Norwood SC Year 8 Camp Blog

When the buses rolled through the gates of The Summit on a windy and powerless but inspiring Wednesday morning, we were preparing for what was going to be a challenging but 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, showing everyone our harnesses and how to set themselves Targets, Stretches, and Super Stretches, and getting into our first couple of rounds of activities.

The Abseiling, Summit Window, Leap of Faith and Giant Swing were the instant highlights, making for a fantastic vibe at the bottom of our Big Tower. Sky Bridge was a tough one, the Rock Wall and High Wire were challenging to get up, the Snowy River Challenge was an epic team bonding experience, our Cave was scary and Inflatable City was just fun. Both teachers and students pushed many personal boundaries (you were amazing Christine) and students and fears were overcome, with too many to mention pushing beyond what they first thought they were capable of.

Towards 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;

Group 1 - Save The Turtles

Grp 2 - Team John Summit

Grp 3 - Tupac Butter

Grp 4 - Skippity Dippity

Grp 5 - Five Aura

Grp 6 - Low Gang

Grp 7 - The Swifties

Grp 8 - Flagthorn

Grp 9 - Greasy George

Grp 10 - Woo Gang

Grp 11 - The Jaginators

After a dinner of burgers and with the power back on, Wednesday night was a student leader-led trivia night, where no one was assisted in any way from The Summit staff. Thursday was kicked off with a morning Intentions chat about how your actions can impact those around you and the benefit of acknowledging the things in life we are grateful for 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 tyres, charades, this thing you had to squeeze through, mud, Bruce, a ball pit and a whole lot of fun! 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 Five Aura and Tupac Butter!

Friday started with an incredibly inspirational chat from a special guest named Jason Ratnall. Jason came to us from Bettermentall Australia and gave us a small insight into his life, struggles and the challenge he set himself to run 3249 kms in 100 days, an acknowledgement of the 3249 lives that were lost to suicide and mental health battles in 2022. It is an incredible story and if you would like to know more about it you can visit Jason’s website at https://bettermentall.com.au/

We then set about 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.  As a reward for his incredible efforts over the week, the teachers also asked to recognise Duke Simpson as their values winner. 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 Daniel, the parents, teachers and students of Norwood 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, Logan, Spinks, Sunny, Mim, Cal, Ant, Sam, Chey, Taylor, Fran and Liam