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"Your First Ski Trip! A Kid’s Guide For Your First Ski Adventure" is an illustrated children’s book centering around ski and snowboarding knowledge and safety.
"Your First Ski Trip! A Kid’s Guide For Your First Ski Adventure" is an illustrated children’s book centering around ski and snowboarding knowledge and safety.

RST Alumni Collaborate on Children’s Book

By SAM RINK

Some find online classes to be isolating, but for two graduates of the College of Applied Health Sciences’ Recreation, Sport and Tourism online master’s program, the opposite was true. Charlie Hoffmann and Sean Baptist got to know each other while participating in the program in 2023, and it led to an artistic collaboration.

Hoffmann and Baptist, who have never met in person, spent the past year writing "Your First Ski Trip! A Kid’s Guide For Your First Ski Adventure," an illustrated children’s book centering around ski and snowboarding knowledge and safety. 

“We live a couple hours away from each other, but we've never been in the same room,” Hoffmann said. “And we both kind of have that same RST philosophy where we're happy to do a million hours of work, just so kids—young people—can enjoy themselves.”

Hoffmann and Baptist both had established careers in the recreation-sport-tourism industry before they chose to enroll in the online master’s program in 2022, but they came from very different backgrounds. Hoffmann, currently the director of recreation for the Borough of Rumson, New Jersey, found his love for recreation studies organizing basketball tournaments for his friends as a child.

Baptist, on the other hand, has a background in art, working as a freelance illustrator before he transitioned into children’s books. He got involved in community programming in New York City after taking on a position as an art educator with the parks department and subsequently helping start a rugby program.

“I decided I wanted to devote myself to recreation and public programs,” Baptist said. 

So what drew them together?      

They connected over skiing and snowboarding in their final semester in the program. Hoffmann got hooked on skiing at age 11, ran a ski club at a high school for several years as part of his career in recreation and still skis and rides for leisure today. Baptist said he didn’t click with skiing initially, but after falling in love with skateboarding, his father convinced him to get back on the slopes in his home state of Michigan and try snowboarding. It quickly became a passion. 

The idea for the book wasn’t a new one. When Hoffmann led the ski club, he noticed how little families knew about the sport. “I heard people say, ‘How come a chair is moving? What does ski patrol do? What's a black diamond?’ And that's when I was like, 'Wow. People really don't know this.' And the concept sat in my brain for a long time before it got to paper.”

So, when Baptist talked about his love of snowboarding and background as an illustrator to their shared class, it only made sense to collaborate. 

“Light bulbs went off in my head because I had the book partially written,” Hoffmann said. “I went online and looked at some of his stuff, and it was so perfectly in line with what I was looking for.”

Both of them are excited to be able to share their passion with other kids through this book in the same way they do running public sport and recreation programs in their careers.

“When a cool project comes across my desk, I'll jump on it and say, ‘Hey, this is something I want to be a part of,” Baptist said. “I really want to educate people on how to safely do this, and how it can be fun, and everything they need to experience.”

They credit the RST online master’s program for bringing them together and elevating their knowledge and network as RST professionals. Hoffmann said he particularly enjoyed the collaborative work he did in the program as a contrast to his day-to-day work life. 

“I’m literally a department of one,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to play well with others in the sandbox, but it was so much better, because they [other students] bring more to the table than I do.”

The convenience of an online education allowed Baptist to maintain his career and life in New York. Being in a master’s program has also proved useful for pursuing employment in parks, a field in which he didn’t have much experience.

“The program was not only rapidly catching me up with everyone else, but Illinois has just been the gift that keeps on giving,” he said. “And it just kind of opened up this world of opportunity where people were like, ‘Oh, OK, that's an achievement on its own, that this guy's in grad school.’”

The two still haven’t met in person, but their shared experience in the program led to a friendship and fulfilling professional collaboration for both. The book’s unlikely conception is due not only to their time at Illinois, but the values and passions that brought them to the program in the first place.

“We kind of share that mentality of just doing selfless acts just to help others fall in love with stuff like we did,” Hoffmann said.


"Your First Ski Trip! A Kid’s Guide For Your First Ski Adventure" was published by BookBaby on Dec. 19, 2024.

For more on Sean and Charlie's collaboration, check out the video below.

 

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