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Paying it forward
After high school, Jess Dixon had a plan: to become a physical education teacher.
Growing up in Stoney Creek, he spent a lot of time outside playing sports, mainly hockey, baseball, and golf, sports he continues to play to this day. “We were outdoors a lot. When I wasn’t playing sports in an organized fashion, I was doing it in an unorganized fashion. Street hockey was a big part of my youth,” Dixon said.
Over many years of playing sports, he played under many coaches, and in high school got the opportunity to do some coaching as well. His love of sports, and the insight he gained from his coaches and teachers over the years, helped him realize that he wanted to become a physical education teacher.
“I really liked the opportunity to pass on knowledge that I gained from my coaches, and my experiences to the next generation of players, to pay it forward. I also had some really terrific teachers in a lot of different subjects, but being a Phys Ed teacher just made the most sense. I thought it would be a really great career: teaching kids and helping them stay physically active.”
After high school, Dixon enrolled in Brock University’s physical education program to be followed up with Teachers College. He soon realized that the program wasn’t really going to set him up for teaching at the high school level and that it was more geared toward elementary school. “I wasn’t the only one. There were a lot of other students who felt the same way. I don’t know if it was the way they marketed it, or if I didn’t do enough research on the program, but it became very clear that it wasn’t the right fit for me.”
With it being so close to home, and Dixon enjoying his time playing on the varsity baseball team, he wasn’t interested in changing universities. As luck would have it though, he wouldn’t need to. During the second semester of his first year, the Dean of the faculty came into one of the first-year courses and informed students about a new program that was being launched the following year called Sport Management. Any student who wanted to switch could do so seamlessly, provided they met the minimum grade threshold.
“I’d never heard of that before,” he said. With it being the early days of the internet, he couldn’t find much information about it and even a meeting with the Dean didn’t provide much insight. “His response was kind of funny, he’s like, ‘I really don’t know a whole lot about it, but it’s all the rage in the US, and it’s going to be great. We’re going to hire new faculty and we’re all in on this.’”
Dixon took a leap of faith and made the switch. “Immediately, everything clicked. Everything made sense. My grades started to shoot up. I enjoyed the assignments I was doing in classes; they didn’t feel like work, it just felt like I was pursuing my passion.”
In the last year of his undergraduate degree, speakers from many universities came to Brock to talk about their graduate programs. One of those speakers was Bob Boucher, who was head of the department, and professor of Sport Management at the University of Windsor at the time.
“At that point, Windsor had a sport management undergraduate major within their Kinesiology program, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about it. They also had a master’s program. I spoke to Bob, and he invited me down to visit the school and get a sense of what I would be getting myself into.”
To make the visit, Dixon would have to take a day off from working at his job at a golf course. Boucher told him he would make it worth his while and invited him to lunch and to play a round of golf along with two other professors.
“That was the recruitment for me to come here as a student. I thought, wow, who does that? And that’s something that always stuck with me. So now whenever I have a student that’s interested in coming to our program and is willing to make the trip down to Windsor from outside of the city, I try to make it worth their while, make them feel like they’re part of our HK family.”
Dixon decided on Windsor and loved his time here under the supervision of Boucher and competing as a member of the Lancers golf team. “Working with Bob was amazing. Under Bob’s supervision, I presented twice at the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) conference as a master’s student. Bob was the first president of NASSM and he introduced me to many of his colleagues within the society at these conferences. There was great mentorship all the way through.”
Teaching at Brock and UMass
After finishing his Masters, Dixon was toying with the idea of doing a PhD when Brock called, looking for people to teach classes for them. He did not have much experience teaching, but at one point his plan was to be a teacher, so he said why not, and took another leap of faith.
He taught many different courses at Brock. However, looking back on it now, he realizes he wasn’t quite sure of what he was doing. “At that point, everything was done on my own. I had no formal training. Instead, I emulated what I had seen from other instructors but remained open to feedback from my students and colleagues. By the time I got to my second year, I started doing things differently and was having more success and was really enjoying connecting with my students, some of whom I continue to stay in touch with to this day.”
After two years of teaching, he started to realize this was the right career path for him and started exploring options for completing his PhD. Dixon chose to do his PhD in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst because he wanted to focus more on the business aspects of sport management. “I felt like I really understood the sport side of things at that point, given that both my undergrad and my masters were completed within faculties of health sciences and human kinetics, but needed to improve my business acumen. I thought if I’m going to teach this stuff, I really need to know it.”
He did a semester as a GA before they realized he could teach, at which point they started assigning him courses. “So, I taught while I was doing my PhD. Among these courses were some I already taught at Brock. I’ve always believed it takes about three times teaching a course before you have a firm grasp of it, and at that point I had taught multiple iterations of them.”
“Working with my supervisor, I also had the chance to revise and reconstruct their strategic management course which they called Sport Policy. Because of that and other experiences, I was nominated for and won the college’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.”
Dixon said this provided him with some early external validation that the work he was doing was worthy despite the lack of formal training as a teacher. This motivated him to work harder on his teaching. It also made him appreciate the value of teaching, which is firmly integrated into the PhD program in the Department of Kinesiology.
Specifically, students are required to accumulate teaching points by participating in or leading CTL workshops, going to teaching and learning conferences, serving as a GA, teaching their own courses, etc. “We built this into our curriculum and it’s something that we believe in. Teaching is a big part of your job as an academic, so you should have some understanding of what you’re doing in the classroom.”
He said it wasn’t until he returned to the University of Windsor, where he was hired after finishing his PhD, that he finally received formal training in teaching, and he credits the CTL for the role they’ve played in his development. “The CTL does a tremendous job of helping people develop as teachers.”
“Now I have a better understanding of why I do what I do in the classroom, and I can articulate it in a much better way than I ever could have before,” he said. “I understand now why some of the things I do work, and I’ve been able to tie it in with some of the literature, theories, and frameworks, but I didn’t get that until I arrived here as a faculty member.”
Winning the NASSM Distinguished Educator Award
Earlier this year, Dixon was named as this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Sport Management Educator Award by NASSM, the largest international academic society for sport management.
The award recognizes excellence in the classroom, innovation in course design and pedagogy, commitment to improving the quality of teaching and learning in the sport management discipline, and a commitment to one’s own professional development.
During his time at UMass, he completed a project that contributed toward him winning the prestigious award. Dixon was taking a course taught by his supervisor Mark McDonald where, sprinkled throughout the course, were about 4 or 5 case studies that facilitated class and group discussions. “Those were the best classes in that entire semester, those four or five classes were just head over heels better than anything else. So, I kind of said to him at the end of the semester, why don’t you teach your whole course that way?”
McDonald replied by telling him that he didn’t think there weren’t enough case studies to make it work. Dixon took on this challenge as part of an independent study class and began to assemble a database of as many case studies with sport management applications as he could find. In the end, Dixon ended up with over 300 case studies and McDonald recommended to Dixon that he teach the course.
When Dixon taught the course, every class explored a new case study. “The feedback was incredible, they loved it, but it was a lot of extra work for them. In hindsight, it was too much for the students, which required other instructors to scale things back in subsequent semesters.”
Dixon recalled getting an email from an exuberant student following the first time teaching that course. The student was being interviewed for a job and as a part of the process was asked to tell the interviewer about a problem he faced working in the sport industry and how he resolved it. The student didn’t have any experience to draw from, but instead talked about a problem in a case study and how he went about resolving it using frameworks he was taught in class. “And he got the job. In his email he said, ‘I just want to let you know that I got a job because of that class and that case study.’”
Dixon continues to develop the case study database, which now has over 1700 entries. It’s now a searchable, web-based repository that is free for anybody to access. In addition to the Sport Management Case Study Repository, Dixon was also part of a group that co-founded Case Studies in Sport Management, the only peer-reviewed journal in the field dedicated to publishing teaching case studies.
Dixon said winning the award felt like it was continuing a part of a family tree of past mentors and colleagues. Boucher, who was Dean when Dixon was hired at Windsor, won the award in 2011. Jim Wiese, his former professor at Windsor, now at Western, won the award in 2022. And McDonald, his former supervisor, received the award in 2009. “These guys are pioneers in our field, and I was fortunate enough to work with and receive mentorship from them throughout my career.”
For Dixon, wanting to become a Phys Ed teacher came about because of a love of sports and wanting to share knowledge he had gained from others. That sense of paying it forward hasn’t changed. “When it comes to teaching and mentoring students, I feel a real obligation to give back, just like the people who invested their time and energy and resources in me.”
Judging by the accolades, awards (Wayne Marino Faculty of Human Kinetics Teaching Excellence Award – 2019; UWindsor Alumni Association’s Excellence in Mentoring Award – 2016), and praise by students, he’s doing a fine job of it.
Watch a video produced by the CTL that served to introduce Jess Dixon at the annual NASSM conference, where he received his award.
Peter brings extensive expertise in multimedia to support CTL programs, website design, and special events. With around 25 years of experience in graphic and web design, he brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. He is a graduate of Print Journalism and Digital Media from Conestoga College, and and Communication, Media and Film from the University of Windsor.
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