The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
STAYING ON TOP OF THEIR GAME
Sports-based camps offer kids fun, chance to sharpen skills
Among the vast array of summer-camp opportunities available to kids and their parents throughout Northeast Ohio, sports-oriented programs have been longtime staples.
Not only do these types of summer camps seek to introduce a variety of established athletic pursuits to children and teens, they also provide structure, opportunities to improve the skills of those involved and impart valuable, lifelong attributes like determination, self confidence and social skills.
Take the sand league volleyball summer camps offered through Force Sports, for example.
During a July 10 session at Force Sports’ Eastlake facility, youth volleyball director Colleen Nero said the seven, weeklong sessions of the camp offer its participants a chance to relax and work on their technique without worrying about team standings. It also helps them train on terrain that offers challenges above and beyond what schools’ gyms have to offer.
“This sand league allows them a lot of fun. It gives them a break,” Nero said. “They have fun. They laugh. Plus, it’s good conditioning. It’s not easy to play sand (volleyball).”
She said the sand league presents benefits for its participants’ families, as well.
“The parents and grandparents like it. They can bring their kids, grandkids because it’s during the day and they
love being here and sitting outside,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity to sit outside, enjoy the sun together and be a family.”
Soon-to-be Chardon High School student Josie Lococo and her parents are cases in point.
Josie, who is 13, is on the team at school and has been playing volleyball about seven years. She starts her eighthgrade year in the fall and said she enjoys everything about the sand league summer camp.
“I just like that I get to spend time with my friends and get to do something I love to do,” she said, adding that she likes the extra training, too.
Josie’s father, Sam, said he likes seeing her enjoy herself so much and appreciates the added interaction with her friends the league provides.
“She definitely enjoys herself here,” he said. “And the friend aspect is especially important because she doesn’t get to spend a lot of time with them. She also gets to play with girls from her team. So that’s a big plus.”
Lococo said the league also provides structure while school’s out for the summer and has helped Josie grow more responsible.
“That’s the other thing — having some responsibility,” he said. “She has to get up on time. She has to organize getting here. (Her mom and I) are both usually working. So she has to arrange getting here and back home. So I think it’s helping to build character and responsibility, too.”
Josie’s mother, Gina, agreed.
“It’s good having that structure, especially over the summer because it’s a freefor-all,” she said. “Plus, she loves it.”
But Volleyball is far from the only summer-camp offering through Force Sports. It has numerous locations throughout Northeast Ohio and offers a range of summercamp opportunities, including soccer, tennis, lacrosse and fitness, among others.
For those seeking to expose their young campers to a variety of sports, Blue Streak Summer Camps offers an AllSports Camp for boys and girls ages 4-13 that exposes them to everything from archery, baseball, basketball, compass reading and outdoor education to football, frisbee, golf, kickball, repelling, soccer, softball and floor hockey, just to name a few.
Founder Tim Baab, a former coach at John Carroll University, said the nineweek camp is to introduce its campers to as many sports as possible and is, therefore, constantly switching up its activity.
“We change the activities every 30-35 minutes,” he said. “So they’ll cover 16-18 different sports each week.”
He added that variety has always been an important part of the philosophy he employs in physical education.
““I used to be head basketball coach at John Carroll University and I always believed that kids should be exposed to as many sports as they can,” Baab said, adding that the program has helped introduce countless youth to team sports in which they may never have participated otherwise.
“We have lacrosse, for example,” he said. “We’ve had kids that have never played lacrosse before. And we’ve had their parents call us, after they got back into school, saying they joined the lacrosse team.”
But the lessons Baab’s camps teach go above and beyond athletics and technique. They also speak to the psyche, emphasizing good sportsmanship, self confidence, teamwork and socialization, he said.
“We also work on social skills, which is important,” he said. “We talk about winning and losing and about how winning is not the most important thing. We talk about what happens when we don’t win and how to be a good sport.”
He added that the Blue Streak camps administrators and counselors also “work hard on behavior modification, accentuating the good and ignoring the bad, unless someone’s in danger, of course.”
He also said the camps welcome special needs participants, who participate alongside everyone else.
“We like to mainstream them,” he said. “It helps them out and it helps out the kids who maybe have never been around others with special needs.”
A newcomer to the Northeast Ohio sports scene is Warrensville Heights-based Adrenaline Monkey, which seeks to bring the excitement and creative energy found in competitions like American Ninja Warrior and Parkour training to the masses.
Adrenaline Monkey offers two summer-camp options: the Wee Warrior Camp for ages 3-5 and the Ninja Warrior Camp for ages 6-13, according to Jamie Wolfe-Haggerty, director of marketing and business development.
Wolfe-Haggerty said the camps’ main goals are “to provide safety and instruction” to kids looking to engage in these kinds of activities, which are a departure from traditional, team-based and individual sports.
Although, by July 10, Adrenaline Monkey was only half-way through its first week of youth summer camps, having just had its grand opening June 30, Wolfe-Haggerty said the initial feedback has been positive.
“We actually offer half-day and full-day camps and I’ve heard a lot of kids in the halfday camp say they wish they were in the full-day camp. So that’s a good sign,” she said. I’ve also heard parents say: ‘This is the only camp my child wants to do.”
She also added that “the kids are going home tired, which is a good thing.”
Adrenaline Monkey also offers a wide array of adventure-based programing yearround, hosting parties and other events, and is equipped with other attractions in addition to the Ninja Warrior and Parkour courses, including climbing walls, ropes courses and performance-training facilities.
“So they’ll cover 16-18 different sports each week.” — Founder Tim Baab, a former coach at John Carroll University