US Lacrosse Community Forum Forums NORTHEAST LACROSSE CAMPS & CLINICS Improving Quality of Girls Camps

I have found over the past two years, that these summer camps do pretty well instructing a wide range of talent. It seems in an effort to increase enrollment, camps will allow girls of any talent level to attend. This is ok, they need to be profitable.

The issue that I have been seeing is the inability to evaluate and group players by talent level. I want my daughter to learn and perfect new skills, not have a catch with a girl that is far below my kids talent level.

I am hoping that a message can get to the directors of these camps, that from a player and parents perspective, we need to IMPROVE, LEARN NEW SKILLS AND MOVE FOWARD. Not have a glorified practice.

FYI, my daughter learned many of her current skills in these camps.

Just my two cents, anyone have any thoughts on this?

Nobody has any thoughts?

Do I need to send my daughter off to a camp held at some faraway college like Syracuse, Northwestern, Duke etc????

My kids have had excellent results at local camps. I am not sure what your question is. All camp directors always strive to improve but it seems your camper consistently gets grouped with...as you said...some kid who can't catch. Guess Syracuse is next for you then. Let us know how that goes.

Theres a typical BOTC response.

truth be told is, how many of the parents really attend the session to know how they are run.

I have had the displeasure of noticing a few camps and being really disapponted. Whether the coaches are just making the girls play scrimmages or not paying attention to certain ages.

Only the girls looking to be challenged will complain the rest will say they had fun because they probably did. Had fun with making friends and hanging out, not having fun playing lacrosse.

It is the same at most camps. Know what you want for your daughter - does she needs to play play play or does she need station skill work and see which camp offer that.

Blue Chip Camp was outstanding this year!!

Your original post stating you and your kid deserve better than the camps out there is typical. Your teaching point should be that you can always learn something. How is it that you are qualified to assess the quality of these camps. Btw how old is your kid?

Would the camp directors consider this?

Continue to separate kids by age as the always have, but then further separate them within their age group by talent level. let the beginners work to improve their skills with other kids with their needs and allow the more advanced to be "Seriously Challenged", perhaps this would work for all talent levels.

As af now, based on this years camps, and discussing the camps we utilized this year, myself and a few other travel players parents are NOT UTILIZING the same camps we did this year here on Long Island.....

The exception was Blue Chip, very good camp, also very expensive for three nights...

Once again, I am looking for improvement, not DAY CARE.....

Shooting Star broke them into age groups and then moved kids up that needed to be more challenged. I thought this was a good camp and was around a lot to check in on how it was going. They also did a good job with the goalies and did not just use them to just defend the goal- but actually worked with them on HOW to be better goalies.