By Adam Kaplan
This is high season for “New Boy Presentations.” You remember the New Boy Presentation, don’t you? It might have been Nardie and Sally, or Roger and Judy, showing up at your house laden with a slide projector and a screen to set up in your living room…or maybe it was Adam Fornear and I wrestling with a computer and your television set. In the past couple of years, I have had to do these over Zoom calls, which brings with it its own challenges.
Regardless, these presentations are filled with photos and lots of information about what camp life is like. One of the things that has always struck me about these presentations is how much time I spend talking about all of the STUFF that we have at camp. In fact, of the 144 photos that I present, fully 135 of them are just about showing the prospective campers all of the “stuff” they will get to play with at camp. (One hundred forty-four photos…I know…learn to edit already Kaplan! But I figure it is only fair to prepare the kids for the long-windedness of their camp director since they will have to endure it throughout their camp careers!) But, anyone that really understands Nebagamon knows that despite the fact that we have some pretty fun stuff at camp, the real magic of the place, and what makes it special, cannot be shown in a photo. The Nebagamon magic happens to all of us because we commit ourselves to building as perfect of a community as we can, and challenge ourselves to become the best versions of ourselves.
I’ve noticed that over the years, as my New Boy Presentation has evolved, I have attempted to communicate this affective facet of camp more and more. I have realized that one of the points that I now make no less than five times during that presentation, is that sometimes what we do at camp is hard. Whether it be getting to the top of the climbing wall, learning to windsurf, getting over homesickness or learning to resolve conflict in a cabin group…sometimes things at camp are difficult.
While I know that “Come to Camp Nebagamon, things will be hard!” is not the greatest tag line from a marketing approach, I intentionally highlight it because I really do believe that the challenges that camp asks boys to accept and face are absolutely key to any formative camp experience.
The truth is, more than ever, I believe that kids today need to grapple with challenges. Like many of you, I am a modern parent. And part of modern parenting is the desire to gift our kids idyllic childhoods free from as much strife and difficulty as possible. With the best of intentions, we modern parents often shield our kids from lots of things that are difficult. When a relationship with a peer in school is a struggle, we might call the parents of that peer. When our kids are having trouble with a concept in class, we may step in and go directly to the teacher. When our kids seem to be getting less playing time on a team as they would like (or we would like!), we go straight to the coach. Again, we modern parents do this out of love and a desire to be wonderful parents…that is not bad. But, an unfortunate byproduct of this is that we may set our kids up to believe that life is always going to be easy, or that someone will always take care of things for them. We deny them the opportunity to address challenges on their own, and that may leave them feeling like they are not capable of handling challenges. Instead of “protecting” our kids, we inadvertently prevent them from learning how capable they truly are, even when things are tough. No, ESPECIALLY when things are tough.
And that is where camp comes in.
Camp is the perfect place for our kids to stretch out of their comfort zone and embrace challenges. It is a combination of the leap of faith that our camp parents take when they trust us and make the decision to send their son(s) to camp, the distance from life as they know it, and the roughshod communication that parents receive from their kids (yeah, I know the quality of the letters you sometimes get from your sons! If you want some help with that, you can read more here, from Adam’s Updates), that allows kids at camp to grow. Removed from the parental safety net and the expectations of their community, campers are more willing to try. They learn how to navigate (with the caring coaching of our wonderful staff) and succeed at conquering those challenges. And in the process it bolsters their understanding of themselves and how capable they are. You can imagine there is very little that feels as good as learning that you are capable of succeeding when things are hard. There is no greater gift that a summer at Nebagamon offers these guys…
Indeed, that New Boy Presentation has changed some over the years. These days it is not uncommon to hear me saying, “Getting up on waterskis is hard, and you are going to fall down a lot as you learn to do it. But, when you finally figure it out, and you are up on those skis cruising around the lake, you will feel incredibly proud of yourself.” Another favorite is, “I like that you will be walking up that steep hill on trail, with that backpack weighing on you, thinking about how hard it is to get up to the top. Because…when you get to the summit and you are eating lunch on top of that mountain, the food will taste better and the view will be prettier, because YOU are the one that made it happen…and that feels great.” Perhaps not the stuff of a camp marketer’s dream presentation, but, then again, those are the folks that wanted us to install webcams all over camp and highlight in the New Boy Presentation the ability for parents to always stay virtually connected while their son is away. Ummm, we took a hard pass on that one.
We are deeply in the throes of planning for the summer of 2022 and we could not be more excited about it. So, here is wishing everyone at camp this year a summer full of physical challenges, social challenges, and even straight up hard things…with s’mores.
