Hampshire College

The Outdoors Program/Recreational Athletics (OPRA) offers students extensive opportunities to learn outdoor and sport skills such as rock climbing, kayaking, martial arts, and aquatics. We also provide the opportunity for student- and staff-initiated expeditions and trips.

OPRA gives special emphasis to integrating outdoor and physical learning experiences with the rest of college life. Programmatically that means OPRA collaborates with Hampshire faculty, staff, and students in ongoing courses.

Fusion of body and intellect has long been a goal of OPRA. This year the program will continue to offer body potential work and body awareness in addition to outdoor and sports skills courses.

We seek to enable students to experience nature personally, through local natural history explorations, as well as hiking, biking, camping, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, canoeing, and expeditioning.

In addition, OPRA offers the opportunity for students to participate in intramural and club sports (basketball, soccer, volleyball, frisbee), and a great variety of trips, activities and special training sessions. A schedule of activities and trips is available on the Fall Schedule page.