Camp Champions Blog

We have begun our final week.  We have just 6 more days of moments.   

10 weeks ago, we brought in a speaker during counselor orientation that told us that life is full of "minutes" and "moments".  A minute is 60 seconds.

Nothing happens in a minute.

But everything special happens in moments.  Fears are overcome in moments, Friendships are cherished in moments.  Sunsets are moments.

We have been in the moment business lately.

Last night, we had the first ever Torchlight ceremony in the pool.  It was epic.  The torchlighter came down the slide and the cheers and chants were all augmented with splashing.  The Leadership Team acted as lifeguards so that the counselors could enjoy the festivities as well.  We concluded with a counselor belly-flop competition.  Great fun.

The campers that have been here for 1 or 3 weeks have come together incredibly well.  They act truly like this is a family.  Campers interact across age-ranges and everyone knows everyone. These campers are so quick to share a fun story, hold a counselor's hand or simply help each other.  The conversations are fluid and easy.

This type of community is what we camp directors dream of.

Today, we added to the community.  We have campers from San Antonio who are part of a study designed to prove that summer camp fosters critical character skills. We have a slew of former counselors, Leadership Team members and directors running the program, so I am very confident that the program will prove many of the benefits of camp.

We also added 27 adorable Batter Up campers.  Batter Up is our 6-day introductory program for children finishing Kindergarten and 1st grade.

I truly adore this age group.  5-7 years olds have a certain simplicity about them.  Do not get me wrong, I am not saying they are boring or predictable.  In fact, "predictable" is not even on the menu.

I mean that they approach the world at face value and are truly present each day.  A 6-year old girl is not worrying about whether she has exactly the right outfit on in the way that teens often do.  A 7 year-old boy is not analyzing his status and adopting a persona to fit in as he might in 4-5 years.

Instead, what you see is what you get.  If someone is upset, the cause (my marshmallow fell into the fire) is easy to identify and generally easy to remedy.

They make friends readily and bond happily as a group.

Their imaginations are unfettered and they play unselfconsciously.

In short, Camp Champions is a pretty special place to be today.

Steve Sir

Tonight’s blog is destined to be a short one, but I do want to share a little about our youngest two cabins.

Last night after the counselor meeting, I was walking back to our house when I looked up and saw Scorpio.

Last night, Caroline Crawford suggested a topic for a blog.  Caroline (Craw Ma’am), is our Mini Division Leader (girls just finishing K-3^rd) and will become the Assistant Girls Director behind Leah Ma’am after the summer.  She is a force of nature and a ball of energy.

She told me that I should write a blog about how our current campers are “reaching out” (one of the 4 Rs of Camp Champions) to the campers that arrived yesterday.  We have some campers that are finishing the 3^rd week of a three-week session (and a couple that are halfway through a four-week session) and we challenged them to find ways to embrace the new campers and help them feel as comfortable as possible as soon as possible.

As the summer goes on, I find myself lacking insight.

OK, I am running the risk of being a broken record.  Yesterday, I wrote about framing experiences.  Today, one of my “Big Picture” articles is about the same thing (“Like is what you sort for”).

But I just felt I had to share a quick story from today’s girls’ Lake Swim.

We had fireworks tonight!

One of the challenges with camp is framing the experience for the campers.  Children do not simply have experiences, but they also think about them and process them multiple times after the experience is over.

Here is an example.  I have a friend named Shawn Achor, who wrote the book “The Happiness Advantage”.  I have mentioned him in previous blogs so I will not go into much detail.  Simply know that he is considered an expert in Positive Psychology and has even been used by PBS as part of their fund-raising drives.

He loves to tell the following story about processing experiences.  When he was 8 or 9, his parents asked him to watch his younger sister who was 4-5 five during a dinner party.  While they were playing on a top bunk, his sister rolled off and fell to the ground, landing hard on her hands and knees.

He looked down at her face after this painful fall.  He could see the rising tears of pain and indignation.  She was about to explode and he would soon be in trouble.

At that moment, he had an inspiration.  He is fond of saying that he “peaked at age 9” with this words that he then uttered.

“Amy, did you see how you just landed?  No human could land like that.  Only a BABY UNICORN could land so gracefully!”

Amy’s greatest wish in life was to have the world recognize her inner unicorn.

At this moment, her face froze.  She could choose to be angry and indignant about the painful fall OR she could embrace her status as a unicorn.

She smiled, wiped away the tears that had come forth and celebrated her unicorn-ness for the rest of the evening.

Neurological research has shown that our minds are single processor units.  We can only do one thing at a time.  In other words, Amy could be sad or be a unicorn, but she was cognitively incapable of being both.

I love this story because it shows the power of the mind to reframe an experience – even one as undeniably unpleasant as a 5 foot fall onto a hard floor.  I have also found myself thinking about this story a great deal in the last 4-5 years since I first heard it.  As a camp director, I find amazing power in the following ideas:

• With the right frame, campers can see almost any experience as a potentially positive one.  A skilled counselor can help a child find the “teachable moment” in any circumstance.
• (And this is the biggie) we can help teach children that this it true so that they can choose their own interpretation of events in the future.  This is a true and life-affirming power.  It is hard to see yourself as a victim if you can always see grow or positivity in experiences.

I like to tell the Senior Campers that time in 2001 when Susie Ma’am and were founders of a camp-related Internet company.  It was essentially the predecessor to CampMinder.  We raised a lot of money and hired over 60 people when the Internet bubble burst.  Without additional funds (we were still in the development phase), we had to close our doors.  We had to let our employees go, tell our investors we had lost their money, explain to our vendors we could only pay them a fraction of our payables and let our camps know we could not serve them that summer.

None of that was fun.

But we had a partner that said the following once we learned that we could not raise any additional funds, “We did not make our vision work, but we are not failures.  In fact, we have been given an opportunity to go out with our heads held high.  We will finish strong and everyone will notice.  Most importantly, our own children will notice.  It will be a wonderful message to them that failure in an endeavor cannot keep us down!  Let’s finish strong!”

After that, we each work up and came to the office with a sense of purpose.  Sure we would be delivering bad news to someone, but we could do so in a way that showed compassion and dignity.  We even began to think we had a new mission – to show everyone that we came in contact with that we were not defeated.  In fact, we had several vendors ask us why we even called them and paid them anything.  We told them about “finishing strong” and they were really taken aback.  It have never occurred to them that someone could find a sense of purpose in an awful situation.  One guy (who work for the US Post Office) ended up in a long chat with one of us and ended up resolving that he would not feel so helpless at work any more.

I certainly hope that I never have another experience like that (and I tell the Senior Campers that), but I find it wonderfully liberating to know that we could handle it if it were to happen again.

When camp is at its best, it helps campers learn that they can control their interpretation of their experiences.  Of course, it helps that most experiences are really, really fun and require no re-framing.  But there are inevitably teachable moments.  It is not always fun to clean the cabin (though some have found a way to do even that).  Being homesick is not fun.  Having a conflict with a cabinmate is not fun.  Overcoming a fear of heights and climbing the Wall or Pirate Ship is a powerful, but challenging experience.  The Lake Swim and kilometers are also great opportunities to see the positive in a challenge.

Some campers’ initial instincts is to go to a more negative space.  “I don’t like swimming in the lake and I am now tired.  I wish I had not done that.”  Our job is to help them re-write that story in their head.  “I am not an enthusiastic swimmer and I find the lake a little intimidating.  Because of that, this swim was a bigger triumph for me than for most kids.  I am proud of myself because I am stronger and more capable now.”

This is were we talk about the Warrior versus the Worrier.  We remind them that there are different dialogues going on in their minds and that they can choose to feed their strong voice and starve the inner victim.

Let me assure you that the campers do not see this “heavy” stuff.  We are not talking about cognitive interpretation in front of them.  But I thought you might enjoy reading a little about some of the goals we have for our campers.

I look forward to seeing many of you on Saturday!

Steve Sir

Getting Ready for the Green Machine Dance

I always find myself becoming nostalgic toward the end of the summer.

At the start of the camp season, the summer stretches out far into the future.  The end seems incredibly far away.

The days are also intense.  Living in a cabin with 10-13 other people is a truly immersive experience without much “personal down time”.  The friendships form quickly and deeply (I always marvel at how many camp friends are in wedding parties), but if you find yourself a little annoyed with someone, you cannot ignore it.

The days are also incredibly active, with 6 hours of daily activities (most of which are somewhat physical) and special activities on top of that.  While campers get full nights of sleep (9ish hours), they generally hit the bed hard at the end of the day.

Time is a funny thing at camp.  We often say that the “days are long, but the weeks are short”.   I remember my first Man Cave last Tuesday as if it happened yesterday, but this morning’s meeting seems somewhat distant.

As the summer advances, time also accelerates.  With each session, I find the days rolling faster as I strive to make the time with the campers last.  I find it hard to believe that many of our campers will be leaving in 2.5 days.  One of the hard parts about camp is the fact that you do get highly attached to the individuals and the community very rapidly.  We truly begin to feel like part of a family.  As campers return year-after-year, those bonds only strengthen. That is a gift, but it also makes saying goodbye much harder.

Since I have done this so many years, I know how quickly the last days and weeks will speed by.  I also know that in a month or two, counselor or leadership team member would give anything to be waking up at 6 AM to run a Lake Swim or staying up late for a counselor meeting.  These temporal inconveniences might inspire the occasional complaint today, but they will seem precious soon.  Campers and counselors will long for nightly rituals where they share the high points of the day with their cabin.

In short, we will miss the community.  When I attended Davidson College, we had an Honor Code that we took very seriously.  As a result, we had essentially zero cheating or theft.  I remember the President of the College saying that “it is not that better people come here, but our community compels us to be better people”.  At our best, our community does the same thing.  College students choose to forgo partying.  Everyone unplugs from technology.  We strive to practice kindness and look for the best in each other.  Sure, we are not always successful, but we do pretty darn well.

Some of our counselors have told me that camp is a great place to see how people are at their best.  One female counselor said that a guy that is enthusiastically teaching a 9 year-old is far more appealing than a guy at a fraternity party!

So our community is nearing its end and I want to tell the counselors and campers how much they will miss it.  I want them to savor the time together because it is different from the “real world” and better in so many ways.  When school returns, there will be fewer silly songs, Pirate Ships, stories by starlight and deep conversations.  Do not get me wrong, I am a huge believer in education, but I also wish that we spent a little more time at here.

As I look over this, I realize I have rambled a bit.  I hope you will forgive the indulgence.  I just know that soon we will be missing the same children that you are currently missing.

But I cannot imagine doing anything else.

Steve Sir

Sometimes other people just say it better.

I truly love our Sunday evenings.  I love the picnics in general, and I enjoy this particular one in particular because we host the "T-Bone Club".  The T-Bone Club are all the campers having finished 8th grade that are in their last summer as campers (prior to becoming Senior Campers).  During one of our picnics, we ask them to dress up and we serve them a special meal of steak, double-stuffed potatoes, green beans. bread sticks and strawberry cake.  It is a fun celebration of their leadership as the oldest campers and an acknowledgement of their pending graduation.

Susie and I dress up as well, she in a classy way and I in a Scottish way.  Let's face it, you do not get too many chances to break out a kilt, so the T-Bone Club is one such opportunity.  [Note: wool socks in a Texas summer are not fun - this requires real commitment.]