Quick Note: This is a guest post from Doug Norrie, who was with me at Tri-State last week.

Asked for his thoughts on the summer camp industry, or at least what he saw in Atlantic City.

Plus, 3 extra things

1. ​Staff Training Sprint Cohort → So excited for this. 50+ camp pros are already in! Let's get your camp there, too. 4 days building out a staff training. More details at the bottom of this email.
2. ​Dirtbag Rich: High Freedom, Low Income, Deep Purpose by Blake Boles → coming out March 28th. Blake is a great friend, a travel buddy, and one of the coolest guys out there for thinking about life in a totally new way. That code above gets you 50% off the Kindle edition. Remember Portugal - that was Blake
3. ​Write From Camp on Substack → We are writing about the business of summer camp 3x a week. 100% free to join. Specifically, more Tri-State thoughts coming out on Friday.

Ok, take it away Doug.

This was my first ACA Tri-State conference. Tri-State is a hell of a way to be introduced to the summer camp industry on a macro level, with "everyone" in the same place at once.

I should say upfront: this was my first one. Everything that follows comes with that caveat attached.

Before I get into any "bigger" thoughts about the 72 hours, four moments told me pretty much everything I needed to know about what was happening here.

1. Before the keynote, someone on stage is yelling into a mic. A parade of costumed people sprint across the stage. Total spectacle. I had legitimately no idea what was going on. It seemed great.
2. Wednesday morning, 8 AM. Dude in a lizard costume runs by us. I'm thinking it's either someone finishing the night before, or late to some AM job. Nope. Neither. It's a camp 5K down the AC Boardwalk with a camp flair in a place (AC) that definitely doesn't scream "summer camp!"
3. Camp Idol Wednesday night. Full band and full energy. A bit loud for this old head. But then there's the ACA CEO Henry DeHart belting out Devil Went Down to Georgia. In almost any other industry, this would be utter lunacy (or 100% alcohol induced), but here it was pretty much just normal.
4. Didn't count the number of hugs I saw in the Convention Hall and elsewhere over the course of three days, but it was in the hundreds or thousands. I even got and gave a ton even though I knew about 15 people total walking in the doors.

About 4,000 people showed up to Atlantic City for three days in March. Camp owners, camp directors, camp counselors, camp support staff, camp vendors, and camp consultants. The whole ecosystem, or at least a relative and accurate sample of it, in one convention hall.

I was there with Jack specifically, and a number of other camps I work with tangentially. That's enough context to not walk in completely blind and rudderless. But not enough to pretend I had any real holistic read on an industry this size. I'm not sure anyone could really have this in totality.

That being said, there are some things you can see pretty clearly from the outside.

A 1 of 1 Group

Summer camps, by and large, know exactly what they're great at. The fun, the mission, the intentionality around giving kids an experience that's genuinely hard to find anywhere else right now.

These people give a crap (and are proud) about what they do in a way that's not especially common.

What's harder, and this came up in conversations over lunches and dinners and in sessions, is taking all of that and packaging it for the parents who most need to hear it.

Because parents are distracted, skeptical, spending money on travel sports, and increasingly unconvinced that sending their kid away for a summer is a normal or necessary thing to do.

And it's worth being precise about why.

Parents aren't sitting at home thinking camp is weird. They just don't trust much of anything right now. Institutions, strangers, anything they can't see or control. It's more a cultural problem than a camp problem. Which makes it harder to solve and more urgent to address.

From what I can tell, without getting into spreadsheet nerdiness, enrollment is down at a lot of camps. Nobody seems to have a clean answer for this.

What I noticed about the sessions

There were north of 100 sessions at Tri-State this year. Staff training, camper wellbeing, mental health, operations, legal, DEI, activity programming.

All valuable. I went to a bunch, and each one I stepped into kicked ass. By a simple law of transference, I'll just assume all the ones I missed also kicked ass.

But sessions specifically about getting new families to campConvincing the parents who don't trust anything enough right now to write a check and send their kid away for a summer?

Maybe 8 or 9. Out of 100-plus.

Sure, you could say, "Yo, Doug, a great program is, in and of itself, a marketing strategy!!!"

I'm with you. Retention matters. A camp that's safe, fun, inclusive and all those other words keeps families coming back. We'll high-five on that.

But retention is downstream only of the families you already have.

It does nothing for the parent who's like, "hell f@#ing no" or who's spending many bands on club soccer, or who has quietly decided that sending their kid to live with a bunch of 19-year-olds in the woods for a month is, at the very best, not happening.

Also, there is really no separate camp sales team out there smiling and dialing, following the Glengarry Glen Ross model of Always Be Closing. The camp teams in June staff trainings are often the same people who need to get on the phone with a skeptical parent from September through May.

Everyone at this conference, to some degree, is responsible for enrollment. This is the whole group. Alec Baldwin isn't walking through that door swinging brass balls and talking about selling.

So the honest read (from someone who has exactly one of these under his belt) is this:

Tri-State is exceptional at helping camps get better at the thing they already do. It is a bit less focused on helping camps grow beyond the families already in the fold. This is a cultural chasm to overcome, and if only 8-10% of the energy is spent understanding and addressing this gap, it's only going to widen.

Camps, like most industries, are extraordinary at talking to themselves. The conference was a mini-masterclass in it, in the best possible way, with spaces for gap-filling here and there.

Which brings me back to the boardwalk.

And the keynote stage. And the hugs. And the old guard, middle-agers, and young crew who went all out, singing full-band karaoke to a room full of people who were completely here for it.

Camp people exist out in the world the same way they exist at camp. That’s not a small thing. Most industries don’t get to say that. Could you imagine a convention of mortgage brokers rolling like this? No. And honestly, we wouldn’t want them to.

But this energy is a sales pitch.

The fun, the commitment, the bravery to be exactly this unself-conscious in an Atlantic City convention hall in March? That’s marketable.

Not in the used car lot way. In the honest-to-goodness-I-mean-this-from-the-bottom-of-my-heart way that’s almost impossible to fake and nearly extinct everywhere else.

Camps know this. They live it. They sprint down boardwalks in lizard costumes for it.

They just need to package it and bring it out into the world with the same conviction they bring everything else. 4K people in Atlantic City in March already know this. The trick is making sure the parent on the couch in November does too.

Camp people are already doing it. The pitch is already there. Getting it out into the world is the part that might still need work. But there's plenty to work with.

I’ll steal this from Jack:

You got this,

Doug

PS - Thoughts on this? Can let me know at doug@dougnorrie.com

PPS (From Jack) - Seriously, sign your camp up for the Staff Training Sprint Cohort.

Bring 3 staff members. Get $600 in additional bonus materials.

This is going to be the deal of staff training season.