The Knicks won the NBA Championship. I’ve been waiting my whole life to write that first sentence. Two months of playoff basketball. Every game and minute mattered. Jalen Brunson (our hero) was locked in from tip to buzzer for eight straight weeks. Which brings me to your camp. You are in the exact same window Brunson was in. You just did not put a name to it. Most camp people I talk to still think of summer as the regular season with more urgency. Summer is actually a different animal...
12 days ago • 2 min read
We dropped both of my daughters at camp last week. The 10-year-old was going for the first time. The 13-year-old was going for summer number three. If you asked last week which one would have more nerves, would have said the 10-year-old. Everything was new for her. Not quite. The returner was a bit more nervous. She was getting her last texts in with her home friends. Running through in her head whether the camp friends would still feel the same as last summer. Working the nerves out loud in...
19 days ago • 2 min read
Do you know how car insurance rates drop when you turn 25? Why that’s the moment an insurance company decides you are a fully formed adult who can drive a car safely enough to not charge you an arm and a leg? It is worth thinking about this when you are looking at your staff. That drop is not arbitrary. The actuarial nerds at the insurance company are not guessing. They have decades of crash data showing the brain piloting the car at 21 is meaningfully different from the brain piloting the...
26 days ago • 2 min read
Camp is humming along. Summer is cooking. And in the run of play, a staff member comes to you and asks for feedback on their performance. They want to know what they could be doing better. Great! This is the moment camp directors always say they want. And they believe it when they say it. Wrote a while back about the complaint that comes up most from camp staff. They never get any feedback. So when one of them walks up and asks for it directly, you, of course, oblige. Sit them down. Name what...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Today’s young camp staff are hyperaware of the moment a phone comes out. Think about a moment at your own camp. Something fun is happening at the end of a long day. But now marketing pulls out a phone to grab a quick photo. And then the mood shifts just a little. These staff are 17 to 23. They have spent basically their entire lives watching people get turned into marketing posts, or worse, into memes in someone else’s group chat. They notice the second a phone comes out. They notice when...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Every time I walk into a camp staff training, I know what the staff is looking at first. My socks. I wear no-shows socks. You know the kind that disappear inside the shoe and the ones that frame me as the elder millennial I am. The staff is wearing crew socks. Stoop socks or quarter length, the full-leg ones. So they notice the second I walk in. I could go buy new socks, but honestly, I don’t want to and they wouldn’t look right on me. So I just acknowledge it out loud at the start of the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
A few summers ago, my (at the time) fifth grader went off to overnight camp for the first time. Of course, excitedly, I shared with other parents at school pickup, expecting similar vibes. Nope. Instead, I got questions like: “Why would you let them go that far away?” “Why would you send them away for so long?” “How could you trust someone else with your kid overnight?” And these parents knew what I do for a living. They see LinkedIn. They know I run a consulting firm working with summer...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Staff training has started for a handful of camps, and is still a few days away for most. The night or nights before, you can’t quite name why you’re feeling on edge, but maybe you are. Even with decades of experience and (maybe) a few wisps of gray hair, there’s still this nervous feeling right around now. Know what I’m talking about? It showed up for me even recently on a phone call. A camp director hired me to lead his training. He wanted a prep call to demo what we’d be running that week....
2 months ago • 2 min read
I was touring a camp last summer with a non-profit CEO. We’d just walked her property together for an hour or so, looking at programs. I told her she was a good CEO who cared about camp. She said, “How do you know that?” I looked down. “Your shoes.” She was wearing sneakers. The Sneakers Test Do sneakers tell the whole story? Yes, I think sneakers tell the whole story. She was dressed to be on the property all day. The tour was the smaller thing she happened to be doing. It doesn’t matter if...
2 months ago • 2 min read