Community Recreation Director, City of Saint Paul Parks and Recreation

My name is Jody Griffin and I work with the City of Saint Paul Department of Parks and Recreation and I am a community recreation director. We have 25 community recreation centers. And we have Como Zoo. We have a couple golf courses. We have a couple outdoors pools and an indoor pool. Miles and miles of trails. Athletic department, and that's where I specialize, is in the athletic department. Well, we oversee the adults through youth, down to around the eight, nine year-olds and we organize and administer all the athletic schedules, the leagues, getting the officials, setting up the leagues, training coaches, and so forth. So the four seasons right now, we just finished up basketball for the winter. Spring is volleyball, futsal, which is indoor soccer. And summer's the baseball, soccer. We do a lacrosse class within that. Fall, we do football, outdoor soccer. Again, we do another lacrosse class. And then back to the basketball. It's a daily grind of constantly registering the teams. Getting the individuals to registers at the rec centers. Then they turn their teams into us and we take over from there. So it's non-stop. Trying to find officials, training them, the coaches that come through the rec centers and working with them. And then getting schedules out and getting everything lined up from the community site locations for the hosts. You're working nights or a weekend, then that means one of the days later in the week, you're working a shorter day. Yes, you need to be able to work nights, you need to be able to work weekends, which those are big things that folks are like huh, I thought it was just going to be a few days. You get a field trip or whatever it might be, you really have to have flexibility in our profession.