We’ve spent much of our time on this podcast speaking about the burnout associated with working in college sports and how it affected our personal and work lives. In this week’s episode, we speak to someone who has quantified our feelings into groundbreaking research.
Dr. Matt Huml, an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati, teaches sport administration courses in the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services. He is also on the forefront of the work issues that people working in college sports face every day. We ran across a piece in Sportico he and Dr. Elizabeth Taylor wrote in 2022 titled - Why Employees Are Fleeing The College Athletics Industry - and quickly chased down the rabbit hole of his work, which explains a lot about the current state of the business. We identified with his research, personified it, and we wanted to talk with him.
In 2019, he helped write a groundbreaking study titled Workaholism In Sport: A Mediated Model Of Work–Family Conflict And Burnout, which detailed the conflict that many of us have faced doing a job that we were passionate about. He’s also studied remote work for college athletic department personnel, he’s done research on the spouses of sports workers, and recently, published a study called Working to Live or Living to Work? How Daily Work Experiences Affect Sport Employees’ Biometric Health.
In this episode, we’ll talk to Dr. Huml about some of the things he found out in his initial work on burnout (5:04), his findings and insight into work-family dynamics (9:55), the jaw-dropping turnover rate in collegiate sports (12:02), what burnout really is (18:21), how culture applies to actions on the field and not for the athletic department (27:45), do athletic directors really understand what’s happening (29:50), would staffers ever walk out (35:25), what he learned from actual staffers to try to even out work-life balance (36:50), and his advice for senior leadership to address burnout and to actually value the time of their staffers (37:20).
Dr. Huml also answers questions about generational trends in the industry (40:28), whether higher-ups will start building athletic culture around real family (41:30), and what would be the one big thing he would recommend for athletic directors (44:39). We wrap up the interview with Dr. Huml asking us a big question (58:46).
Special thanks to Dr. Huml for his time and insight for this fascinating interview.
For more of Dr. Huml’s research, you can find it here.
Oh, and before we forget, we want to thank our newest sponsors, Slim’s Magic Carpet Rides and We Build Moats (32:19). We hope to see their multi-figured check in the mail soon.
This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.
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