Bio

Jim Tucker organized the Paul Smith’s College Striders in September 1987 upon his arrival to the campus as the Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), a professional position he retained until 1995 when he was offered a new position at the college as the Recreation and Intramural Programs Coordinator.  With this position, he became known as the Dean of Fun, a moniker that was bestowed upon him by the late Fred G. Sullivan who was a Dean at Paul Smith’s at the time.  

Organizing and conducting a variety of year around outdoor recreational programs including canoeing, snowshoeing, Nordic skiing, hiking, and backpacking, as the Dean of Fun, he was recognized for his work and achievements in Newsweek (2006).  Paul Smith’s College was honored in Newsweek, as “One of America’s Hottest Colleges for 2006,” with Paul Smith’s earning recognition as the Hottest College for Resort Living. The article stated, “The school's director of intramurals calls himself "the Dean of Fun" and organizes hikes in boots, skis and snowshoes.”

Tucker became the Athletic Director in 2010 after serving as the Dean of Fun for 16 years, while maintaining his volunteer role as the Director of the Paul Smith’s College Striders.  He patterned this campus – based organization upon his experience as a member of the Virginia Tech Striders  while in graduate school (1982 – 83).  With the Paul Smith’s College Striders, he has been preparing the student athletes to compete in a variety of endurance sports while conducting a broad range of events on the campus for athletes both near and far.  Triathlons, canoe races, duathlons, road races, trail runs, marathon (flatwater) canoe races, snowshoe races, Nordic ski races ~ he has coordinated all these and more at the campus over the years.  

His snowshoe athletes have won the International Snowshoe Championship (ISC) fifteen times since 2001, including 2001, 2004 – 2006, and 2008 – 2019.  He spearheaded the efforts of snowshoe race organizers in 1999 to form the Empire State Snowshoe Racing Association (ESSRA).  He was the organization's President from 1999 to 2015.  The Paul Smith's College Striders have been the hosts of the Empire State Games nearly every year since 1985.  He was recognized by his peers as the ESSRA Snowshoer of the Year in 2003, and by Snowshoe Magazine with the Cindy Brockman Person of the Year Award in 2014. 

It seems that each successive snowshoe season for the PSC Striders is the “most successful season ever,” and the Striders are maintaining this tradition of continued success. Paul Smith’s College Snowshoe racers annually get on the podium at the Empire State Games, and on several occasions, members of the Striders have medaled at US Snowshoe Nationals.  Seven students have earned spots on the US National Team.  This includes Isaac Leach (2017), Matt Leichty (2016), Tyler Dezago (2015), Chloe Mattilio (2014), Louis Ferrone III (2013) and Ben Palladino (2011).  Three of the student athletes have competed in Italy over the years in La Ciaspolada.  As a collegiate team, they have traveled to California, Oregon, Colorado, and Wisconsin, as well as the annual treks to the New England states, Quebec and Ontario.  

Jim is the United States delegate to the World Snowshoeing Federation, and was the President of the Empire State Snowshoe Racing Association (ESSRA) from 1999 - 2010.  He has done design work and consulting for various snowshoe manufacturers, and was on the cutting edge in the development of aluminum-framed backcountry and racing snowshoes for over a decade.

Jim Tucker has been involved with the local Franklin – St. Lawrence County Special Olympics since 1997, conducting the Winter Games at the Paul Smith's College campus with the capable assistance of over four dozen student volunteers. In 2009, Jim took the next giant step, and was the Chief Field Judge at the World Winter Special Olympics in McCall, Idaho. This was an awesome experience, working with nearly 250 snowshoe athletes from approximately fifty nations. The cultural enrichment, fellowship, and sharing was a life-changing opportunity.  In 2013, he was again selected for this same position in PyeongChang, South Korea, where the sport had grown to over 350 athletes competing representing over 60 nations ~ on snowshoes.  

Jim was recognized as the 2002 Faculty Member of the Year by the Paul Smith's College Alumni Association. This was quite an honor, especially given that teaching is only one aspect of his job at the college. Jim taught Adirondack Expedition each fall for over a decade each fall, but relinquished this wonderful teaching experience when he became the college’s Athletic Director in 2010, only a year after beginning his collegiate XC coaching career.  Since 2009, he has been teaching The Humble Spud, a cultural anthropology class at Paul Smith’s that chronicles the potato from its roots in the Andes of Peru to its present day as the number four commodities in the world’s food consumption.  

The cross country teams have won men’s conference titles in the Sunrise Conference of the NAIA (2009), and then the Yankee Small College Conference (YSCC) in 2011 and again in 2014, 2015, and 2018.  The women’s team won their first conference title in 2013, and again in 2014 and 2015.  In this short time, Paul Smith’s College Cross Country has hosted the USCAA Nationals in 2011 and 2012, and featured five USCAA All Americans.  He is on the advisory board for USCAA Cross Country and is the Cross Country Chairman for the YSCC.  

Jim and his wife are Saranac Lake HS and SUNY - Potsdam graduates (1981) and were married in 1982 before heading to Blacksburg, Virginia for graduate school.  Jim completed his MAEd in Student Personnel Services (Guidance and Counseling) at Virginia Tech and completed graduate course work in exercise physiology at the same time.  Married with two married sons (Mike and Larry), Jim has developed and maintained an active and engaging lifestyle. For over forty years, he has been an endurance athlete and coach, involved in running, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, duathlons, triathlons, swimming, and canoeing. 

While attending Virginia Tech, both Jim and Michele became actively involved in conducting several major HS and Collegiate indoor track meets (1983).  This exposure to national caliber coaches and athletes was a genuine eye opener, working with dozens of the best runners at that time.  

Upon return to the North Country, he returned to coaching girls’ track and field at the local high school and then coached the distance crew (both genders) for several years (1984 – 1987; 1990 – 1995).  Although many of the athletes earned Sectional titles, school records, and some continued to compete regionally, nationally and internationally as endurance athletes, the most enjoyable part is the number who have gone on to do great things as adults contributing to family and community life. 

Jim’s personal experience growing up on his family’s potato farm in nearby Gabriels, New York provided him with daily opportunities to enjoy the beauty of the Adirondacks first-hand. An Eagle Scout, he spent a great deal of free time tromping through the woods on snowshoes, building fires and cooking in the woods, canoeing the ponds, lakes and streams, and taking his peers on numerous hiking treks in the Adirondack High Peaks.

He developed the College’s Marathon Canoe Team in 1996, which has become the premier collegiate marathon canoe program in the country. Many of the program’s paddlers were involved in the 425-mile, 15-day Enviro-Trek 2000 in June of that year. The dozen paddlers provided pre-arranged environmental education programs to school age children along the route. Paddling to Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty was awesome and still remains a magical memory.  Tucker stated upon the trek’s conclusion, “There is little doubt that any worthwhile goal can be realized with perseverance and hard work.”

At the conclusion of the 2000 paddling season, Jim was recognized by the St. Lawrence Valley Paddlers (SLVPA) as the recipient of the Rip Friot Award for Dedication to Paddlesport. The destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 has only further cemented the bond among the original Enviro-Trek paddlers, as the group maintains vivid memories of seeing the Twin Towers behind us on the Hudson River as we approached the Statue of Liberty.

Following the success of the inaugural EnviroTrek many of the crew members developed and paddled Enviro-Trek 2001, a 390-mile paddling adventure that traversed New York State along the historic Erie Canal. The eighteen paddlers and two pitcrew members took fifteen days to cover this route beginning in Western New York State just off the shore of Lake Erie and finishing in Stillwater, New York just north of the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers. The group presented almost daily environmental education programs to over 1,200 school children and community groups. Although the Enviro-Trek passed through the cities of Rochester and Syracuse, it was in the many small communities such as Middleport and St. Johnsville that the paddlers received the warmest receptions.

The Enviro-Trek program took on a new life – becoming Earth Trek in ’03, with an academic planning course for nine students through the spring semester, as they prepared to paddle the 410 miles of the Connecticut River, from the headwaters at the Canadian ~ New Hampshire border, concluding in Long Island Sound. The Connecticut River was the focal point of two academic courses that prepared the student participants for the background work on the prospective waterway including the history, economic, cultural and environmental issues and concerns of the people along the route. Much like the Enviro-Trek participants, these students prepared and implemented a series of environmental education programs, planned the itinerary, arranged the various speaking engagements, and all other aspects of the Earth Trek. Tucker believes, “It is in this planning and implementation that the students truly learn how to coordinate events and see them through to fruition.”

The Earth Trek ’03 was a wonderful success for the participating students, the school children we educated along the route, and for developing a foundation for future comparable programs. The eight students who took part in the actual trek bonded together like ducks ~ much as the first two Earth Treks, and really became a close-knit family. The paddling became routine, with the four-person Minnesota IV’s, the crews were averaging five-miles per hour within the first week, and later were paddling six miles per hour on a routine basis. Despite fourteen days of rain during the seventeen days on the water, the crew quickly adopted Tucker’s personal philosophy, “Isn’t this great?” as their motto, and learned early and often, “You only get wet skin deep.” The final day paddling with the outgoing tide from Gillette Castle to the lighthouse at Old Saybrook, CT was incredibly fast, as the two canoes easily averaged nearly eight miles per hour. The returning one-kilometer paddle back to the pit crew in Old Saybrook was a forty-minute battle against the tide.

As a result of the success and environmental education programs of the first two Earth Treks, Jim Tucker worked closely with Tomoya Yamada (PSC ’02 Liberal Arts grad) in arranging comparable programs for Japanese visitors to the campus. During the fall of 2002, we collaborated to establish “Nature Week” for a group of ten students/staff members from Hosei University in Tokyo. For a group of five folks from Paul Smith's College, Japan Week followed the success of Nature Week, during the Thanksgiving Holiday period as we spent a week with Tomoya’s family in Yokohama doing experiential education programs for Hosei University as well as Links Academy in Tokyo. The cross-cultural exchange of ideas was valuable for everyone involved, and Jim has worked to bring international visitors to his family’s potato farm to experience rural farm life in the Adirondacks.

Tucker got back into cycling in 2007 upon a student’s request.  He had a desire to take part in the long distance canoe treks of prior years. Jim had conducted bicycle tours for Adirondack Bicycle Tours through High Peaks Cyclery based in Lake Placid, NY and took part in a few triathlons in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s before a devastating injury to his knee in 1994. The traumatic injury all but eliminated running as a recreational pursuit and competitive running seems to have become a thing of the past, but cycling is as much fun as ever.  He took part in the annual RAGBRAI (the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) in 2007, 2008 and again in 2010.  RAGBRAI is a weeklong bike ride across Iowa (approximately 475 miles) along with 10,000 other cycling enthusiasts. The ’07 RAGBRAI was his first venture in Iowa, and the warm hospitality and friendliness of the Iowa people is rather infectious. The copious amounts of home-made pies, ice cream as well as the corn and pork products available through the numerous small towns really are attractive as well.  He has shared this adventure with several friends; and in 2010, his wife Michele joined the fun.  During the summer of 2012, Tucker and some fellow North Country cyclists pedaled across Lower Michigan in a cross state bike ride called PALM ~ Pedal Across Lower Michigan.

He developed a course called The Humble Spud ~ a course that chronicles the history of the potato and its relationship to the social history of Europe and the Americas, and has taught the course in 2009, 2011, 2013 and again in 2017.  This course is a truly special opportunity to share his lifelong knowledge of the potato in a course that he refers to as a cultural anthropology course. He has gathered spud information while in Maine, Iowa, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, and internationally during travels through Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Czechia, England, and South Korea.  In 2010, he, along with two of his students, took a trek to Uganda in 2010 to study the potato through his efforts with the International Potato Center’s sub-Saharan Office in Kampala.  In the potato course, the students are frequently asked to prepare and serve a broad range of potato dishes (enough to feed 35) in ways that they no doubt never considered prior to enrolling in this course.  They learn about potato farming in South America, the Middle East, Europe, China, India, Africa, and across North America, in a format that draws from all the academic majors which set Paul Smith’s College apart from other colleges.  The students plant eight different potato varieties during class session #2, and harvest their crop near semester’s end and consume their crop to end the course. 

As an advocate of experiential education and peer education, he often places students in situations that require them to use the skills and knowledge they have, and pass this information on to others. “It is through peer education that students will truly be forced to use what they have learned in the classroom. We can learn through a variety of modalities; and I find that the students at Paul Smith's College excel with experiential education. We will truly remember something if we have an opportunity to teach. My students are surprised to see what they have learned as they teach these new-found skills to youth groups, school children and civic organizations and even corporate groups.”