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Start over.

That was the key takeaway for students in Deirdre Dixon’s leadership and change course Monday when they took on the campus obstacle course and its swinging ropes, balance skills area and logic positioning station to put lessons they’ve studied in class into practice.  

They day’s events were a “challenge by choice,” Dixon, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship said, as she asked the students, all sophomores and juniors, to push past their comfort zones.

Chris Gottlick, director of campus recreation and a facilitator on the course, directed the students to set three goals for their experience. They landed on effective communication, positive attitudes and discipline before Gottlick led some of them to start the course on the balance test.

“Be committed to one another and the activity at hand,” he told the group.

In the logic position station, Dixon divided the students into two equal teams that then stood mirroring each other on a line of colored discs. They were tasked with swapping positions with their counterpart on the other side through a series of logical and restricted moves.

“This is the hardest challenge out here,” Dixon said. “It’s more mental than physical.”

The students started over at least a dozen times before completing the task.

Dixon said the group communicated well, with even the people in the back of the lines remaining engaged. Successful groups typically take 20 minutes; this group took 21, she noted.

“You have to feed information to people who can’t see the whole picture,” she said.

For students Jake Mallek and Jake Labadie, the most challenging part of the course was when the group had to cross an imagined “body of water” to a 2-foot-square platform using only a rope swing. Everyone in the group of a dozen students had to reach the platform and remain there for at least three seconds. They also had to transport a gallon of water to the platform.

To reach the rope, the students had to work together, as they were not allowed to jump to it.  As the first student leaned forward to grab the rope, other students held his ankles. To transfer the water, another student put his foot in the rope, and swung one handed with the water jug. Both made it across successfully.

Students were encouraging each other from the beginning, “catching” the person after them as they landed on the platform.

“Hold each other tight,” one student instructed.

“That was all heart,” another said.

Rarely, Dixon told them, does a group get to the other side as easily as they did.

“I kind of doubted myself at first, but with the trust of everyone, I feel like they all trusted me and they took care of me, and then we ended up finishing,” said Labadie.