To see and feel Linda Marticke’s passion for sports, one must simply look around the ISU intramural coordinator’s office. A picture of the New York Marathon is displayed, and medals from two Chicago Marathons she participated in hang on her walls.Marticke has been with the ISU intramural program since she received her graduate degree from the University of Montana, 25 years ago.Although her love for sports started when she was young, participation wasn’t an option for her because she attended a small Missouri high school where women’s sports didn’t exist.”I tried to get my parents to move me to another school,” Marticke said. Instead, as a sophomore, Marticke’s school introduced golf as the first women’s sport to exist there and she played on the team the next three years.As a sophomore at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Marticke got very involved in intramurals and loved it. She was impressed that the school actually had teams in competition.”I was so excited,” she said. “The first thing we had was flag football. It was a great way to get to know people on the floor, and I wanted to play everything.” Marticke was the quarterback of her flag football team and even got her picture in the school newspaper. Once she got started with intramurals, she didn’t want to quit. She tried every sport she could. “It opened up a whole new world,” Marticke said.She graduated with a degree in recreation. After graduate school in Montana, she almost took a job at Williams Woods College in Missouri. However, days after she had accepted that job, she got a job offer from Iowa State and accepted that instead.”I wanted to go to Iowa State even though I had never seen it,” Marticke said. The size of the school was a big pull for Marticke, and it was a good fit. She has been here ever since.Marticke’s jobs include selecting sports the intramural program will have available, scheduling them, putting different teams into brackets and leagues and publicizing results.She also makes sure the games have proper equipment and is always revising rules and trying to make things better. She also tries to create different things that people would enjoy. However, the department tries to keep the sports they offer consistent. With such success, it’s hard to change them, said Garry Greenlee, another intramural coordinator.Greenlee has worked with Marticke for about 21 years and said she takes on the more difficult sports to organize.”We take the 50 sports and divide them in half,” Greenlee said. “Because she’s so good at what she does and because she’s so detailed, she’s assigned the most difficult sports to program.” Larry Cooney, the director of recreational services, has worked side by side with Marticke since she started.”She’s a team player and has always been open to students,” Cooney said. “She is always open and available for [them] to talk to about problems.”As a co-worker, Greenlee said that Marticke has been the consistent and stable force in the intramural program.”She is always one you can talk to, bounce ideas off of, and get an honest answer for what’s going on,” Greenlee said. Cooney also points out that Marticke is continually trying to think of new ways to do things and new ways to get more students involved.”She has a lot of good experience, is very methodical and is very service-oriented,” he said. Students’ participation is important to Marticke, said Cooney. She does everything she can to allow students to be involved.”She was a big help in instituting the team board,” he said. The team board allows students who don’t have teams but would still like to participate, to sign up and be placed on a team. There is a 70-72 percent participation rate of students, and it takes work to coordinate that many people into teams, said Cooney.Greenlee also commented how fitted Marticke is to recreation and her area of work.”She’s always upbeat, always positive, and just fun to be around,” Greenlee said. “When you look at her personality, no wonder she’s in recreation. That’s how she is in her job; that’s Linda.”