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Lauren Raspanti, Special Event Manager and Marketing Relations at Lemont Park District, finds PATH challenges a great way to get and keep people involved. But she likes to add a competitive twist by also making them a “personal” challenge from the Lemont Park District to the South East Association for Special Parks and Recreation (SEASPAR).

“It’s a great way to stay engaged and promote a bit of extra competition to keep us motivated,” says Lauren about the PATH personal challenges that are now a staple for everyone in both organizations.

So where did all this competition come from? Well, from Lauren herself! When she first downloaded the Virgin Pulse app for PATH, she was very active on it. She saw Matt Corso, SEASPAR’s Executive Director, and a couple other SEASPAR managers were using it, too. Lauren added them to her app and started creating private challenges with them for fun. Turns out, they’re just as competitive as she is and didn’t hesitate to accept her challenges.

SEASPAR is a special recreation association that provides programs and recreation services for people with disabilities who live in the association’s 12-community service areas. Lemont is one of the 12 that partners with SEASPAR to provide those services. To do that, they have some SEASPAR staff working on-site at Lemont — with both agencies’ staff often partnering on activities.

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“We have a great relationship with them and work together very closely,” Lauren explains. “They’re just great partners, and since we work with them in a lot of what we do, we have great friendships with many SEASPAR employees.

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“They’re competitive just like we are,” Lauren adds, “so we started doing the Illinois Park and Recreation Association Park Pursuit with them. But we had to wave the white flag on that one, because they kept winning.” Since Lauren isn’t one to give up easily, she decided to fuel the competition when she started using the Virgin Pulse app.

“Adding an extra level of competition just makes it all more fun!” she states.” And the more challenges we’re in, the more opportunities we have to beat them at something.”

She sets up these friendly competitions whenever the mood strikes. “I always try to make them even — like the one-day step showdown we just had where we both had three people on our teams,” Lauren says. “And when they’re over, we send emails back and forth saying things like, ‘Gotcha last week!’”

When Lauren and Christine Aguirre, Lemont’s Aquatic and Risk Manager, saw how well it was working, they said to each other, “You know what — let’s just have fun with this.”  

So they turned to competing with SEASPAR in more of the PATH agency challenges, since there, they were more evenly matched. “Because if we can’t beat them one way, I want to beat them another,” Lauren laughs. “It’s kind of like a sibling rivalry, you know?

“Plus, we soon noticed we had a lot more employee participation in the big PATH challenges when we ran these side challenges at the same time,” Lauren says. “So now, we take our competition to PATH — and those challenges work even better.

“One of our goals is always to have as many people as possible participate in PATH and take advantage of the incentives. This is one way we can get even more of our staff involved, because it’s just more fun. We park and rec people can be very competitive,” she confides, “and this is a fun and easy way to break up the craziness of our jobs. It helps our teambuilding efforts, too, as sometimes people will hold an inside or outside walking meeting to add more steps during challenges, instead of sitting in a conference room.”

And Christine agrees. “When we have challenges now, more people participate on both sides. And at the end of the day, we’re meeting our wellness goal — to have a healthy and happy staff. If having friendly competitions with SEASPAR gets more people to participate and have fun, then we’ll keep doing them!”