Jack's Camp Friends Newsletter |
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I was so so so nervous last weekend.
It was Visiting Day. That’s when parents descend on this place after putting their kids on the camp bus three-plus weeks before. It’s time to see it for themselves.
There’s a lot that goes into a day like this, to say the least. Camp still has to feel like camp, not something staged for the guests. A bunch of these folks are alumni, so they’ve got their own feelings about what camp means.
And the nerves aren’t only ours. The kids are keyed up too, excited and a little anxious. It’s a whole thing. For some camps, these visiting days are massive endeavors. Maybe they are for yours.
But either way, every camp has its own version of this. Yours might be pickup, or a tour, or a family weekend, or just the couple of minutes at the metaphorical curb when a parent finally gets a looksy at what’s going on. On some level, you def know the feeling I’m talking about.
It’s not that we think something will go wrong. It’s that you spend a whole summer working damn hard at something, and these are the times you find out whether it’s working across every level.
The Instinct I’m Fighting
When those days roll around, the pull might be to control everything. Script the schedule, stage the activities so every parent catches the camp at its shiniest. Put on a show. And I don’t think that’s wrong at all. For a lot of places it might be exactly right.
Our Visiting Day tried to avoid a tight schedule, and this year we opened it up. Turned on every activity, kept the plan loose, and let the kids take their parents around camp for the day. Wherever they wanted to go, they went.
It felt risky (not real risk, like nervous risk). It was trusting the kids were bought in enough to everything happening at camp that they could essentially run the tour themselves.
Spoiler alert: it worked.
What we saw was dispersion. The kids went everywhere.
Paddleboards, the ropes course, the art studio, the new pickleball court out in the woods. No single crowd formed, and every kid’s tour looked a little different.
That spread kinda worked like a signal.
It was like this camp value distribution, with every kid in their own version of it. If the whole camp had funneled to one marquee activity and skipped everything else, that would have told us something else too.
You Can’t Cram for It
Kids and parents spreading out all over camp for hours and hours confirmed something we already half-knew but sometimes struggle to fully explain.
Namely, camp is the same place for every kid and a different place for each of them.
You can’t design one experience and hand it out. The value is personal, and it takes time to build. Faking that in an afternoon is going to be tough, probably impossible.
Which brings me back to my nerves from the beginning. Were they warranted? Hell yes they were. These are big days.
But, and this is a big but, the single best way to account for them is to try and run a camp the kids are so into that they’ll grab their parents and run this stuff themselves. And they aren’t even on the payroll!
It’s what happened last weekend. Parents left happy because their kids were happy because their kids love camp. And they got to show their parents. Full circle.
You got this,
Jack
PS - We are still rocking with Write From Camp on Substack all summer. 3x per week. Check it out.
