St Thomas Aquinas College Yr 7 to 10 Camp Blog

When the buses from St Thomas Aquinas rolled through the gates of The Summit on a wet but buzzing Monday morning, we were running around preparing for what was going to be an amazing week. The energy and enthusiasm of all the students were utterly contagious. The other coaches and I gathered in the Stadium 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 round of activities.

The  Giant Swing and Abseiling were the instant highlights, the Snowy River Challenge was epic and Orienteering was a lot more competitive than anyone expected. During our first rotation, it was time to sit and create a tribe name for each group. The imagination was epic, and after we banned the words “Skippity” and “Sigma”, they all came up with titles that worked. The names they came up with are as follows…

Grp 1 - The Country Bumpkins

Grp 2 - Indecisive

Grp 3 - The Frankies

Grp 4 - The Unicorns

After an epic night walk on the first day of camp, Tuesday was kicked off with a morning intentions chat in the form of setting our day up well and remembering even the slightest positivity from us can influence those around without even meaning to. We then got straight into the next rounds of activities. The afternoon turned out to be as much fun as the morning did, as we also had the opportunity to introduce four new activities. Our dizzying Summit Window, the terrifying Leap of Faith, Monty, Hercules and the Nail board in Snake and Nails and prance and frolic around the park in the craziest fancy dress we could in a Scavenger Hunt.

Tuesday afternoon we also embarked on our epic Monster Course, a wet and dirty run around the grounds of The Summit involving tyres, charades, dirt, cargo nets, holey buckets, water, a ball pit and a whole lot of mud! It was a resilience-building barrel of fun and fatigue!

The course was scored using each team's improvement time from the first lap to the surprise second lap. The campers responded amazingly and the below improvement times are evidence of that!

Wednesday started with another chat about gratitude from Mim in the form of taking a moment to look back on what we have to be grateful for, especially those things we take for granted.

We then 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 at the Barbeque Shelter for the last time to say our thank yous to all the people involved in making this camp epic before reading out the winners of the various activities and rewarding our Values Winners with a ride on our WW2 ARMY TANK!

The Summit would like to thank John and the team from St Thomas Aquinas College for what was a very challenging week. You handled yourselves professionally and we were very grateful. We at The Summit can’t wait to have you back again soon.

Logan, Mim, Sara, Liam and Adam