The other 50% of camp counseling
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All right, let's kick it.
At JC Weekend this spring, we ran a quick exercise with our incoming Junior Counselors. Every one of them had been a camper at K&E.
Asked them all the same question:
Who was the counselor you actually looked up to, and what did they do?
Didn’t qualify it with the “most fun” or “most athletic”, just the one they actually remembered.
Every answer pointed to the same thing.
What they said
One of our JCs described a counselor from his time as a camper.
At K&E, counselors get evening time off which all the campers know happens. This one counselor came back after about twenty minutes and spent the rest of the night reading jokes with the kids in the bunk instead of doing whatever he had planned.
Sure, these were pick-up lines off his phone, which isn’t amazing, but that’s an issue for a different day. The important thing here was that the JC remembered it clearly, years later, and specifically the part where the counselor chose to be there when he didn’t have to be.
Scott Brody was there too, and offered a memory from like 30 years ago. Sitting in a canoe with his counselor, who asked questions and listened in instead of just paddling around. That was the whole story. No big moment. A counselor who chose to just be in that canoe and seem like they genuinely wanted to be there.
Of everyone we asked, about the best counselors, no one mentioned a planned camp activity. Nobody named the counselor who ran the best Color War or could hit nukes in a softball game.
Everyone described some version of the same thing: a counselor who felt larger than life, and then pointed that energy back at the kids when they didn’t seem to have to.
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The math on this
Kids at camp (at least ours) are in scheduled activities for roughly half the day. Eight hours, give or take. That half belongs to the job. You run the activity, you manage the session, you do what the schedule says. You try your damndest to crush it.
The other half is unstructured. In-between time. The space between activities and meals and getting ready for bed. Nobody writes that time into the schedule. It just exists.
You can run a perfectly nice archery session, and the kids will medium remember the act of archery. Run a rough one? They’ll forget it by the following summer (or remember it for being terrible). Either way, that’s the scheduled half. The counselor doing what they signed up to do.
Most counselors use the unstructured time to decompress or talk to other staff. Some use it to be around the kids when nobody asked them to.
That second group is who show up as memories years later.
What kids are actually tracking
There’s no scorecard no rubric for this. Kids aren’t consciously rating their counselors. But somewhere underneath something else, they know the difference between “you had to be here” and “you chose to be here.”
The counselor who came back after twenty minutes didn’t do anything dramatic. He showed up somewhere he wasn’t required to be and made the night fun. The kids registered it and have been carrying it since.
We train for the scheduled half. Staff training is built around what happens when kids are in front of them and the job is clear.
Nobody writes curriculum for the other half. Honestly, there really isn’t curriculum for it. But staff need to know it exists. And it might be the most important thing.
35-year-old canoe rides. Jokes in the cabin.
They aren’t on the schedule, but you better believe they matter, probably more than anything else that happens at camp.
You got this,
Jack
PS - This week on Write From Camp on Substack, we wrote about how to start with Claude Cowork, why starting camp stories can start in the middle, and tomorrow is about doing one less thing this summer. Sign up free.
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4 Live Sprint Replays, The Full Staff Training Recipe Book, prompts to get started, and plan too. It's all in here. Really think this is all you need to run staff training.
Get my newsletter every week.
It’s all about kids today
Jack Schott
Summer Camp Evangelist