Brookfield has hired Matt Odom as the village’s parks and recreation director, filling the gap left by the October departure of Luke Gundersen.
“His personality blends in with what we have been amassing and assembling here with Brookfield. [He is] an easy guy to get along with, a guy who can articulate a vision for the future and lead us on a path to how he’s going to get there while at the same time having a sense of humor and keeping a good perspective,” said Village Manager Tim Wiberg.
Odom’s first day was Tuesday, Feb. 17. His salary is $116,000 annually, Wiberg said.
Odom comes from the Warrenville Park District, which he led for nearly seven years as the superintendent of recreation.
“I oversaw all of their recreation programs and special events, everything from athletics to dance to camps. We had a fitness center there as well, and anything and everything recreational programming, I oversaw,” he said. “I was also their safety coordinator, so I was very involved with organizing that committee and pursuing various safety initiatives and smart goals and working with our risk management agency on a regular basis.”
Before that, he held a series of positions within the Fox Valley Park District, which serves Aurora, Montgomery and North Aurora. That was where he met Stevie Ferrari, now Brookfield’s assistant village manager.
“We had a very good relationship [at Fox Valley], and she reached out to let me know that this position was open. She told me about it, and I was very intrigued,” he said. “I’m still managing roughly the same number of staff, and the budget is similar, but it’s sort of expanded my scope. At Warrenville, I was just in recreation; here, I’m overseeing parks and recreation, so I get to get more involved with parks and capital projects. It was an opportunity for me to move up, and it made a lot of sense.”
Odom said his move to Brookfield allowed him to continue working with a smaller community, which he prefers. At Fox Valley, he said the district had served “nearly a quarter of a million people. It was the second largest park district in the state of Illinois besides Chicago. That was very different for a boy who grew up in a town of 3,000 people.”
He said the move also gives him an angle to get involved with local government.
“For the past 15 years, I’ve worked for park districts, which are their own agencies, their own governing bodies,” he said. “I’m working for a municipality now, which gave me a different avenue to pursue. I was a political science undergrad major.”
Odom said his favorite part of working in recreation has been interacting with and serving the community. He said he started his career studying sports management but quickly pivoted once he realized he would have to work in sales.
“I wanted to be involved in the community and serve the community, and I sort of stumbled into parks and rec. I was in my graduate program interning and not necessarily really happy with the direction things were heading, and I reached out to my local parks and rec department. I lived in Yorkville at the time, out west,” he said. “I reached out to them and started volunteering, and that ended up becoming my career path over the last 17 years. I couldn’t have asked for it to turn out any better.”
Wiberg said he hopes Odom will continue to build on the parks and recreation department’s success in expanding “the breadth and scope” of its programming by being “a little innovative.”
One project Odom hopes to see through, which he said enticed him during the hiring process, is the community and recreation center that Brookfield officials have discussed over the past year as contractors have conducted a feasibility study.
“I’ve never been part of building a facility from the ground up, so that was a big draw for me,” he said. “I’ve only been here for eight or nine days. I’ve already sat in several different meetings looking at capital projects for parks. The scope [of Brookfield’s projects] is big, but it’s exciting.”
