Women’s History Month
Female Founders: The Stories of Patsy Kott and DeAun Woosley
Commemorating the women behind Outdoor Adventures and Fitness & Wellness
Story by Mason Kautz
For nearly a century, Texas A&M Rec Sports has offered a multiplicity of programs to students and the Bryan/College Station community. What once began exclusively as an intramural department has, over time, expanded to include other offerings within the general sector of “wellness”, including Outdoor Adventures and Fitness & Wellness, both of which were founded by women.
This Women’s History Month, we recognize the founders of these programs as essential chapters of the Rec Sports story.
Patsy Kott | Outdoor Adventures
During the mid-1980s, then Intramural graduate assistant Patsy Kott spent countless hours in her graduate program with the Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences. For her summative project, she sought to create an outdoor program within Rec Sports.
At the time, the only outdoor program at Texas A&M was managed by the Memorial Student Center, and in a spell of poetic timing, the MSC outdoor program was being sunset. All gear affiliated with the MSC outdoor program was set to be stored in surplus, left to collect dust or be swept by any curious staff member.
Understanding the opportunity that lay in front of her, Kott seized the outdoor equipment and approached then director Dennis Corrington for funding to create TAMU Outdoors. The program would be created in 1985 as her graduate project, and over time TAMU Outdoors would mature into modern-day Outdoor Adventures, with her leadership as director guiding the way.
“In ’95, we built the rec center, and in the rec center we included a climbing wall, so we built a designated space for Outdoor Adventures,” Jason Kurten, Associate Director of Programs said. “That’s where her office was, and she was able to hire a coordinator.”
Kurten continued, “I ran the climbing program with her, and then I got into paddling through her and began working with the trip program more. Then, I took over as director whenever she retired.”
As the founder of the Outdoor Adventures program, Kott oversaw the development of student staff, ascertaining that even a new program can operate with the same legitimacy and the same quality of service as those old. In fact, her passion for the outdoors was championed best in her everyday labors, not in the glamor and showmanship of job titles and press releases.
“Patsy wasn’t going to be that person out in the front of the crowd,” Todd Grier, the current Outdoor Adventures director said. “she was just going to do good work and connect with people on a one-on-one level”.
Grier continued, “[Kott and Kurten] worked in my day-to-day. They challenged me to be better, they challenged me to grow into a better professional, a better person, and that better version of who I wanted to be.”
It was no wonder that Kott preferred the quiet work of developing others to the grandiosity of lucrative titles. Kott always dreamed of having her own children, even saving a copy of Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” for her child, but her latter years at Rec Sports were unfortunately busied by a fight against cancer. Kott would retire in 2013 before passing away a few years later.
To this effect, Kurten said, “The Outdoor Adventures program was her baby. It was her child; she conceived of it, she nurtured it, she grew it into maturity, and she imbued in it her values. The outdoor program, and by extension the people that work there, and by extension the people that go on those trips, are all in a way her children.”
Outdoor Adventures continues to deliver on Kott’s mission and today grants students and the B/CS community the opportunity to explore beyond regularly scheduled concrete days and explore the wonders of the great outdoors.
DeAun Woosley | Fitness & Wellness
Between RecXercise, specialty fitness, fitness events, boot camps, and wellness coaching, it’s difficult to imagine that Fitness & Wellness is the design of a single person: DeAun Woosley.
Concurrent with the opening of the Student Rec Center in 1995, Woosley was hired as the first director of Fitness. At the time, the department’s initiative was to expand its offerings to include more than just intramural sports, so with the new fall semester came a dawn for the Fitness program. In that formative fall semester of 1995, hiring and training occupied Woosley’s days as fitness classes would be scheduled and introduced to the Texas A&M student body.
“I put out an advertisement that said, ‘interested in teaching group fitness? Show up at this time’, and probably 25 people showed up – students, girls – and I hired all 25.”
For that fall, Fitness only offered three classes: step aerobics, high-impact aerobics, and body-sculpting/weights. By the end of the 90s, the ever growing popularity of Texas A&M Fitness meant new classes would continue to be added to the roster, including the likes of Zumba, rowing, yoga, Pilates, and cycling. Many of these programs would come from the recommendations of the student instructors, a fact that gives Woosley pride.
“A lot of times the instructors would come to me and say, ‘I’ve got a great idea for another exercise program; would you be willing to go with it?’ And I went ‘yes,’” Woosley said. “I felt like they had the pulse of what would be successful, and most of the time their ideas worked, and they just jumped in.”
Despite this exponential growth, Woosley continued to work as the lone full-time Fitness staff; she was a one-woman show for about 15 years before even the first graduate assistant would be hired, and regardless of its infancy, Rec Sports Fitness would be the one of only a few fitness programs in Bryan/College Station for quite some time.
“We were about the only thing in town; there were hardly any studios or gyms,” Woosley said. “We were the fitness program, so most of our classes were packed. We would have 60-70 in a class.”
Woosley’s legacy in the Fitness & Wellness program extends beyond her retirement and far beyond Aggieland. She has two successors in Director Anna Taggart and Assistant Director Miranda Price, and the program continues to expand its programming to this day.
As a reflection of the program she founded, Woosley said, “the [Fitness] program at Texas A&M has always been the #1 program in the state of Texas. When I retired, it was on top. It remains on top, and Anna Taggart and Miranda Price got us through COVID, which was probably the hardest time for Rec Sports.”
Even more, the student instructors and graduate assistants of the Fitness & Wellness program have exceeded beyond their collegiate labors and persevered into the workforce.
“There are probably over 50 instructors that were working with me during those years that have started their own programs and are now role models and presenters internationally,” Woosley said.