5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Sports Camp

www.TheRisingFastball.com

There's many ways to improve your sports camp. You can buy an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) for emergencies, install portable video camera for security, hire professional athletes to speak to the campers, and feed every kid a filet mignon at lunch. Or you can make some improvements that are a bit more easy to implement. Here's 5:

1. Make parents show photo ID

You can never be too careful when it comes to protecting your campers and keeping them safe and secure. With divorce rates and restraining orders through the roof, it's imperative that you're not letting your campers go home with just anybody they recognize. The fact is that not all parents are created equal and it's your responsibility to ensure campers go home with the right person.

In your registration, include a field for guardians to list a few other authorized adults to pick-up their child in the event that they cannot be there. Then, at pick-up time everyday, have each camper wait with their coach until a parent or authorized adult listed on the registration form shows their photo ID and signs the child out of camp. Trust me, it's worth the extra paperwork and ten minutes of time.

2. Add your camp to Yelp

Yelp is not just for restaurants anymore. By including your sports camp on Yelp, you are not just giving parents an easy way to learn about your camp, you are also giving them a chance to voice their feedback. You can even add a discount on Yelp and encourage parents to rate and review your camp so that other potential customers begin to get a better feel for how you do business.

While on the subject of online advertising, you may want to take a few hours each month to search for online directories, calendars, blogs and magazines, that enable you to freely post info about your camp and link to your website. This process can be time consuming, but it certainly can't hurt, and I've definitely had traffic driven to my site from some of these obscure online resources.

3. Use duct tape for name tags

One of the best practices your coaches and counselors can do is learn the camper's names. However, when there are a hundred kids running around with the same color shirt on, this can be difficult to do. So use name tags. And instead of using the stick-on tags you buy at Target, get yourself 10 different colors of duct tape (yes, they now make duct tape in different colors) and go to town.

Each day have your staff put the kid's name (or preferably a nickname - kids love nicknames), on the duct tape and have them slap it on their t-shirt. It will stay on their shirt through 110 degree heat, head first slides, and a run or two through the sprinklers. Plus, you can make the tag any size so the names are actually readable. Differentiate age groups or teams using the different colors of duct tape; this will allow you to better organize and track players. People - especially kids - love being called by their name, and using duct tape as name tags makes it fun, easy, and practical to do.

4. Give out trading cards like candy

When a large group of kids get together, it's not always easy to get them to pay attention. For that matter, sometimes it's hard to get a kid to pay attention if you and him are the only people left on earth. So use tangible rewards to encourage eye contact, listening, sitting still, and learning. We use baseball cards. They are cheap and easy to get, kids love collecting them, and they help us teach the game and improve our player's attention spans.

When directions are being given, we give a card or two to the campers who did an exceptional job "looking, listening, and learning" the entire time. When kids are asked to be silent, we reward the two or three kids who focused the fastest. Using cards as rewards has worked so well that we now pass them out like candy for kids who hustle, are good teammates, encourage others, eat fruits and vegetables, answer trivia questions, or show a positive attitude.

5. Send parents a nightly e-mail

Just like you want to know what is going on at your child's school, camp parents want to know what made their kids come home excited, exhausted, and dirty. And they can only get so much info from your website or their child's memory. So each night, e-mail parents a brief recap of camp, a preview for tomorrow, a reminder or two, and a picture from the day.

By e-mailing parents a recap/preview of camp every night, you are also giving yourself an opportunity to communicate with parents about other things. You can mention future camps, Yelp deals, website updates, staff improvements, etc. Basically, you are passing out free public relations in a way that parents love. It works. Do it. Trust me. Parents. Love. It.



-- Ben Campopiano