General | November 06, 2023

PHILADELPHIA - This month's guest of the Penn Athletics podcast is newly hired Associate AD/Director of Campus Recreation, Shelbi Long, who was hired at Penn over the summer. She talks about her vision for campus recreation at Penn, the positive effect that fitness can have on wellness and the campus community, and much more.

To listen to all Penn Athletics podcasts, visit www.pennathletics.com/podcasts. 

Long was most recently the Director of Campus Recreation at Sonoma State University for the past four years. A 2002 graduate of Lock Haven University in health and physical education, Long makes the move back East to lead Penn's expansive campus recreation program. She began her career while pursuing a master's in liberal arts at Lock Haven as the graduate assistant for intramural sports before taking a full-time role at Penn State Altoona as the assistant director of campus recreation from 2004-07.

She moved to the West Coast in 2007 as coordinator of recreation and later Associate Director of Recreation at Cal State Polytechnic Pomona where she stayed for 12 years and provided leadership for the oversight, development and evaluation of intramurals, sport clubs, fitness, adventure education, camps and marketing with an annual participation of more than 10,000 students, faculty, staff and alumni. Long also provided leadership in planning for a new $60m recreation center and developed the recreation programs budget to meet expense and revenue goals for a $4m budget. In 2019, Long became Director of Campus Recreation at Sonoma State University, providing leadership of the recreation operation and programs.