Teaching the next ‘champions for change’ in sport

A new Recreation, Sport and Tourism course—Inclusive Champions for Change through Sport, or IC-ChangeS for short—is challenging Illinois students to understand how sports can provide a platform for positive social change.

And what better way to learn than leading their own classes with local high school athletes?

Lead instructor Yannick Kluch, an assistant professor in RST, piloted this course in the spring. His team found a willing partner in University Laboratory High School, the small high school on the Urbana campus.

“I’ve always thought about why people are not doing more to engage high school athletes in social justice work, because they do tend to have a platform in their community,” Kluch said. “The idea had been brewing in my head for years, but I never felt like I could turn it into reality. But here at Illinois, I felt supported right away to make it happen.”

The pilot of this course felt like a step outside the comfort zone to many of the undergrads who enrolled. They would have to don their professors’ caps while wading through potentially prickly topics with their peers. But students left feeling transformed by the experience.

“Being in that smaller group made me feel comfortable sharing my ideas and thoughts, knowing I was in a safe space,” said Lauren Ratajczak, a senior in RST. “I felt like I actually was making a difference in people’s lives. These students can go on to pursue social justice and change in their futures.”

The syllabus explored key social justice topics, mapped onto the sports world: What does systemic injustice mean and look like? What are social identities and unconscious biases? How do these concepts play out for modern-day sport icons?

Kluch researches how sport is used as a platform to advance equity and inclusion on a societal level. When he arrived at Illinois, he quickly connected with Mariela Fernandez, an associate professor in RST who researches environmental justice.

When they heard about the University of Illinois’ Call to Action grants, the project seemed like a perfect fit. The annual grant program from the Chancellor’s office funds research and community engagement projects that tackle social inequities head-on.

With $90,338 from the Chancellor’s grant, and a team of collaborators including RST doctoral student Solomon Siskind, RST master’s student Kevin Gillooly, and Anna Baeth from the national sports inclusivity nonprofit Athlete Ally, the IC-ChangeS team got to work. The group later added two staff members from Uni High as well as a local high school student from Champaign Central High School to the team.

Uni High offered up four sessions of their normal Physical Education class periods for RST to work with. The organizers quickly realized, to best deliver the material, the students would have to become the teachers.

“I wanted to leave the students with a new sense of agency when it comes to social justice topics,” Kluch said. “That was a key goal, to make students not shy away from this. Especially when these topics are under attack.” 

‘You can make a difference’

In one of the first IC-ChangeS sessions, Uni High student Aldo Zepeda Flores walked up to a large piece of paper hanging on the wall, with the question “What does social injustice look like to you?” written on the top.

One by one, students jotted down their answers on the sheet before discussing with the group.

“It was really nice because you got to see everyone else’s perspective and everyone else’s opinions, but it also gives a sense of privacy when you can express stuff a lot more than when you’re called on in class,” Zepeda Flores said.

The Uni High students participated in four sessions during their usual gym class period, with the support of their high school PE teachers.

With only a handful of sessions, each IC-ChangeS session was designed to be as interactive as possible. In one activity, the high schoolers played a card game called “Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game.” Two cards were quickly flipped, one with a noun and the other with an adjective. If the words were “Muslim” and “athlete,” for example, whoever can first think of a person that combined the two terms won the round. Unbeknownst to the high schoolers at the time, the game had been developed to address unconscious biases at play.

“It was no thinking, no time for analyzing the question or what you were about to say,” Zepeda Flores said. “And then you start to realize, maybe I’m thinking in a different way than I should be. You acknowledge your own biases.”

For Flores, who has played soccer his entire life, what resonated most was the sense of belonging: “I’ve done club sports my entire life, a person’s sense of belonging can affect their style of play. I reflected on my own experience, on the times I wasn’t as welcoming, or the times I felt excluded.”

“It gave me perspective of how in every environment, not just sports, my class, and home, you want everyone to feel a sense of belonging, where they all feel welcome,” he said.

Each session was interactive and carefully planned, but the RST undergraduates were the main shapers of the instruction, Kluch said. They were free to figure out how to best deliver lessons to the group of young athletes.

“It’s not just us telling the undergrads, ‘teach that,’ it’s us asking the undergrads, ‘How would you teach that? What would you teach?’ and then they take agency and facilitate,” Kluch said. “They were super creative, and it resonated with the high schoolers because they found engaging ways to talk about these issues.”

The RST students began to make connections between their own lives and the class content – and used that to connect with the high schoolers. “We were teaching the high school athletes, no matter how small the community, you can make a difference,” Ratajczak said. These young athletes do have power and they do have a voice.”

Having supervised the pilot run of the course at Uni High, Uni Physical Education Teacher Luke Bronowski feels the innovative format would be appealing for other high schools. At Uni, the students looked forward to the interactive sessions.

“We have a diverse population at Uni High, some students who’ve experienced social injustice, and so I think it was eye-opening not only for the high school students to hear some of these stories, but I felt the college students were learning from our students, too,” Bronowski said. “Our students were getting tools to use their platform as athletes to be agents of change.” 

Lasting bonds

Lexie Breymeyer came to the University of Illinois in 2021 from Hoopeston, a town of 5,000 roughly an hour drive away from campus. Prior to enrolling in this course, concepts like microaggressions and cultural competence were relatively foreign to her, she said.

“This class has singlehandedly changed my mindset, my values, how I look at the world. I could not ask for more from a class—it’s truly changed me as an individual,” Breymeyer said. 

After graduating in the spring from the RST program, Breymeyer was accepted to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She credits IC-ChangeS’ content for inspiring her to go into sports journalism.

“Sport is not just a game, it’s a tool, and learning how to use sport as a tool for change opens countless amounts of doors. For journalism, I want to do sports broadcasting, setting up a platform to have these uncomfortable conversations,” Breymeyer said. 

Even at Northwestern, she’s still in touch with her IC-Changes classmates: after the semester of IC-ChangeS concluded in May, their group chat is still active, updating each other on their lives and keeping up with the news, just like they did in class.

“We would spend time processing what was going on in higher ed,” she said. “The world we live in is hectic right now, having a safe space to discuss those things and how it relates to what we were teaching students was one of my favorite things about the class overall. It was a community where we could talk about tough topics.”

The plan for this course is to “scale up,” Kluch said. He hopes the peer-to-peer class framework is replicable for other high schools and colleges in-state and throughout the country, which can be adapted for topics with a specific social justice focus, such as inclusion for people with disabilities or sexual violence prevention. He’s submitted for the course to become a permanent part of the Recreation, Sport and Tourism curriculum.

“The pilot run couldn’t have gone better, and I am so proud of our RST students, the IC-ChangeS athletes, and our partners at Uni High for keeping an open mind and making the course as impactful as it has been,” Kluch said. “This course represents the very fabric of what we do in RST; we use our passion for recreation, sport and tourism to make a difference in the world.”

Editor’s note:

To reach Yannick Kluch, email ykluch@illinois.edu

Interested in enrolling in an RST course this spring? Visit https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2026/spring/RST for the full offerings.

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