To travel hopefully is to have faith that an investment today will pay dividends tomorrow. In this article, the authors discuss several different kinds of professional investments that have paid off for them throughout their academic careers. Some of these dividends are obvious. They can be measured in dollars and cents earned as a result of…

In this paper, the academic afterlife of a purposive sample of 12 recreation, park, and leisure studies educators from a variety of universities throughout the United States and Canada is discussed. The paper begins with a brief review of the literature on successful aging. That literature's insights are then applied to the lived experiences of…

We apply lessons from "Moneyball," Michael Lewis's (2003) best-selling account of the Oakland Athletics's use of "sabermetrics" to find undervalued baseball players to help build a cost-effective team to the context of recreation, park, and leisure studies. Specifically, we coin and apply the term…

This article is intended to provoke thought and discussion about what it takes to be a department chair and what it feels like to be a department chair. To accomplish our purpose, we draw an analogy between test pilots and department chairs based on Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" (1979). We reason that test pilots and department…