Tucked away on the third floor of the Chapman Center, Jacob Tingle keeps the door to his office open. Tingle’s office is decorated with sports paraphernalia from all over the globe, family photos, stacks of books and even photos of himself as a referee. His heavy involvement in sports is not only represented through office decorations, but in his influential years at Trinity.
Tingle played basketball at Trinity before graduating in 1995 with a B.A. in communication and religion. Tingle explained how he found that his experience in sports related to his studies at Trinity.
“Those two majors were really awesome,” Tingle said. “A lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of kind of critical analysis. They were a lot about other people, and so gained a lot of perspective about folks that didn’t have similar kind[s] of backgrounds, similar experiences to me and that mapped on to a lot about what I saw and experienced as a basketball player from the time I first started playing basketball. Sports, for me … have always been a place where it’s easier to find connection with someone that is different from you.”
After graduation, Tingle’s boss at the intramural office, Jim Porter, introduced him to a graduate assistantship with the National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association at the University of Maryland.
“I got a stipend to go to grad school for free, and I worked, supposed to work 20 hours a week. It ended up being closer to 60, because I just loved it,” Tingle said.
The program transitioned to a full-time job, but when Jim Porter retired in 2000, Tingle returned to Trinity to work full-time as assistant athletic director. While working on his doctorate, Tingle moved up the administrative chain and became the associate athletic director in 2004. These achievements in his career led him to be appointed as the Interim department chair of the physical education program in 2009. In this role, Tingle designed and became the director of the sports management minor.
“Sport management, as a field, is truly interdisciplinary,” Tingle said. “A huge part of the reason why the program is a minor is for two reasons. If people want to work in sports, they have to be good at something. The way to do that is to have a major discipline. The other reason is not everyone who pursues the minor is interested in working in sports.”
Organizations collaborating with his classes this semester are Spurs Give, a program launched by the San Antonio Spurs to support those in need in the local community, and First Tee, which uses golf to teach children life skills and foster growth for those lacking opportunities. He expanded on the unique, hands-on experiences the minor can connect Trinity students with, including future volunteer work and internships.
“[Students] have an opportunity to set learning goals, to reflect on those goals, and so they go and get hands-on experience, and then in the classroom, we talk about making sense of what they’re doing,” Tingle said. “They’ll be working all semester as kind of little mini consulting firms, doing lots of research, benchmarking and then doing a presentation for those three organizations, making recommendations based on whatever the problem was.”
Tingle’s Sport in England course provides another opportunity for experiential learning in the field of sports.
“There’s a lot of thinking about sport in its place in a global society, not just local. And how can you make sense of your local by better understanding the global? Those are three ways that we really try to give students lots of different kinds of opportunities for experiential learning,” Tingle said. “The Sport in England class doesn’t happen without our Center for International Engagement. The internships don’t happen without our Center for Experiential Learning and Career Success. We’re very appreciative of the awesome pockets of expertise that exist on campus.”
While he is heavily involved in sports management, Tingle is still engaged in curriculum writing for the first-year experience Creative Genius course. In the founding of the class, Bill Crist — a faculty member Tingle had taken a class with as an undergrad — asked him to help write the syllabus.
“It was just really cool to be able to be asked by someone who I respected deeply as an academic, and also as a person, to participate,” Tingle said.
Tingle explained why he continues to teach Creative Genius.
“I’ve taught it 10 times with the same partner, [David] Heller, all 10 years. Super lucky with respect to that,” Tingle said. “What is super awesome is that out of 142 students over the 10 years, maybe 20 have taken another class from me, but I can tell you something about almost all 142 of them because we keep in touch. I get to know them really, really well, whether they take another class from me or not. Getting a chance to interact with really amazing Trinity students gives me a huge kind of point of pride to see you cross the stage, and I’m so excited for you.”
