Keenan Huss

Sophia Carolyn Ralph5min

Speaker 1

00:03

During the test, I know it should go fine. Especially, it's not very loud in here, so I'm not too worried about it. But if you don't mind just for my record confirming your name and your job title.

Speaker 2

00:16

So my name is Keenan Haas, and I'm the Assistant Director of event facility operations.

Unknown Speaker

00:21

So what exactly does that entail?

Speaker 2

00:24

A lot of things. So my job is essentially I'm the event and facility manager for soccer and softball. So there's a few different of us that do other sports we kind of double up on sports so like there's baseball ones, there's the basketball ones, there's volleyball and things like that. So my two babies as you want to put them are soccer and softball in the Turner complex. So I really oversee all the game day operations for those. So anywhere between we sell tickets for NCAA games or the parking situation. All that kind of is spearheaded by me and I try and resolve it as best we can. On the facility side, it's the doing things like we're doing now the journey to zero waste as well as the building that we're building out and left field for softball. So it's kind of a, a wide variety of things between, you know, making sure the game has happened and then the events that we play those games in and our student athletes are in making sure that they're maintained.

Speaker 1

01:22

So a wide variety wide breadth of things going on. Yes, just

Speaker 2

01:26

a thing or two and sometimes it feels like the responsibilities get wider and wider. Right?

Speaker 1

01:31

Like Sure. So in case it wasn't obvious started make myself clear. The story that I'm working on is for my journalism capstone project, and I'm kind of covering the Zero Waste soccer season this year. So most of my questions are kind of geared towards that are looking at how athletics sort of is working with the Office of Sustainability. So do you remember kind of, did they approach you about this, like how this got started?

Speaker 2

02:01

So it's kind of been a mutually beneficial relationships. So this started back. I first started here in July of 2022. Where I was in one of my job titles was on the sustainability coordinator. So it kind of started with during our football games, the first TV timeout of the third quarter. We have the Boy Scouts walk down the 100 level and they take Recycling's and they that's where the conversation started with the Office of Sustainability was, how can we promote it a little bit more so people understand kind of what we're doing and when I say we is in athletics in the Office of Sustainability, so that's been going on but when I came here in July of last year, if the Office of Sustainability reached out and just wanted to kind of make it more spotlighted and give it a platform for them to be recognized, and when I say them, just our efforts, so that kind of started the conversation or our relationship with the Office of Sustainability. Fast forward to late fall. The Office of Sustainability and Tierra reached out to me and if there was any interest in doing a capstone project, and that's where we did the Zero Waste series at baseball so that's kind of what this stems back to is foundation levels with their old GA as well as a capstone group from tears class, set the foundation of what zero waste could be and all that that goes into it. So that was the working with air marking concessions to make sure that their offerings are compostable, as we try and limited what goes to landfill. That's really where the conversation started with a little bit of spotlighting there. recycling. Sure. Yes, I ask how like you. How did you learn about our zero waste season? Yeah. So

Speaker 1

03:54

I'm also in the sustainability certificate got it. So I was aware of it. Last year, I volunteered the first weekend and then went to their vet team like Hunter and all them their capstone presentation. Yep, that was part of our seminar. We had to go to that. Yep. And then I'm pretty I try to keep up on like all the different sustainability things on on the newsletter. Gotcha. I pretty quickly heard about this was going on soccer as well, which is very interesting to me. I wasn't sure like, I got kind of nervous, you know, with everyone graduating last year. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker

04:32

Is it gonna stop? Yeah. So I

Speaker 1

04:35

was very pleased to hear that. Y'all were still going. Yeah. But you get all the fun questions that are all about like the logistics and stuff. Because I was really curious how that works. Everyone's mad mentioning like Aramark and working with them to make sure that everything is compostable. Yep. How does that work like with those deals, so

Speaker 2

04:59

contractually, there are and I can't speak to the specifics of them, but there are some contracts that we have that we can't supplement like I'll give you example, the Texas Roadhouse peanuts, we have a sponsorship deal that we have to sell them in those bags. So there are we're not 100% Everything can be compostable because of our sponsorships. And our sponsors, you know, packaging that we can't always be compostable. So, the Aramark questions I would kind of defer to John Bateman and Randy Holcomb and that crew, especially in the sponsorship side, but there are things that they can supplement like the the coke. The Coke cups that we were just doing is

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