rugby world today.  He serves as a board member for Rugby Idaho.  Over the phone the man who coached UCSB’s club rugby team and many others apologized for a brief interruption, “it’s always busy around here” he laughed.  We would not expect anything less from 2011’s recipient of UCSB Recreational Sport’s Pioneer Award.