Yet each week, the door of Josh Gruenke, associate director of student activities, creaks open as another former organization president’s eyes glisten with hope of reviving a piece of their college experience as they peek their head into the room.
When COVID-19 began its spread across the country, the Campus Involvement Center, for the first time, had a simpler goal than getting students acclimated and involved.
“We wanted to make sure that our students were physically safe,” Gruenke said. “We wanted to make sure that we were not increasing any risks.” Without the capability of organizations to function on campus, the message of involvement on campus shifted to checking on students’ mental well-being, so organization numbers plummeted, Gruenke said.
The pandemic left OU with an additional 236 frozen organizations awaiting reinstallment, according to Gruenke. OU currently has just 487 active student organizations on campus.
After reporting those numbers solemnly, Gruenke sits at his desk flipping through the past years of stagnancy amongst organizations represented on paper and finds another number: 914. The number of student groups on campus before March 2020.
Though some may not have been active, pre-pandemic organization numbers rarely seemed to dip below 700, Gruenke said.
Accordingly, the 2019 OU Women's Club Rugby Team charged the field each week with a full roster and a bench of eager subs awaiting an opportunity to get in on the action. Excitement on the field and from the sideline each practice, game and tournament manifested a culture of camaraderie and unity.
That is until news of the pandemic hit campus.
Suddenly, the excitement dwindled down to a tired Zoom call in the spring of 2020 hosted by Teagan Richman, a 2022 OU graduate. Then just a member of the team, her graduating predecessors dawned her the title of president of a six-player squad returning the following year, juxtaposing the roster of 20 Richman had once known.
“We had to come back in the fall, and everything was different,” Richman said. “Everything was online. We weren't allowed to practice. We didn't have a season anymore.”
The online format provided an insurmountable obstacle for recruiting and practice. With just a fourth of their previous roster size, even if restrictions were lifted, Richman would have needed to triple the roster to just fill the starting positions.
The lost year also accounted for an absence of team bonding and a maintenance of the culture that Richman and her former team had worked tirelessly to uphold in and outside of practice. This was one of the biggest losses for the team, Richman said.
Returning in the fall of 2021, after the past year of stagnancy, Richman surveyed her field and envisioned the team she had played with her freshman year. She knew it was her responsibility to make up for the recruitment effort that was lost over the past year and a half.
Richman was willing to do anything to restore the team back to its former glory, which included attending every first-year student organization event available on campus, she said. From the Campus Involvement Fair to the Party at Ping, Richman and what remained of her team could be found with their own booth. “We had like 30 people sign up,” Richman said. “We had about that many come out to the first practice and we were super excited. They didn’t realize their workload coming back to school in person; we ended up losing half of those people.”
All Richman wanted was to keep the team alive long enough to show the new generation of college women a physical, empowering sport, Richman said. She also said she just wanted the team to give more women what it had given her.
“There was something about the rugby team that just immediately invited me in,” Richman said. “It didn't matter what you look like, it didn't matter your skill level, it didn't matter who you were outside of the team, you were immediately a part of their family.”
Another 2022 graduate, Mark Russell, expressed a similar sentiment towards his extensive student organization experience.
Russell was the president of the Bobcats Spikeball Club: a club based around a 2 vs. 2 yard game that has grown in popularity over the past years.
“The best way to describe it is it’s volleyball, but on the ground,” Russell said. “Instead of hitting it over the net … you’re spiking on the net, hence the name ‘spikeball.’”
Russell described the game with a passion as he expressed how near the club is to his heart. In fact, Russell has referred to the club as his baby ever since he revived the club on campus this past summer.
“The previous president graduated last year,” Russell said. “He entrusted us, so I felt a responsibility … his final words as president to me were, ‘Take this club to the moon.’”
Though the club struggled to gain a following after OU students were sent home due to COVID-19, Russell was determined to relive the memories he had created in the club as an underclassman.
Every night during his sophomore year, Russell and his friends went outside and practiced against each other, but more importantly spending time with one another. His love for it grew just as it did for those around him.
“Spikeball was so much fun, and we have those memories with it,” Russell said. “I want other people to have that.”
Before being brought back in Russell’s hands, he remembered a friend of his from his junior year — someone he met in a spikeball club dwindling due to COVID-19. The student came to him and told him he was thinking about transferring because the spikeball club had been his only way of finding friends on campus.
“That really stuck with me,” Russell said. “This spikeball club has more to it than just spikeball.”
The story struck Russell and pushed him along his journey as president. He re-registered the club and put in the work to create an outreach team to assist him and the other executive members of the spikeball club in restoring the club on campus and restoring its former community-oriented priorities. He dug deeper into the connections that lay beneath the game and centered the club around that.
“I’ve always been a huge people person,” Russell said. “That's why it's so important for me to facilitate those types of bonds in my club between my members. I don't want them just showing up, having fun at spikeball and then going their separate ways and not talking outside of it.”
Each week, Gruenke gets former fraternity members, activists and low-level athletes sitting in front of his desk pleading their case for an organization with a majority following that graduated years before.
Despite the bleakness of the situation, Gruenke has seen it as an opportunity to improve the involvement system.
The Involvement Calculator was born from Gruenke and the Career Involvement Center’s optimism. In lieu of the cancelled 2020 Involvement Fair, the center presented students with a detailed questionnaire designed to mimic the fair on a personal level, providing students with a detailed list of five organizations catered directly towards each individual.
“That’s not a computer that does that,” Gruenke said. “Those are all individually read by a person … That's basically what our staff does all summer.”
The calculator is the newest installment in Bobcat Student Orientation, and it yielded a response from over 3,000 students eager for any way to get involved.
“I felt really badly for students that were missing out on the traditional college experience,” Grunke said. “I wanted to do whatever we could to make sure they got the best of whatever we could offer.”
Now, Gruenke said the university is reaching the pinnacle of its involvement recovery phase. Not only are more organizations popping up on campus, but students have shown interest in reinstating past groups that were victims of the pandemic.
Even so, the students interested in leading the organizations still have a long way to go.
“Many of these students have never even seen a fully functioning organization, and now they’re president of one,” Gruenke said. “We are trying to help them transition into those roles.”
Lily Wittman, a sophomore studying sports management and president of the sports management fraternity Sigma Alpha Sigma Mu, is one of those students Gruenke was talking about. Wittman is a sophomore learning from the remnants of the organization’s returning members about the process of the organization.
Though Wittman is an underclassman in just her first in-person semester with the fraternity, she knew her organization inside and out, which she would have to, considering the struggles the sports management fraternity has faced.
Before COVID-19, Sigma Alpha Sigma Mu was seen as a very selective and prestigious organization with GPA standards, an intensive interview process and a strict level of professionalism upheld throughout its 40-50 members. However, as numbers began to dwindle in the fall of 2020 and recruitment events were moved online, the fraternity was presented with a brand-new struggle.
The fraternity began to suffer from declining recruitment numbers despite attempts to keep the organization going in an online setting, Wittman said. However, it was more difficult than expected to maintain the same number of members, let alone foster the same culture, when each meeting was on a computer screen.
Even as an incoming freshman at the time, Wittman knew the organization was too special to give up on, despite not having met any of her fellow members in-person.
“They all made sure to know my name, my major, where I was from and I just felt special,” Wittman said. “So, I wanted to make sure that I put all my effort into bringing everything back.”
Unfortunately, some things were impossible to save, including the semesterly networking trips that serve as a core aspect of the fraternity, Wittman said. Losing the trips during COVID-19 decreased the professional and career-oriented value the organization had once sustained, making it even more difficult to convince new students of the fraternity's value.
To assist younger leaders, the Career Involvement Center created a written guide for executive leadership teams and hosted training days to enforce a strong leadership-based structure for the organizations to work from.
“(It’s) getting them back in that mindset of ‘Why did they join a student org?’” Gruenke said.
Though the effects of COVID-19 still linger in student organizations today, members’ passion for the organizations have begun the revival process.
OU Women’s Rugby has worked its way up to a 15-player roster, Richman said after a year’s worth of recruiting. Though this is the minimum number of players necessary, the team has been able to play through a successful fall season and attend the annual Nash Bash Rugby Festival this spring.
Though the team still has some recovery work to do, Richman said confidently that they have trained their members to maintain the inviting, yet tough, culture as they pass the organization on to younger generations of women in rugby. The team will undoubtedly reach and surpass their former roster size, but until then, Richman said she could not be happier with the hands she has left the program in.
Similarly, the Bobcats Spikeball Club has maintained 15-20 consistent members that meet each day to play the beloved game. As they make their way to the casual practices, Russell observes his community grow stronger and deeper.
“It’s been important to me because this is one of the best ways for me to be active, along with meeting a lot of new people,” Alex Graff, a 2022 graduate and former treasurer of the Spikeball Club, said.
Graff said though spikeball is fun, he values the friendships that the club fosters just as much, and Russell’s leadership has heightened that sense of community.
“(Mark’s) whole personality is just very energetic and welcoming,” Graff said. “He’s great at the whole public speaking thing, so he’s been great with making people feel involved.”
Russell, with the help of his fellow club leaders and outreach team, have set up many events over the past year alone, including formal tournaments that invite students from the University of Cincinnati and The Ohio State University, but also date parties to build the relationships within the club.
“I just want all of OU to know and be ready,” Russell said. “Spikeball club is going to be a large club here at OU. I can feel it.”
Though Sigma Alpha Sigma Mu has not quite reached the same amount of involvement as it once had before the pandemic, Wittman said the 35 current members they have recruited over the previous two years reflect the same values and standards that were expected before the campus shutdown.
Additionally, the organization has made up for its previous loss of the national networking trips by taking three this year to Columbus, Detroit and Pittsburgh.
“It's so different shaking hands with somebody instead of meeting them like on Zoom,” Wittman said. “That's why we did so many trips. Even if it is an hour to Columbus, it's still physically meeting that person, and they're going to remember your face.”
With plans already in the works for future trips to places such as New York City, Sigma Alpha Sigma Mu expects to have fully recovered from the effects of COVID-19 on involvement by the fall.
“This semester was, ‘We just need to get back on our feet,’” Wittman said. “We just wanted to do so many events at once instead of focusing on a big consulting project, but that will be our focus for the fall.”
As time goes on, OU organizations will improve at different rates. Whether it is the level of involvement or the frequency of activities, organizations undoubtedly need time to improve aspects of their organizations before restoring them to their most efficient and enjoyable state.
However, improvement has been a constant throughout nearly all student organizations after COVID-19, and this can only be boiled down to genuine interest and affinity for the organizations’ purposes and their members.