04/11/18
HAYS, Kan. – Teams from five universities will join a team from Fort Hays State University on the FHSU campus this weekend for the first-ever Collegiate Leadership Competition in the Heartland Region.

Arrival and check-in will be from 6:30-7 p.m. Friday, April 13, in the Memorial Union’s Black and Gold Room.

“The Department of Leadership Studies at FHSU was honored to be asked to serve as a host site for the Collegiate Leadership Competition,“ said Dr. Jill Arensdorf, chair of the Department of Leadership Studies.

“Hosting has been not only a unique opportunity for the FHSU team to participate in the competition on their home campus, but also for other Midwestern schools to get to experience the innovative and beautiful Hays campus and city of Hays,” she said.

The other competitors are the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs; Dodge City Community College; Emporia State University; Iowa State University, Ames; and Washburn University.

“Developing skills through multiple hands-on learning opportunities is a best-practice in education,” said Arensdorf. “FHSU chose to have a team in the competition to give students a skills-based learning experience about leadership.”

The competitions, which involve a series of activities, each followed by a debriefing session, will be Saturday, April 14, in the Black and Gold Room. The activities involve groups and their appointed leaders solving simple physical problems under conditions that make the tasks much more involved.

“The activities for the individual competitions are kept under wraps, even from the host campus’s logistics coordinator,” said Kaley Klaus, instructor of leadership studies at FHSU, who is also the logistics coordinator for the competition.

“So I can’t really say much about them,” she said. “But the competition is grounded in the idea of ‘deliberate practice.’ You practice how to drive, play a sport, cook, how to do math, etc. This competition gives students the opportunity to deliberately practice the leadership skills we teach them in academic leadership programs.”

Collegiate Leadership Competition is a nonprofit college leadership program founded in 2015. The CLC’s regions are the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, New England and Ohio Valley.