Grovedale College Year 9 Camp Blog

On the stunning morning of Wednesday, February 21, the Summit welcomed the students and teachers from Grovedale College.

Students were promptly shown to their accommodation, where they would be staying for the next couple of days! After they got settled, they were welcomed into the Stadium, where coach Spinks gave an introduction to the camp and the coaches - Logan, Sara, Calarnee, Cheyenne, Ant, Sam, Aron, Jakob, and their team leader Spinks!  Sam discussed to the students about The Summit’s recipe for the best camp ever, and the ingredients were the Five Keys of camp. These keys are:

1. Have Fun

2.  Play All In

3.  Make Lots of Mistakes

4.  Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

5.  Don’t Go Home Wondering What If

Without further ado, we all headed down to the activities hub and started with a game of 50 Up. Then Sara and Calarnee taught everyone how to wear a helmet and harness, followed by Logan telling everyone an epic goal-setting strategy to help us grow our comfort zones and conquer challenging activities called Target, Stretch, and Super Stretch.

Campers started their first activity with two initiative challenges that involved working together to solve a puzzle. This tested teamwork and leadership, but teams rose to the challenge! Then, we moved on to our first activity rotation.

Day one ended with introducing the students to a camp tradition called GMICs, which stands for “Great Moments in Camp” - this is all about writing down and acknowledging some of the incredible moments we’ve seen.

Day two started with setting a morning intention with Spinks, learning about how important it is to focus on the things we can control, mainly the weather and people.  Asking the students to think about who they wanted to be and how they wanted to show up for themselves, others and, of course, the activities. Before getting into the park and beginning their three activity rotations, we played a game of Jockeys to get them into the right state physically.

After lunch, students made their way down to the park; finally, it was time to do the famous Monster Course with the bonus of the waterslide to rinse off, which made everything more dramatic and fun.  The tribes completed the first lap course, stopping the timer, and were banded together and told that they were running another lap, as the winner of the course was the tribe with the most significant improvement time. This was a massive feat of teamwork, strength, and resilience. All tribes improved by 5 minutes or more.

The camp activities were Leap of Faith, Laser Skirmish, Sky Bridge, Summit Window, Snowy River Challenge, Giant Swing, and Snake and Nails. This range of activities challenged people’s bravery, team spirit, support, trust, creativity, and problem-solving (to name a few!) 

Day three came around, after reading a bunch of GMICs, Sam ran a gratitude session and asked what and who makes them feel grateful as well as the three ways to express it (verbal, written and physical); we then had two more activities to go, and we challenged them not to go home wondering what if. Making our way down to the BBQ shelter we played a game of Huckle Buckle to get our bodies moving, the groups tackled their last two activities ahead,  At the end of the last rotation, groups then debriefed their experience by sharing a rock, stick, and leaf (something that rocked their world about camp, something that will stick with them and that they want to leave behind). All tribes then voted for a Values winner, someone who had embodied The Summit Five Keys the most consistently throughout camp. After taking a group photo, we went to the WW2 army, where the valued winners got a hot lap while the rest got to watch.

Thank you Grovedale College for playing all in and achieving what was once thought impossible!

Keep Unleashing Your Greatness!