The Waves Are the Work: Reflections on Camp Management

Years before becoming a camp lawyer, I was, and still am, a camp founder and operator. Like many of you, my family and I spend every summer at camp, where I have the privilege of managing the organization alongside an exceptionally talented team of professionals. As longtime readers know, once we are in the depth of summer, I sometimes like to step away from legal topics and share some reflections on camp management. I find these particular posts cathartic to write, and readers have told me that they also find them cathartic to read.

There’s a basic truth of camp management: Some days are very hard. The problems that reach our desks are the ones that nobody else could solve. And we have talented and dedicated teams, so these problems are rarely simple ones. Indeed, for those of us in leadership, running camp often feels like managing a curated list of camp’s biggest and most complicated problems. 

Many years ago, I was speaking with a longtime camp owner who said that she likes to tell homesick kids that their experience is something like waves on a beach. The water is normally calm and smooth, but then a wave comes and may even knock you off your feet. You struggle against the wave, stand back up if you got knocked over, and then look out at the water and see that it’s calm again.

While it’s an apt analogy for homesickness, it’s perhaps an even better one for camp management. I’ve found over the years that there’s a similar cadence to every summer: Camp feels calm and smooth for a few days at a time – in these moments, senior staff may joke that “things feel a little too calm right now” – and then day three or four comes around and some completely unexpected event blindsides us. 

In the middle of a crisis, the problem can feel enormous. It calls to mind a particular lyric from a song by The Sam Chase, a fixture of my jogging playlist: 

I’ve never climbed a hill without having that same sinking thought: This is the biggest freakin’ hill that I’ve ever come across.

When these types of problems come across our desk, they tend to interrupt every plan and make us forget that camp was running beautifully only a few hours earlier. Such is the nature of camp. We know the waves are coming, but we don’t know what they are until they’re here. 

We dutifully interview our applicants and check references, and then the occasional staff member who shows up to camp is just… terrible. Likewise, bunk dynamics are unpredictable. We don’t know which groups will become the best of friends and which will have ongoing conflicts. There are facilities issues, misbehaving campers, weather events, disputes between parents, viruses, and countless other challenges that we know are coming but can’t pinpoint with certainty until they get here.

Although experience makes us better at responding to these things (and also better at putting them in perspective), it doesn’t make the waves any smaller and it doesn’t alleviate the emotional toll of dealing with them. After well over a decade of camp management, I can tell you with certainty that conversations with difficult staff or angry parents never really get easier.

So what’s the grand takeaway from this? 

For starters, it’s important to recognize that we all share some version of this experience. That’s camp. It’s also one of the reasons our industry is so collaborative. In some sense, we’re all in this together and uniquely appreciate what we do each summer. Nobody who works outside this industry really gets it. How could they? 

It’s also important to remember that most camp crises are waves, albeit sometimes big ones. They require our careful attention and judgment in the moment, but then the wave passes. To switch analogies, each crisis may feel like the biggest hill we’ve ever come across, but with experience, we can also remind ourselves that these things are normal and just part of the cadence of camp. 

We spend all year preparing for the unexpected. The unique feature of camp management, and one of the things that makes no two days the same, is that we know the unexpected events are coming, but we don’t know what they are until they get here. Our job is to remain steady when these events materialize, be the calm and collected voice in the room, make the best decisions we can with the information we have, and help camp return to calm water.

Perhaps that’s the final lesson. A summer free of challenges would be a pipe dream. Put otherwise, the waves are the work. Nobody needs strong leaders when everything’s going smoothly. Our skill as operators is measured by how we respond when the inevitable problems arrive. Did we remain thoughtful under pressure? Did we treat our people fairly? Did we rely on the judgment of our talented teams without acting alone? Were we the voice of calm and reason when emotions ran high? And did we make the decision that best served the camp community, even when it was difficult or unpopular?  

In my own case, with each passing year of this work, I aspire to make the answer “yes” to more of these questions. I hope you do too. Good luck, my friends. I wish you all a very smooth summer.