Bairnsdale SC Year 7 Camp Blog

When the buses rolled through the gates of The Summit on a cool but very exciting Wednesday morning, we were preparing for what was going to be an amazing week. We weren’t quite ready for how prepared the awesome teaching staff were so about halfway through our teachers meeting, we knew the week was going to be something special. The other coaches and I gathered in the Lodge with them to introduce ourselves and our Five Keys of Have Fun, Play All In, Make Mistakes, Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable, and Don’t Go Home Wondering What If, before playing a couple of games. Show everyone our harnesses and how to set themselves Targets, Stretches, and Super Stretches, our very own goal-setting strategy, and get into our first couple of rounds of activities.

The Flying Fox, Leap of Faith, and the Giant Swing were the instant highlights, Sky Bridge was a tough one, the Summit Window was challenging just to get up to, the Snowy River Challenge, Bush Challenge, and the Laser Skirmish were epic, Cave was a bonding experience and Inflatable City was just fun. There were definitely many personal boundaries pushed and fears overcome, with too many kids to mention pushing beyond what they first thought they were capable of.

Toward the end of the first day, each group was asked to come up with a name for themselves that was agreed upon by all, and these are the names they came up with;

Grp 1 - The Rangers

Grp 2 - Geronimoes

Grp 3 - Avocado’s

Grp 4 - Thing 4

Grp 5 - No No Pops

Grp 6 - J6’s

Grp 7 - Smokey Georges

Grp 8 - The Bubble Guppies

Grp 9 - Dirty Deck Chairs

Grp 10 - TCC’s

After a Bush Walk on Wednesday night, Thursday was kicked off with a morning Intentions chat about how your actions can impact those around you before getting straight into the next round of activities. The afternoon turned out to be a bit cool, but everyone was so into the activities we couldn’t tell.

Thursday afternoon we also embarked on our epic Monster Course, a run around the grounds of The Summit involving tires, charades, mud, Bruce, a ball pit, mud, barbed wire, and a whole lot of mud! The course was scored using each team's improvement time from the first lap to the surprise second lap, with everyone doing amazingly, but being dominated by The Rangers and The Dirty Deck Chairs.

Friday started with another chat from Logan about gratitude before completing our final rotations and wrapping up the camp. We asked each of the kids to vote on a Values winner, or the person in their group they felt used our Five Keys the best to make camp a rewarding experience for not only themselves but their whole team. The winners are listed below with all the times for each of the recordable activities. We gathered on the stage to say our thank yous to all the people involved in making this camp epic before reading out the winners of the various activities.

Thank you so much to the parents, teachers, and students of Bairnsdale Secondary College for an awesome week. You were all so incredibly dedicated to ensuring your camp was an amazing experience. We at The Summit can’t wait to have you back again soon.

Adam, Tim, Liam, Logan, Sarah, Sophie, Tiff, Mim, Zoe, Calarnee, Sam, Marcus, Chey, and Julie