Jack's Camp Friends Newsletter |
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This week's Write From Camp on Substack is covering how I'm (trying) to make camp videos that feel organic.
For Friday, Doug wrote about Sebastian Maniscalco's take on summer camp. This is a free one and is worth signing up to see that post.
All right, soccer time.
The World Cup is going on. Have you noticed? Maybe caught a little USA 2-0 W last night.
If you’re working at camp right now, I doubt you’ve caught much of it. I’ve watched about 45 seconds total (rounding up).
Hard to dial into 8+ hours of soccer (or football!) when you’re busy running around all day.
But we tried to bring a little of it to camp. Our boys had a World Cup Day this week. Kids drafted onto national teams, soccer all over camp, senior finals in the Hollow with all of Kenwood watching and the whole place singing the national anthem. Staff came up with the idea and worked to put it into action.
From the outside, it looked incredible.
What wasn’t totally obvious was the hour beforehand when nobody, counselors included, knew exactly what was supposed to happen next.
Ideas Are Never The Hard Part
Camp runs on good ideas, and good ideas (usually) come cheap. Everyone has them. The hard part is that someone has to own one and drag it into reality.
The first time you run anything, it’s the worst you’ll ever run it. And that first time is also when you have the most energy for it, before the doubts and the logistics wear you down.
World Cup Day had its doubters for sure.
“It’s only soccer.” “The kids will get bored.” Stuff like that.
It started rocky, and the communication was a mess.
Then it built. By the finals in the Hollow, it was among the best things we’d done all week. Some kids will tell you it was their favorite event of the summer. Others thought it was fine. That spread is normal. That’s how most of camp actually works.
The Real Bottleneck Is Information
World Cup Day was supposed to open with a breakout. For our big activities we kick things off with one, a loud, high-energy reveal that builds hype before anything official starts.
Ours nearly got submarined before it began.
Basically, we mistimed it so we hit this dead hour where kids kept asking what was next, and counselors kept saying the worst thing a staff member can say.
“I don’t know.”
I played out the string the only way I could think of. Getting everyone together for a photo to send to my mom (Pam Schott loves seeing kids at camp!).
It bought 10 minutes and meant nothing. A genuinely good idea was sitting right there, almost sunk by logistics that never traveled.
Running camp is mostly moving information from the people who have it to the people who need it, in time for it to matter. Meeting cadence. The one-page printout. How early people need things. Who approves what.
That, not the ideas, is where camp sometimes gets tough.
Skill = Flexibility
I’m trying to build a better system for this, and I’d bet most of us always are. But even a good system won’t have the handout ready every time. Camp doesn’t work that way.
So the system is only half of it. The other half is teaching everyone, yourself included, to roll when it falls apart, or is starting to fray at the edges. Because it will.
The main thing at camp, at least for me above all, is that if things aren’t working perfectly, the kids shouldn’t feel it.
The second campers sense it might be a mess, it becomes one. A counselor’s instinct is to say “I don’t know.” The better move is to absorb the gap, keep the energy up, and let the kids stay inside the day.
You can’t prep your way out of all of it. Some of the job is just learning to wing it well.
So whatever big thing you’re pulling off this summer, expect the same split. The event itself will probably shine. What decides whether it does is the messy run-up, how information moves before anyone shows up.
There’s still plenty of World Cup left to watch. But notice what you actually see. The goals, the PKs (Germany, oof), the upsets, but never the machinery behind all of it.
Camp is the same. Kids will carry the finals into the Hollow and the whole place is wilding out. They’ll never know (and should never know) about the hour it looked shaky.
That gap, between the memory and the machinery that makes it, is the job. Building it, and staying loose enough to save it when it breaks.
You got this,
Jack
PS Still getting summer inquiries about camp? It pays to have an automated sequence to respond to them. Check out 7 Camp Lead Sequence Fixes to Make Right Now. Free and a place to start with these automated series.
