Student Spotlight

All good Aggies love throwing on maroon and cheering for their favorite team. Sports are simply part of the Aggie tradition, and while every student walks away with a stellar education, some Aggies marry their undergraduate experience and passion for sports into one career path. Such is the case for Austin Hebert ‘23, a sport coordinator for Intramural Sports.

Hebert grew up supporting the Aggies from an early age; his sister attended Texas A&M in 2008, and as a sports fan, one of his favorite memories is watching the Aggies dominate their 2012 football season with Johnny Manziel at the helm. When the time came for Hebert to come to Aggieland as an undergraduate, he knew he needed to find a home somewhere in the sports arena.

Naturally, he found his way to Intramural Sports.

Hebert joined the team in Fall 2020 and was able to find his tribe among the other intramural staff despite lingering restrictions from the COVID-19 outbreak.

“I needed some sense of community,” Hebert said. “You find out real quick at the Rec and especially at Intramurals, it’s basically an organization of its own…where you’re interconnecting with a bunch of people.The more you move up, the more people you meet.”

Since joining the Intramural Sports staff, Hebert has worked his way up the organizational ladder to Softball Sport Coordinator, a blended office and field role that sees him scheduling junior staff, handling evaluations, and training student officials and supervisors. 

But don’t let the title fool you: Hebert also oversees the programming of a few smaller intramural leagues as well.

“My immediate softball staff is about 35 people, with 10 supervisors and 25 officials…, but if you add in cricket and kickball, I can get up to about 50 during the semester,” Hebert said.

Hebert’s excellence in Rec Sports doesn’t end there, however. This past October, Hebert represented Texas A&M alongside a select number of other student employees at a National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association (NIRSA) conference, where recreational professionals and companies converge to network and explore new opportunities in campus recreation.

From his entry into the Department of Recreational Sports to graduating this December, Hebert has shined brilliantly is his ability to understand the business of intramural recreation and lead his fellow Aggies towards their own improvement within the program. He models his success after friend and former student Kayla Aston, who previously served Rec Sports before graduating last year.

“She changed this program a lot just by herself,” Hebert said. “God, I can’t do everything that she did…, but it’s a huge validation to know that, even if I can’t be the Kayla, I can be one of the top people in the program.”

With his exit from Aggieland on the horizon, Hebert looks to begin the next phase of his career by securing a graduate assistantship in campus recreation.

“That’s what I’m focusing on right now — getting those applications out there, getting my name out there, doing some networking with some NIRSA people — and hopefully I can do that graduate assistantship and find Nick [Heiar] or Kaulin [Andric]’s job somewhere.”

Hebert graduates in December with a bachelor’s degree in sports management.