Victoria Aboriginal Health Services

It was a pleasure to welcome Victoria Aboriginal Health Services to The Summit! The campers were very excited to be given the opportunity to come to camp for the whole week! And the week was going to be epic, filled with 12 rotations of activities, The Monster Course, lots of smiles, a great attitude and lots of fun!!

The afternoon kicked off with the introduction to the Five Keys: Have Fun, Play All In, Make Lots of Mistakes, Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable and Don’t Go Home Wondering What If. We thought, we would just break it down and go with Have Fun, for the first day of camp. We split off into our groups, where we did our first team activity together, learning quickly that to be a great group, we needed to communicate together in our initiative game.

The rest of our afternoon flew by very quickly. After learning about a new goal setting technique, we call it “Target – Stretch – Super Stretch”, and a wonderful harness brief from Cam, we were all physically and mentally ready to hit the park with 4 exciting activities - Orienteering, High Wire, Summit Window and Inflatables! That time was filled with loads of fun and laughs and 1 rotation was completed. It was a great taster for what was to come for the rest of the week!

Day 2 rolled around and we soon learnt that at The Summit we like to set our days up for success. Learning about who we wanted to be today and choosing one word to describe what we wanted to focus on for the day as well as reflecting back on our 5 keys. Today was the day to Play All In! We hit the park for a group game. We played 50 up and although at the start we struggled to hit 50, we then, blew it out of the park to get an impressive score off 172!! What a way to start the day, I’ll say! We then split up into our groups and went straight into 2 rotations before lunch. They were Orienteering, High Wire, Summit Window, Inflatables. All different activities - some off the ground, some on the ground - but all are very similar in teaching us, that once you start playing all in, the fun naturally comes as well!

After lunch we finished off our last rotation of those activities. Then introduced 4 new activities for the last rotation off the day: Snowy River Challenge, Sky Bridge, Rock Wall and Laser Skirmish! By the end of the day we had finalized our epic team names, they were:

Group 1: Koori People (TKP)

Group 2: Victoria Aboriginal Sporting People (VASP)

Group 3: Deadly Warriors

Group 4: The Chain

Day 3 was coming at us hot! With temperatures of 40 degrees coming at us later in the day, we thought, we best get the day on the way! To kick it off, we started with a moment of gratitude, shared a few things we were grateful for in their day to day lives - sometimes it is the little things that go unnoticed! It was the day when we focused on making lots of mistakes, so we thought what best way to learn from the mistakes then from playing a game called Huckle-Buckle! We then started our activities day: Snowy River Challenge, Sky Bridge, Rock Wall and Laser Skirmish! All the teams really started to come together in The Snowy River Challenge, learning that encouraging and supporting your team mates is the best way for a team to succeed!

Sky Bridge was filled with determination and persistence and helped all realise, that when you fall down you need to get back up and keep taking on another step forward. Special shout out too Bianca – great work on The Sky Bridge - not only did you do an incredible job walking across the bridge but you were there to support and encourage the rest of your team mates across the bridge as well! Georgia, your resilience on The Bridge was outstanding. You fought your way back up every single time and just kept going, it was incredible to see! Everyone, including the leaders, showed great determination and persistent to get across The Bridge. It wasn’t easy but you proved, that by taking one step forward and keeping your head up, you can really achieve more then you realize.

Rock Wall was filled with so many limits being pushed, getting one step higher then you thought. It was awesome to see you come down and see the journey of how far you got. Well done to everyone!

As lunch rolled around, the temperature was definitely rising, so, after lunch we had one last rotation for the day, and even though, it was hot, everyone still gave it their all. Afterwards, we hit the water! We opened up the waterslide and everyone was having so much fun, enjoying the moment, whether it was in the canoes or the waterslide, it ended up being a refreshing afternoon!

Day 4 came around and we talked about being present in the moment, we watched Beyoncé video to help to get a greater understanding of our key for the day, which was “Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable”!

To start with, we played a game of Pirates all together and had some laughs. We, then, got introduced to our final 4 activities: Cave, Giant Swing, Leap of Faith and the Flying Fox. Four more exciting activities and we soon started to understand the whole “getting comfortable being uncomfortable” on The Giant Swing!

In The Cave, learning new experiences, it wasn’t the dark we were afraid off, it was the unknown. As a result, have learnt that sometimes you just need to trust the process.

We all had a flying time while on our Flying Fox, where we even had a lot of team mates go twice! It was great to see the support of group from The Leap of Faith to run over and help The Giant Swing team. It was very much appreciated. Awesome team work! Thank you, everyone!

We had some lunch, then got ready for our Monster Course! Before we started our Monster Course, we got into our groups and came up with a chant that was going to be presented in front of everyone to determine the order of The Monster Course (and who gets their food first for dinner 😉)! The groups were getting judged on team involvement, originality and the level of enthusiasm. They had about 20 minutes to come up with the best that they could do! AND THERE WERE some cool chants but The Chain did take out first place, followed closely by The Deadly Warriors, 3rd place TKP followed by VASP. Very well done everyone!

Now it was time to get wet, muddy and have all the fun. Our Monster Course was all about demonstrating great team work. The Chain and Deadly Warriors decided to go in the second heat, so TKP and VASP lead the way! We soon learnt in The Monster Course, it wasn’t about the fastest time, we wanted to see what type of person you are when you are wet, muddy, playing all in and really challenging yourself and being a supportive encouraging team member. It was incredible too see each team really come together and improve to be the best that their team could be! After all the fun, laughs and challenges along the way the finished off with some fun in the lake afterwards!

Day 5 Our final day has arrived! What an epic week it has been! We reflected on how much has happened and acknowledging it was the last day we didn’t want to go home wondering what if! We got straight out in the park and played our last game together, which was Jockeys!

We then had an all group Scavenger Hunt, where each time we were racing against each other and the clock to score the most points! It was awesome looking around the park seeing the teams run from place to place and hearing their chants along the way! After time was completed, we re-grouped and read out the results. Unfortunately there was only 1 winner! But 2 second places!

1st place on 690: VASP

2nd place 610: Deadly Warriors and TKP

3rd place 570: The Chain

We then went into our last rotation of camp and finished of strong! After 5 days of unleashing greatness, the camp came to its finish line!

Thank you all very much for living by the 5 keys and really bringing everything you could. You all really pushed yourselves and crushed camp The Summit coaches and leaders could not be more proud of what you have all accomplished over camp, keep continuing to be amazing! I hope you created lots of memories that will last a life time.

Results:

Snowy River Challenge:

1st place: 20.19 VASP (Group 2

2nd place: 21.36 The Chain (Group 4)

3rd place: 24.16 TKP (Group 1)

4th place: 25.12 Deadly Warriors (Group 3)

Monster Course:

Every team made an epic time improvement well done to all

1st place: 9.44 The Chain

2nd place: 7.28 VASP

3rd place: 7.21 TKP

4th place: 4.08 Deadly Warriors

Values Winner:

Deadly Warriors: Hannah

TKP: Mara

The Chain: Bindi and Mahkylah

VASP: Jacob

Also throughout the week there were 3 more people that really went above and beyond and always demonstrated incredible leadership skills a big thank you too:

Bianca

Whitney

Micheal

Many thanks and Best wishes from Trinette, Cam, Phoebe and Nik!