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 received as well as form a committee that would be in charge of determining how best the money should be used. Three of the founders of SMERF are Ashley Auld, Shaun Hicks and Janet Sevilla, each was an exceptional student leader at Recreational Sports.
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 5th 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.
Shaun Hicks, UCSB graduate 2006 and fellow founding member of the SMERF, says that it was “kinda a funny story” of how he came to work at RecSports. After transferring to UCSB his Junior year from Boston College, Shaun was shooting some hoops at the Recreational Center before school one day when he instigated an altercation with a guy he was playing against. He remembers an older, Asian gentlemen walking up to him and telling him the importance of having fun and play and the belief that “everyone’s a winner.” This gentleman happened to be Paul Lee, the head director of RecSports, who ended up offering Shaun a job. Shaun began working at RecSports at a beginning level position and soon became more involved in working on the Special Projects team and miscellaneous marketing jobs. After half a year of working closely with Paul, Paul mentioned to Shaun his ideas regarding the SMERF and what it would take for it to come to place.
Shaun began working on the project that he felt was a great idea. He headed putting together the committee for SMERF and all of the background research that comes with putting a measure on the ballot and getting a referendum to pass. He remembers the campaigning time before the elections to be one of his favorite parts of working for SMERF. He fondly described how the months preceding the elections seemed like a SMERF frenzy and that the whole office lived breathed and dreamt SMERF. Along with the RecSports office, Shaun approached all of the student body organizations on campus to align with their teams so that every voting body and party would support SMERF. In addition to flyers, buttons, and shirts, Shaun also put on an awareness concert in the RecCen- all to raise awareness for the campaign. His single fondest memory at UCSB was finding out that the measure passed with over 80% of the voting student body’s consent- a percentage far higher than any other referendum that year. Knowing that so many people supported something that he and RecSports were so passionate about was a truly uplifting moment for Shaun.
RecSports taught Shaun that he is the agent of his own happiness and change- that he can achieve anything that he believes that he can- which helped him be the youngest graduating member of his business program at UCLA a couple of years after graduating UCSB. He also continues to give back regularly- he finds community service so valuable that he even included necessary volunteer work to be apart of his requirements per quarter at his current job. He also was part of the team that put together Toastmasters, which helps people become more comfortable with public speaking. He now works as the formal PR officer and a lot of his time to that. The spirit to give back and to stay motivated that was ignited in him from working at RecSports continues to live in him today.
The third founder of SMERF honored this year is Janet Sevilla. Janet attended UCSB from 2002-2006, and was a third year at the same time as Shaun and Ashley, and was also a leader at RecSports. She came to be involved with RecSports her sophomore year as a member of the sports club marketing team. She laughs as she remembers that she “wore a lot of hats at RecSports,” as she also soon became a part of the office staff and a gym field, soon progressing to a night supervisor, as well as being on the RecSports governing board, and of course, SMERF. She remembers how SMERF simply started as an idea tossed around in Paul Lee’s office and then actually watching it turn into a huge project, all in a few short months.
Janet loved watching SMERF during her time at UCSB and loves the fact that it still continues to progress and continues to help students with serious medical problems. She fondly remembers the planning process and how they had to present to all of the student groups on campus, telling them why they should support SMERF. School is already expensive as it is and a medical financial burden should not prevent someone from finishing school- this fundamental principle behind the idea of SMERF is what ultimately sold 80% of the student body on voting for the initiative to pass and what lead to the beginning of the SMERF.
Today, Janet continues to live by RecSports philosophies, especially one of Paul’s sayings, his acronym for fear which he insists stands for “false expectations about reality.” This saying helped Janet persevere through some tough times at UCSB- being kicked out of the school for having too many units, then finally being able to convince the Dean that she should be able to graduate with her double major and minor. This saying continues to help her today with any issues she comes to face. She currently works with the LA Galaxy as the community development coordinator, which helps bring programming to children and helps raise awareness in the community about recreation and soccer especially. Thus, one can see how philanthropy is still a huge part of Janet’s life.
It is no surprise that these three individuals who continue to give back to their community today were the founding members of SMERF, each being a leader of RecSports while they attended UCSB. We are so happy to be able to award them with the Pioneer Award at the 5th annual Hall of Fame, this April 30th and so proud to call these astounding individuals gauchos!
