It’s not even 9 a.m. and JP Gentile (Recreation Management 1996) has already been part of several enthusiastic conversations as he makes his way from the parking lot to the Lethbridge Polytechnic Students’ Association (LPSA) office. As he weaves through Centre Core, he’s asking students about their weekend, suggesting a table tennis rematch later in The Cave, inviting them to dodgeball or cricket in the gym, and offering smiles and a lot of “hey, how’s it going?”
“A little ‘hello’ can go a long way,” he says. “That’s what I love about my job – student interaction and making those connections.”
As the LPSA’s Campus Recreation manager, Gentile is responsible for organizing sports leagues, tournaments, drop-in activities and outings like skydiving and ski trips. But for many students (and colleagues) over the past 27 years, he has also been a moving company, a carpenter, a taxi driver, a delivery service and a mid-winter car battery booster – not to mention a support system and a confidant.
“I’m also the guy with the suits,” he laughs, “I’m always wearing something quirky.” And even that, he admits, is by design to lighten the mood and break the ice so students can have an enjoyable and well-rounded post-secondary experience.
But it’s so much more than that. Gentile’s thoughtfulness goes beyond brightly coloured suits, onesies and tie-dyed referee shirts at dodgeball games. He cares. A lot. And his gestures over the years – both big and small – have made immeasurable differences in the lives of so many people.
“JP is a blessing,” says Mary Isijola, a second-year Business Administration student who moved to Lethbridge from Lagos, Nigeria, one year ago. “Young, old, black, white – he doesn’t differentiate. He gives to everybody, he helps everybody … and he makes Canada a place I will never forget.”
In the LPSA boardroom across the hall from Gentile’s office sits a collection of plastic bags full of clothes, boxes of housewares and a variety of other donated items all destined for the next campus clothing drive. The latest event, and the second of the academic year, is only a few weeks past, but the floodgates are still wide open – thanks largely to Gentile’s community connections.
“I sent out a message to a couple of people from [a local church group] and it just blew up,” he says. “My phone is going nonstop, and I’m picking up truckloads.”
Gentile says he started accepting donations of housewares on a whim, and quickly found out how much students, especially international students, need them.
“We put out silverware and kitchenware, plates, bowls, pots and pans, stuff like that, and the shelves were cleaned out within the first hour,” he says. “We [people who have lived in Canada for many years] take it for granted, that we have junk drawers full of these things. [International students] can bring clothes over. They can’t bring dishes.”
Gentile says sometimes, students in need of household items will approach him, either because they’ve gotten to know him or because other students have mentioned his name.
“One student asked me, ‘sir, do you have a bed?’ for, like, six months,” Gentile recalls. “Finally, my daughter says she wants a new bed, so I tell him I’ve got a nice queen-size for him, with a headboard and everything. I bring it over, he opens up his bedroom and he’s been sleeping on a thin mat on the floor.” Gentile smiles and says, “he tells me he’s getting the best sleep now.”
This kind of grand gesture is not at all surprising – or even out of the ordinary – for those who know Gentile.
Take Isijola and her 11-year-old son, Jeremiah, for instance. The pair moved to Lethbridge from Nigeria in the summer of 2023. While they were initially excited to have found a fully furnished room to rent, Isijola says living with their landlord quickly became uncomfortable.
“It was difficult,” she says. “I don’t want issues [with her], I only want peace for my son, and I remember being on my bed crying and thinking, ‘I never planned for this. This is not a phase I want to go through anymore.’”
Isijola says she decided to look for an apartment. It was early in the fall semester, so she stopped by the LPSA office to ask Gentile if he could keep an eye out for rentals, though she says she found one online within a week.
“I think it was two weeks later – we had moved, and I was wondering where to start [trying to furnish the apartment on a limited budget] when I saw JP,” she says. “He asked me, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ and I said, ‘I got an apartment.’ He went, ‘woo-ha!’ but I said, ‘don’t celebrate yet, the apartment is pretty much empty.’”
Isijola says Gentile’s response was an automatic, “I got you.”
“I thought, what do you mean, ‘I got you?’” Isijola recalls, though she says Gentile’s intentions became very clear a few days later when he pulled up to her apartment building with treasures from storage locker purchases (one of Gentile’s many hobbies) in tow.
“I had tears running down my face when I saw JP,” Isijola says. “He brought his truck with a bed, bed stand, couch – he brought everything for my apartment. I was shocked. It was like a dream come true, like a miracle, and it was a blessing to me and my son.”
In the months that followed, Isijola says Gentile checked in with her regularly and gave her extra blankets in preparation for her first Canadian winter. She says she even got a Christmas gift from him.
“That was a second shock,” she laughs. “I don’t receive gifts during Christmas, I give people gifts. So, JP was the first person to ever give me something. He is a true friend, and he became family along the line. Sometimes, when I’m coming to school and having difficulty at work or thinking ‘how do I get through this subject,’ I’ll see JP and his smiling face gives me so much peace, joy and happiness.”
In The Cave, the undisputed home turf of the LPSA, table tennis is calling, and Gentile can’t help but pop in for a quick game. He plays – a lot – and for several years running, he’s been the one on campus to beat.
“I’ve always heard [students say], ‘you gotta go beat the old guy’ and for years I didn’t lose,” he says. “But lately, I’ve been playing some students from Nigeria and they’re good, like next level. There was an audience of 50 people the other day. It was awesome.”
In addition to his long-standing reputation as a worthy ping pong opponent, Gentile has also become known as the Cricket League Commissioner. He established a league during the 2022-23 academic year in response to the growing number of students from India who were interested in playing a popular sport from home. The initiative was so successful that upwards of 70 students started showing up for tournaments.
“They made me an honorary Singh,” he grins proudly, referring to the surname common among Sikh men. “They call me JP Singh.”
There’s no doubt Gentile has a special connection with the polytechnic’s international students. He says as a second generation Canadian, it just comes naturally.
Gentile’s parents were born in Italy and immigrated to Canada with their families at a young age – settling first in Montreal and later in Fernie, B.C.
He mentions his father and his father’s younger brother initially stayed behind in an Italian orphanage before they were reunited with their mother and two older siblings a few years later. Unfortunately, by that time, their father (Gentile’s grandfather) had passed away.
“They came to the land of opportunity to try to better their lives, and there were tough times,” Gentile says. “My grandma was living on welfare and helping with the church in Fernie just to try to put food on the table. So, I have a soft spot for immigrants and refugees – I may not understand their struggles where they come from, but I can empathize and I can help, because people helped my family.”
It’s also one of the reasons why Gentile is so passionate about helping students who are struggling with food security. In his early days as an employee, Gentile helped transition the campus food bank over to the LPSA and then he ran it for several years. He’s also heavily involved in the annual CANstruction anti-hunger event at Centre Village Mall. Teams of architects, engineers and designers – including a group of Lethbridge Polytechnic engineering students – build life-size structures out of cans. At the end of the event, Gentile helps distribute thousands of dollars in canned goods to local food banks, including the one on campus.
Gentile was also a driving force behind the LPSA’s community garden project that ran for several years, which generated hundreds of pounds of produce for student and community food banks. With fond memories of his “small house, big garden” childhood home, Gentile connected with Lethbridge Family Services to organize volunteers from the Lethbridge Bhutanese Seniors group who planted, tended and harvested the crop of potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and more. Many of the volunteers had been farmers in Bhutan.
“They donated their time and wanted no produce in the end, aside from a couple of tomatoes in their hats,” Gentile says. “I’d check in on them and bring them water, or I’d sit and have lunch and watch them garden and think, ‘I remember those days.’ Even my grandma was there gardening with them.”
More recently, the LPSA in partnership with Wellness Services created food pantries for students in need – a years-in-the-making bucket list item for Gentile. Discretely located in four locations around campus, the pantries’ shelves are stocked each weekday during the academic year.
“It’s a big cost, and the institution came through with support for us,” Gentile says, referring to a $5,000 donation announced by the polytechnic’s Executive Leadership Team in August 2023. “This [leadership] group has made such an impact. They see our students are struggling – rent has gone up, gas has gone up, groceries have gone up – and they have been very receptive [of our initiatives].”
When he’s not raising money for the LPSA Food Bank, helping furnish students’ apartments, co-ordinating clothing donations, or performing countless other good deeds throughout the day, Gentile is focused on organizing recreation activities on campus and brainstorming new ideas.
As a former member of the Kodiaks men’s soccer team – two years as a student-athlete and nine years as an assistant coach – overseeing student sports leagues is a natural fit for Gentile, though he says the LPSA team is always adjusting to accommodate changing interests.
“Every year is a new child,” he laughs. “We used to have 24 floor hockey teams and now I can’t get one. But disc golf is huge – they’ll play in three feet of snow and tape ribbons to their discs so they don’t lose them. Cricket has really taken off, and we ran a poker tournament the other day and 50 people showed up, so you never know. We just try things.”
Gentile says bingo is a prime example of something that would never fly nowadays, and yet Sexy Bingo attracts 300 people to The Cave twice a semester. The LPSA’s events website claims, “it’s not your grandma’s bingo,” – an amusing catchphrase, but even more so if you know where the cards came from.
“They use my grandmas’ bingo cards from the 1970s,” says Gentile, grinning. “The ones with the windows and they have their names on the back – Theresa and Rosalia. Every bingo, someone says, ‘who’s this Rosalia lady?’ Those cards have seen miles and miles.”
Gentile is also quick to credit his Italian heritage for his sociability and fondness for events, saying he grew up hosting countless gatherings at his home – from soccer spaghetti dinners and fundraisers to holiday parties.
“My dad was a New Year’s baby so every New Year’s Eve we would have 70 or 80 people over,” Gentile recalls fondly. “He was a teacher, so during the holidays we’d go to his elementary school, grab 20 tables and those old-fashioned chairs that wouldn’t stack properly and bring them to our basement. People knew the Gentiles always had the big parties.”
Whether it’s a slow-pitch tournament, goat yoga, pictures with a pot belly pig, or betting on what spray-painted square on the soccer field a cow might do its business, for Gentile, nothing is more important than creating a positive student experience.
“Students come back five years later, and they don’t necessarily remember what they did in CJ101, but they remember a good ball tournament or hoisting a hockey trophy,” he says. “Yes, they’re here for academics but those little things create lasting impressions, and when they leave this institution, they’ve made some kind of home away from home.”
It’s an approach that, even after 27 years in the Campus Recreation office, Gentile still takes to heart.
“He’s in his element,” says Aaron Chubb, Gentile’s long-time friend and former LPSA colleague. “I think some people might get stale in a role like that, but he’s so good at listening to what students want to do and being flexible. People bring him ideas and he’s not closed minded. He listens, and he goes, ‘OK, how can we make this work?’”
And, Chubb says, he always goes the extra mile.
“I have a lot of good memories of some bigger events that we did, like Band Wars at The Barn, but it was often the little things – a one-off event in Centre Core or a free swag giveaway – that I realized made a huge difference with students,” he says. “Those things didn’t take a lot of planning or a lot of work, but they had a big impact. JP taught me that sometimes it’s those smaller things that people really remember.”
Off-campus, and still very much focused on relationships and community building, Gentile is on call as a handyman for seniors who need repairs done on their property, their lawns mowed, or their homes cleared of furniture when they downsize.
“My name’s out there,” he laughs. “Me and my dad built several houses in Fernie. I bet you could drive out there and somewhere on every block is a house we did a renovation on; we did a ton. I couldn’t build someone a house now, but I could build them a shed or a deck or a fence.”
He’s also got one of the biggest Christmas displays in west Lethbridge that he purposely leaves up for months before and after the holiday season.
“I open up my blinds and kids are just walking through the Paw Patrol [cutouts],” he says. “Parents are dropping them off just to have 10 minutes of destressing.”
Add to the mix, family time with his partner of several years and his two kids, who he says, “truly keep me on my toes,” and it’s no surprise that Gentile is always on the move.
He jokes that on rare occasions, the words, ‘JP said no today,’ will appear on an LPSA office whiteboard and his colleagues will snap a picture to commemorate the event.
“I just can’t,” Gentile laughs, “I can’t say ‘no.’ I like helping people.”
Last spring, Gentile received a Lethbridge Polytechnic Honouring Excellence Award for Community Leadership – a recognition that encapsulates his efforts on- and off-campus to do good and bring smiles to those around him.
What he may not realize is that by doing what comes naturally to him – being kind and helping people – he’s also inspiring others to do the same.
“I’ve had a number of people who I would consider mentors in my life, and JP is definitely one of them,” says Chubb. “He’s really good at catching those moments to take a little extra step and really make someone’s day. He taught me it’s the conversations, it’s how you make people feel – those are the things that really stick.”
Isijola says she, too, considers Gentile to be a mentor and a role model she would like to emulate, in addition to being first a friend and now an honorary family member.
“I would love to walk through his path to understand how he does it,” she muses. “When you render help to people, you can find some peace. So, I can imagine the kind of peace he finds.”
It’s high praise, but Gentile is humble. He gives credit to his “wonderful LPSA colleagues” and the many student executives, student representatives and polytechnic employees who, over the past 27 years, have made lasting impressions on him as well.
“Just try to help one another,” he says. “It costs nothing to be kind.”
View JP Gentiles' photo collection
JP Gentile has posed for hundreds of photographs over his three decades on campus, both as a student-athlete and as an employee.
