For Eric Stein, wellness means serious work—and having a ball
BY ARIELLE LASKY
Eric Stein, amid exercise balls in the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation, is Stanford’s senior associate director for physical education, recreation and wellness—a position created to get the entire campus more active.
Eric Stein is a big advocate of the power of exercise. According to him: "The best medicine out there is physical activity," he said. "It gives you a purpose, a reason." As Stanford's senior associate athletic director for physical education, recreation and wellness, Stein has devoted his career to engaging people in a wide variety of activities and helping them discover the physical and mental benefits of fitness.
Stein is the first person to hold this position at Stanford, which was created in 2006. At that point, Stein said it was just him and a full-time administrator. Today, more than 10 people coordinate different programs under his leadership. As director, Stein helps manage all non-varsity athletic and recreational programs, including physical education and recreation classes, intramural and club sports, outdoor education and other related activities. "It's a lot of stuff that was kind of all over the map prior to my coming here," Stein said. "Now we have a foundation."
One of the major projects Stein has developed over the past two years is the BeWell@Stanford initiative, a multi-pronged program to help the campus community—as the campaign's slogan goes—"get active, eat better and unwind." With the aid of Jennifer Sexton, coordinator of recreational fitness and wellness, and Provost John Etchemendy, the initiative has quickly built a presence on campus. The website (http://bewell.stanford.edu) alone, which has only been up for half a year, now has about 9,000 registered users. "We have the best intercollegiate athletic program in the country, there's no question about it," Stein remembered Etchemendy saying before the BeWell campaign kicked off. "It's about time we pay attention to the regular faculty, staff and students."
With only about 800 varsity athletes out of tens of thousands of Stanford employees and students, Stein's programs serve the vast majority of people on campus.
"The world I live in," he said, "is not like intercollegiate sports where it's all about W's and L's, wins and losses. My world's about P's: participants. It's about trying to engage people, regardless of their ability level, whether it's intramural programming or working out informally or connecting with friends and taking a walk."
Stein emphasized the collaborative aspect of the wellness initiative. To ensure its success, he has worked with many offices on campus, "from Vaden Health Center to the Health Improvement Program to Benefits to Parking and Transportation." One of the programs he developed with the Health Improvement Program is the Employee Incentives Program, a three-step process to get faculty and staff active. Employees receive a taxable $150 reward for completing the Stanford Health and Lifestyle Risk Assessment (SHALA), and then attend a workshop to interpret the results. After completing those steps, they are eligible for a free fitness assessment and two personal training sessions.
According to Stein, prior to the program's launch in January, the provost said he would be happy with a 20 percent participation rate. Stein's latest statistics show that 38 percent of all employees have completed the SHALA, and now his goal is to reach 50 percent.
The SHALA will not only encourage people to make healthier choices but also help the university assess its overall wellbeing. By mining data from SHALA, Stein's department will be able to generate a "health report card" for the university. "We can use that to guide the programs for the future, based on the needs and interests of the population," he said.
The real long-term goal, Stein said, is to "change the culture in a way that people would celebrate taking a walk. Instead of today someone saying, 'Oh, geez, why are you walking?' they would say, 'You didn't get your walk in today?' We want it to become a part of what you do."
Another program Stein highlighted was the Pac-10 Fitness Challenge, a competition in November among the Pac-10 universities to see which can log the most amount of exercise in one week. Stein said students got really excited about it last fall: 3,280 unique people participated in the event.
Stein recalls talking with an undergrad at the gym and pointing out that Washington State was ahead in the race that day. The student replied, "Yeah, but we are going to win it." This was a revelatory moment for Stein. "It hit me—this was like a chance for everyday students, faculty and staff to be heroes," he explained. "They are never going to get on the football field or the basketball court, but they could do their treadmill or weightlifting, and be a part of a competition."
Stein also attributed the success of the many programs so far to his staff. "One of the key things is having great people. The staff are really great professionals. We dream a lot together about what it is we'd like to do and create. And we are only as good as our ears are open … we are trying to listen to the students and the staff," Stein said.
"It's a lot of oars in the water, but it's exciting," he added. "I feel really lucky and happy to be here."
As for himself, Stein said athletics always have been an integral part of his life. After high school, Stein went off to the University of Evansville to play basketball. He later discovered that he wasn't necessarily the best player on the team, and that started him down the path he is on today.
"As a seventh grader I was the same height that I was in college. I used to be the big man and now I was the small man [on the team]," he said, laughing. Channeling his energy elsewhere, Stein got involved in intramural sports at Evansville. "By my senior year I was running the entire intramural program," he said.
After college, Stein went on to the University of Illinois to earn a master's degree in physical education, with a focus on recreational sports. He started his professional career at a junior college outside Chicago, after which he worked for a few years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of South Carolina. He then went to work at Princeton, where he spent 23 years as associate athletic director for physical education and campus recreation, and where he started a campus wellness program.
Stein said he is often asked why he left Princeton. "It was a wonderful place," he recalled. "But my wife and I used to say, if there's one place in the country we would go, it would be Stanford." Stein's wife, Robyn, had traveled to the Bay Area for work several times, and the two fell in love with the university. Even so, they didn't consider moving west for a long time—they wanted to remain at Princeton until their younger son had graduated from high school.
The timing could not have been more fortuitous. Seven days after his son graduated, Stein was at a meeting of Ivy League athletic directors. "My buddy from Columbia asked me if I had heard about this opportunity at Stanford," he recalled. "I gasped, and said I needed to leave the meeting and call my wife."
Soon the Steins were on their way to Mountain View, where they now live with their 6-year-old daughter, Elyssa.
(More information on BeWell and the Employee Incentives Program will be available at the 2008 Wellness Fair, tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation.)
Arielle Lasky is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.
