Meet the ‘Fantastic Four’ at RIT Wellness Program

The lessons go well beyond the sports

By John Addyman

Ed Sherman, the soccer adjunct professor in RIT’s wellness program, watches as a game warms up in the gym during a rainy morning.

Now that we’re of an age where we have kids — or grandkids — going to college, we’re concerned about some things. Will the program be right for our kids? Will they get what they need to find a job after graduation? Does the college they chose breed success?

And in asking those questions, we hope we make the right decisions to help our kids grow and learn and prosper at the school they’ve chosen.

Most importantly we ask, “Will college prepare our kids to meet life?”

Does that college do more than teach processes and build knowledge bases? How do we know that the college even worries about that other stuff?

The Rochester Institute of Technology thinks carefully about it and lays out resources and populates classes in its immense wellness program — rolling out life lessons with a huge variety of sports options.

Dave Hunt, who coaches racquet sports in the RIT wellness program, shows his class how to serve with a decided spin in table tennis.

Sports? Teaching life skills?

Believe it.

Four proponents, successful servants of the effort, are coaches Ed Sherman, 59, Alex Sleeman, 74, Steve Romano, 68, and Dave Hunt, 74 — kind of like the “Fantastic Four” of Marvel Comics fame — all adjunct professors in the RIT wellness program.

How is learning a sport going to make you a happier, more successful systems analyst or AI programmer or forensic scientist?

Start with golf.

Golf?

“It’s a golf class but one of the things I want them to take away from my golf class is the etiquette part of it,” said Sleeman, the golf coach. “So when they’re done at the end of the day on the links, they take their hats off, shake hands and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ You don’t get a lot of that anymore.

“The etiquette part of golf is my biggest thing. I want my students to feel comfortable. They’re going to leave here and have these wonderful high-falutin’ jobs and they’re going to be asked to play golf. I want them to feel comfortable — they’ll know how to dress; they’ll know how to talk; they’ll know what the etiquette is on the golf course, whether their game is good or not — that doesn’t matter — it’s how they get along with the other people and how they know what do to, how to act. That’s my biggest takeaway. That’s what I want them to know.”

In his class, Sleeman’s biggest thrill is to watch students from so many different countries “come together, with different personalities; they come together as a group and get along. I wish they could take that into the world. I think our program is developing that the ability to get together, to live together, and have fun together and put away the differences.”

The RIT wellness program includes dance courses, fitness courses, health and life support courses, health and wellness courses, martial arts courses, music courses, outdoor education and recreation courses, even ROTC. Students get involved in the pool, the courts, the field and outdoors.

“Wellness education at RIT takes learning beyond the classroom with hands-on learning opportunities that span across all areas of health and well-being,” says the RIT website.

For the guys in the Fantastic Four, their wellness programs are near and dear to them for what they bring out. The guys are all vastly experienced and enthusiastic in what they teach — beyond the sports themselves.

Alex Sleeman, a wellness coach at RIT, guides a student in seeing the lay of the land on a fairway in a golf booth.

Sleeman teaches in a small golf instruction area where players are hitting into a large screen and a computer that tells them where they’ve hit the ball on that hole. He helps players look at the larger idea of what’s happening on the course. And he watches kids change.

“It’s what we teach the kids to do,” he said, “to be together. One of the things I love is to see how they progress. Kids who have never had a golf club in their hands before and they become successful. Some of them win my little putting trophies and they take that trophy home with them.

Sleeman has been with RIT since 1986, coaching racquet sports. Off campus, he’s a bagpiper with the Keystone Pipes and Drums.

“There were 5,000 students here when I started,” he said. “There are 19,000 now.”

Romano taught phys ed in Rochester and Webster schools for 35 years, retiring in 2016. He coached high school and college football for 49 years and high school lacrosse for 39 years.

He’s an avid runner, marathoner and biathlete — out the door at 6 a.m. every day to get in his run.

“I’ve been in the gym and on the field my whole life,” he said. “Doing this now at the college level with so much diversity here and so many kids from all over, I’m lucky to have this opportunity. RIT is an incredible place to teach. Students are from all over the world and are so committed to learning and growing as young adults.”

Like Sleeman, he has an approach to his classes that mirrors what the others believe.

“Diversity is what this wellness program is all about,” Romano said. “Having kids from all over — India, China, Russia — whatever the case may be, all being in one setting, playing one game. Watching these kids working together and then high-fiving one another, it’s just incredible. That’s the wellness base. We just use all these other things, the games, to bring kids together…even getting kids on the same team.

“Kids are sometimes reluctant. You tell them to get a partner. And they’re not comfortable doing that because they’ve never done that before in whatever country they’ve come from. So, when they’re standing next to someone else, there’s all of a sudden this little comfort thing. With a little encouragement, they eventually say to themselves, ‘I can do this.’

Steve Romano, the football instructor in the RIT wellness program, teaches students from all over the world who may be getting their first up-close glimpse of the game and its unusually shaped ball.

“Then you tell them, ‘You two go get two others and you guys make up your own team.’ It takes a whole semester to get that comfort zone, but it’s cool to see.”

Romano believes that getting people together “feels like more of what we do.” His colleagues — “the veteran guys — have taught me that it’s different for kids who have been living in the same neighborhood to get together than for kids who have been living on the same earth, far away and are coming together here in Rochester at RIT. It’s a cool place. It really is.”

Sherman has come to the wellness program through the athletics department. He was hired 25 years ago as the assistant women’s soccer coach.

“Then the program needed a soccer instructor. I said I’d be happy to do that. One class led to two. Two led to three and three led to six. Now I’m teaching 21 classes,” he said.

While that may sound like he’s busy, Sherman is easily recognized by his ever-present bottle of Mountain Dew that helps fuel his after-hours business of flipping houses. He has rented out some of those flipped houses to students. He knows the breed well after teaching for 47 years. And his longevity is about to bring him to a unique life situation: “Maybe in a year or so I’ll be coaching a grandchild of one of my former players,” he said.

Three generations under the same coach. “Now I’m close in age to the grandparents of the kids I’m coaching. That’s crazy,” he added.

He believes each member of the Fantastic Four is on the exact same page in their approach.

“We teach life through sport,” he said. “We all have backgrounds in different things. I have a background in a lot of things but soccer was my main thing. I’ve done a ton of sports — I’ve coached many sports. I’ve played every sport I could get my hands on. The big thing we’re trying to do — with the little kids I coach soccer on my travel team and the big kids I coach here — we’re teaching life skills through our medium, which is sports. Many kids unfortunately are from many different backgrounds from all over the world and sadly, they’re not the most social kids in the world, sometimes.

“One of our big pushes is trying to get them ready for life. You have to be able to talk to people, you have to be able to look people eye-to-eye, you’ve got to be able to communicate with people. Some of these kids struggle with that. Everything we do revolves around getting them social, doing things together, getting them to cooperate and hopefully enjoying what they’re doing in the meantime. If we can get the kids having fun, laughing, smiling, talking to each other — we’re doing our job.”

Hunt had to make some family choices right out of college. A superb tennis and table tennis player (nationally ranked as a teen), he wanted to teach at Cortland or Brockport, but also wanted to stay close to his family, so he joined the family business, Hunt’s Hardware and worked with his dad, brother and sister for almost five decades, until the business closed.

Then the job at RIT fell into his lap.

“What I didn’t expect when I came here was to be working with these three amazing guys. I expected a wonderful faculty and everything, but to have these guys in my age group and to become integrated into the Fantastic Four is something that was totally unexpected. I loved the Fantastic Four as a kid but I never thought I’d be joining them,” he said.

“In my classes, I try to teach the interdependence of playing partners. This is the quality-of-life partner education. Kids can talk to us like they cannot with other instructors; they can talk to us at any time about almost anything. And they do. We establish a friendly bond with our students. I think that’s one of the benefits of teaching in a situation where you’re teaching movement, where things are very dynamic,” he said. “We’re not sitting in a chair. We’re really bonding and connecting with our students. It’s one of the beauties of the program.

“What I learned from Ed Sherman, who is very creative, is the ‘learn through play’ approach. He taught me that the best instruction often comes from fellow students and the games themselves. As instructors, we add our expertise and teach self-belief and the joys of sports participation.”

Hunt asked his colleagues how much longer they’d want to be part of the wellness program, how much longer would they like to teach. It’s clear the “wellness” part of the program has affected them all.

“They each said they see this as a ‘working retirement,” Hunt explained, “where they plan to do this for as long as they can and as long as they are mentally sharp and physically capable. The ‘physically capable’ definitely applies to Lex and me, as we will both turn 75 this year. We plan to go as long as we can…maybe mid-80s for me. Ed and Steve are a bit younger and are willing to continue for years. The attraction is teaching what we want, when we want, having wonderful students and being able to teach alongside of each other.”